Questions tagged [spoken-language]
A modality of language, contrasted with written language, whistled language or sign language.
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Do any languages use words like particles to represent commas, periods, hyphens, quotes, parentheses, etc.?
Wondering if any languages use words, particles, or other speakable markers to represent punctuation like periods, commas, hyphens, quotes, parentheses, question marks, exclamation marks, or ...
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Why do Korean and Japanese sound similar to each other to native speakers of English?
I don't understand why, but Korean and Japanese sound very similar to me, and also to other native speakers of English. I think I once read a comment saying something like "If it sounds like Japanese ...
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Why do some people speak/whisper the words they are reading?
Not sure if this is the right stack exchange site but here goes..
Couple of people at my workplace seem to whisper or quietly speak the material they read. They do this routinely, and they speak more ...
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Does (or should) the terms "spoken language" and "speech" include signed language?
And if not, is there a term, accepted by both the Deaf and linguistic communities, that includes both spoken and signed language, in contrast to written language?
Reputable linguistic sources, ...
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Has English caused any Languages to undergo Sound Change or Grammar Change?
French historically has caused the presence of several unique sounds in English that would not have been present otherwise. For example the "dʒ" sound in "garage". Similarly, I believe I've read ...
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Term for conversation where each person speaks a different language, while understanding each other
I would like to know if there is a technical (or common) term for the type of bilingual (or multilingual) conversation described in the title. For example, one person could be speaking French, while ...
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Speech rate measured in bit/sec
Are there references giving the speech rate measured in bit/sec?
I easily found references on speech rate giving measurement in phones/sec, syllables/sec or words/sec. Are there references giving the ...
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How is filler conveyed in a gloss?
Fillers are used in many languages when the speaker signals that he or she is thinking but has not yet finished talking. Things in English like umm, er, uh etc.
Is there something that can be put in ...
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Is there a word for "mouth transitions" which describes the movement of a mouth which is saying one word, but preparing for the next?
I think I can produce every individual phoneme in standard-ish spoken Mandarin.
However, if I want to speak fluently I have to watch videos of people speaking and closely watch their mouths, because ...
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Is audio understanding in bad conditions (e.g. at a noisy market) different between languages?
I consider myself almost fluent in English, but have trouble understanding when the words are blended together. This includes for example noisy places, song lyrics, or accents. In Czech, I have no ...
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Rejecting writing down a language for various reasons
I remembered reading somewhere about a language that its speakers believe the written words are sacred (or some other reasons) they chose to refrain from putting spoken words into written forms even ...
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Estimating the number of words in a language before invention of alphabet
Here is my question from the title:
Given a (natural) language with its writing system based on an
alphabet, are there any theories giving (quantitative) estimates on
the number of words the ...
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Anguish Languish to English Language metric
Anguish Languish is a silly linguistics exercise to replace all words in a sentence with phonemically similar counterparts with no regards for semantics or meaning. The intent is that the original ...
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English an Oral, German a Written Culture?
From my perception (native German, lived in UK) German culture is more focused on the written word and values precision and perfection when expressing yourself. English culture on the contrary ...
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French language : is it possible to use a possessive adjective earlier than the name it refers to? [closed]
I have posted the same question on the French language Stackexchange, and I have been referred to post it here too.
A phrase said by Mireille left me dumbfounded:
Bénédicte et ses filles ont ...
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How did the j get the dʒ sound?
The j getting the dʒ is very weird, how did the letter j get the dʒ sound?
Why not a /j/ sound as in "yes"?
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Stringed music as a constructed language
I'm working on a concept for a constructed language for a story I'm writing. The people/culture that it's for have no vocal cords and communicate with a combination of body language, tapping/...
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Why does google translate produce awkward sentences
Anyone who has ever used Google translate knows that the translated version is mostly grammatically correct but often extremely awkward to use in a conversation.
This is one of the factor which has ...
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Would Saussure consider sign language as "parole"?
I wonder if sign language would be "parole" according to Saussurian linguistics. After all, parole can be denied as
the "concrete" use of the language, the actual utterances. It
is an external ...
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Relationship of spoken and written language and truth of sentences
I am not entirely sure if this is the appropriate site and whether these are the appropriate tags for this topic, so if that is not the case, please feel free to let me know.
I never thought twice ...
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What is the difference between an accent and mispronunciation?
I listened this morning to a radio discussion about accents (French radio France Inter, Doit-on avoir honte de notre accent ?). It was about accents from various regions in France (and abroad) and how ...
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How to make a bilabial approximant sound?
In the IPA chart, there are some white areas with no text. These are where a sound can exist, but it has not been found in any known language. (The gray areas are where humans are incapable of making ...
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Is there a public sound bank of the IPA?
I'm looking for a comprehensive audio database of the IPA, spoken by the same individual. I realize the this restriction may not include the full set of the IPA and I'm willing to settle on the ...
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Sign languages of non-mute people
Does anyone study the sign language of people that can actually speak/pronounce/utter words? What would you call such study and what would you call such subject?
I mean, if a person can use both ...
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Automatic annotation of *non-native* semi-spontaneous speech
I wonder if there is any tool for automatically annotating L2-semi-spontaneous speech (practically said, to produce a TextGrid file from a sound file (.wav) and a text file containing the ...
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Speed listening
I have just heard that there are people out there (mostly blind people) using screen readers at overspeed, achieving speech rates twice as high as usual, and even higher.
What I want to know is: Are ...
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Hesitation markers like "uh, ehm" versus repetition
When listening to my 5-year-old son telling me a little story about dinosaurs, he used a lot of repetition in the following way:
"The triceratops… the triceratops used his horns… the triceratops ...
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Words per minute - language list?
I have an idea on how fast a Dutch speaker speaks:
130 wpm = medium
160 wpm = fast
100 wpm = slow
I'd like to have that same knowledge about other languages.
Is there a list somewhere that ...
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Are there any languages that have words for open and closing quotation marks in speech?
It seems to me that most languages have some way of bounding quotations in written form. European languages have their apostrophe quotes and angle-brackets, while eastern Asian languages have those ...
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Why is spoken Chinese so fast paced?
I'm fan of watching subbed Chinese movies and series and with them sometimes happens something that very rarely happens with movies or series from other languages that's the fact that I haven't been ...
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Common name for speech errors like Phoneme Deletion and Phoneme Substitution
I would like to know the common name for speech errors like phoneme deletion and phoneme substitution, just like there is word called "prosodic error" for stress error and intonation error. I have ...
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To what extent is aural language comprehension based on a post-processing model, and what are the factors involved?
It occurred to me that what we hear and interpret as speech is often an inarticulate garble of phonemes that native speakers process with lightning speed (usually) to come up with a clear and specific ...
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Does the concept of slang exist in cultures without established written or formal education traditions?
In English and, presumably, many of the world's other commonly spoken languages, there exists a rough category of words considered slang. This concept is not quite the same as taboo (many slang words ...
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Do any languages not have the concept of "words"?
I'm wondering if there are any languages that are basically just streams of basic sound blocks, like letters or syllables, and they don't have words.
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What is the linguistic term for sounds such as 'um', 'uh', 'like', etc. when used to control the rhythm of speech?
Sounds such as 'um' and 'uh' are common in speech when the speaker needs to prolong a sentence or otherwise control the rhythm of the sentence. I also hear these sounds used to convey indifference or ...
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Open source probabilistic dialogue state tracker
Do you know of any simple (form filling) dialogue state tracking systems with a graphical model based dialogue state representation?
I'm looking for one to get familiar with the overall model and ...
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How does the term "naturalistic speech" differ from "natural language"
Seems some linguists use "naturalistic" -- but I'm not clear on what it means in this context or if it's different from "natural".
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Writing influences speech and viceversa?
For example, language changes over time, but in languages that exist without writing, it changes naturally just influenced by itself. So when writing was introduced, did that start to influence speech ...
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One-to-one speech conversation dataset (Recorded over microphone)
I need a publically available one-to-one speech conversation dataset recorded over the microphone, e.g., interview scenario or enquiry or call centre call answering.
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has there been any research conducted on formality and language learning?
I wanted to know if there has been any research regarding F-score or CF-score (Li, Haiying, "Comparing Two Measures for Formality." 2013.) affecting learning and/or language learning?
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Do generative linguists use spoken-word corpora?
Do generative linguists use spoken-word corpora for data? Offhand, I don't see why at least some of them wouldn't.
I'm not suggesting that the use of spoken-word corpora vs. documented native ...
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Are there languages without fillers like "um" or "uh"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsMWbVrjucg&t=34s
According to this video (0:55) almost every language has those speech disfluencies. But ALMOST. Do languages exist that have no such sounds for ...
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Duplex perception experiment - Can I try it on my own?
I was reading about speech perception over headphones, “duplex perception” (Lieberman et al., 1981) — who note that when a speech stimulus was split into two parts and presented to different ears over ...
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What's the difference between articulatory features and articulatory gestures?
I'm confused about those two terms, but based on my understanding articulatory gestures are represented by the vocal tract variables and articulatory features include all units are involved in ...
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Is the idea of "simultaneity" in sign language as opposed to "linearity" in spoken language really tenable?
I have seen scholars claim that...
"sign languages are simultaneous whereas spoken languages are linear".
In my opinion, however, the notion of "linearity" vs. "simultaneity" is misleading at best....
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Libs or APIs for removing background noise from voice input?
The effect of background noise on speech recognition is not good.
Are there libs or APIs for removing background noise from voice input?
Ideally language-agnostic or tuned for the top 100+ languages,...
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Acoustic signal to phones?
I am currently trying to understand speech perception, and are at the moment a bit stuck.. I seem to understand how the ear process incoming sound, but i don't understand the concept of phones. Why ...
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Slang, colloquial use, informal speech, etc [closed]
Background
The question is motivated by this post in the Russian forum, where the answers repeatedly refer to verb пересечёмся as "young people's slang" or "teenage slang". (пересечёмся = "we'll cross ...
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Speech Pathologists and the International Phonetic Alphabet
Do speech therapists and speech pathologists have to learn the International Phonetic Alphabet as part of their profession? They might want to learn it, but my question really is: are they required to ...
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Are there any constraints on how dead languages could have been spoken?
Considering written languages that we know, restricting ourselves to alphabetical languages if helpful: Can we make any general statements or assert any constraints on how a language could have ever ...
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