This study describes and analyzes outgroup linguistic racism in parodies of Ebonics (`Mock Ebonics') that appeared on the Internet in the wake of the December 18, 1996 resolution of the Board of Education of the Oakland (California) Uni®ed School District on improving the English-language skills of African-American students. We examined 23 World Wide Web pages containing 270,188 words, from which we chose nine pages containing 225,726 words for in-depth analysis. Drawing on a characterization of Mock Spanish, our analysis shows that Mock Ebonics is a system of graphemicphonetic, grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic strategies for representing an outgroup's belief in the imperfection and inferiority of Ebonics and its users. We show how producers of Ebonics parody pages employ these strategies, which are common in speech stereotypes, to articulate an anti-Ebonics language ideology and shift the blame for the poor academic performance of African Americans from a racist society to learners and the community from which they come.
Background: Focused attention on Data to Care underlines the importance of high-quality HIV surveillance data. This study identified the number of total duplicate and exact duplicate HIV case records in 9 separate Enhanced HIV/AIDS Reporting System (eHARS) databases reported by 8 jurisdictions and compared this approach to traditional Routine Interstate Duplicate Review resolution. Methods: This study used the ATra Black Box System and 6 eHARS variables for matching case records across jurisdictions: last name, first name, date of birth, sex assigned at birth (birth sex), social security number, and race/ethnicity, plus 4 system-calculated values (first name Soundex, last name Soundex, partial date of birth, and partial social security number). Results: In approximately 11 hours, this study matched 290,482 cases from 799,326 uploaded records, including 55,460 exact case pairs. Top case pair overlaps were between NYC and NYS (51%), DC and MD (10%), and FL and NYC (6%), followed closely by FL and NYS (4%), FL and NC (3%), DC and VA (3%), and MD and VA (3%). Jurisdictions estimated that they realized a combined 135 labor hours in time efficiency by using this approach compared with manual methods previously used for interstate duplication resolution. Discussion: This approach discovered exact matches that were not previously identified. It also decreased time spent resolving duplicated case records across jurisdictions while improving accuracy and completeness of HIV surveillance data in support of public health program policies. Future uses of this approach should consider standardized protocols for postprocessing eHARS data.
Determining phonological and intonational phrase boundaries is an important step in synthesizing natural-sounding prosodic contours in a text-to-speech (TTS) system. An algorithm is presented here that generates phrase boundaries in Spanish texts. The basis for this algorithm is Liberman and Church’s function group (f-group) parser for English [M. Y. Liberman and K. W. Church, ‘‘Text Analysis and Word Pronunciation in Text-to-Speech Synthesis,’’ in Advances in Speech Signal Processing, edited by S. Furui and M. M. Sondhi (Marcel Dekker, New York, 1992), pp. 791–831]. The Spanish f-group parser produced satisfactory results for shorter sentences and sentences containing a fair amount of punctuation, but the parser tended to overgenerate phrase boundaries in longer sentences and sentences with little punctuation. In addition, the parser generated but did not distinguish different types of sentence and paragraph transitions. To refine the parser in these areas, selections from a Spanish text [E. Sabato, El túnel (Editorial Seix Barral, Barcelona, 1982)] were read by adult native Spanish speakers and analyzed for phrase boundaries as evidenced by significant changes in fundamental frequency, tempo, and/or pauses. The acoustic phonetic data and its role in the development of the phrase boundary algorithm are discussed.
Objectives: Achieving accurate, timely, and complete HIV surveillance data is complicated in the United States by migration and care seeking across jurisdictional boundaries. To address these issues, public health entities use the ATra Black Box—a secure, electronic, privacy-assuring system developed by Georgetown University—to identify and confirm potential duplicate case records, exchange data, and perform other analytics to improve the quality of data in the Enhanced HIV/AIDS Reporting System (eHARS). We aimed to evaluate the ability of 2 ATra software algorithms to identify potential duplicate case-pairs across 6 jurisdictions for people living with diagnosed HIV. Methods: We implemented 2 matching algorithms for identifying potential duplicate case-pairs in ATra software. The Single Name Matching Algorithm examines only 1 name for a person, whereas the All Names Matching Algorithm examines all names in eHARS for a person. Six public health jurisdictions used the algorithms. We compared outputs for the overall number of potential matches and changes in matching level. Results: The All Names Matching Algorithm found more matches than the Single Name Matching Algorithm and increased levels of match. The All Names Matching Algorithm identified 9070 (4.5%) more duplicate matches than the Single Name Matching Algorithm (n = 198 828) and increased the total number of matches at the exact through high levels by 15.4% (from 167 156 to 192 932; n = 25 776). Conclusions: HIV data quality across multiple jurisdictions can be improved by using all known first and last names of people living with diagnosed HIV that match with eHARS rather than using only 1 first and last name.
Consonants in Spanish rhymes are typically resyllabified to the onset position of the following syllable in all but the most careful speech styles. There is, however, a lack of consensus regarding the temporal characteristics in the production of two identical phones at word boundaries (e.g., las salas, ‘‘the rooms’’). Malmberg (1971) states that the two segments are reduced to a single sequence, with a slightly longer duration than one phone. According to Navarro Tomás (1968), there is reduction from two segments to one, with no increase in duration. In the present study, adult native Mexican Spanish speakers produced three sets of phrases containing the sequences [s]+vowel, vowel+[s], and [s]+[s] in both citation forms and fluent reading. Preliminary findings support Malmberg’s position regarding the citation form productions and Navarro Tomás’s position in the fluent reading productions. This suggests that Spanish-language speech synthesis systems, in the absence of allophonic variation for a given sequence, can vary the duration of rhyme plus onset sequences at word boundaries to achieve a citation vs. fluent reading speech style.
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