The Effect of Modified Speech on Listening to Authentic Speech

Abstract

Abstract-The present study investigated the effect of controlling speech rate on listening comprehension of Iranian students majoring in English. It was somehow the application of Krashen's 'input hypothesis '(1985). There were two homogeneous groups each comprising 40 students taking 'Oral Translation 3'. In the experimental group there were 28 females and 12 males, in the control group there were 30 females and 10 males. The age of the subjects ranged from 22-28.The selected materials was authentic American English spoken by fluent native speakers in the programs such as 'Opera' and 'Dr. Phill'. The students were worked with in a well equipped language laboratory. The experimental group had the advantage of modified speech through Ulead software version 11. The control group just enjoyed the possibility of a five time repetition for each individual sentence. At the end two reliable and valid M.C. listening comprehension and cloze tests were prepared from the covered materials and administered to them. The cloze test was based on the exact word version (Chaudron, 1986). Based on the results of this study it was concluded that there were no significant differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups on the multiple choice and cloze tests at .05 level of significance. This implies that first, the experimental group did not do any better than the control group and second, the students were not able to apply the benefits of slowing down the speech to authentic texts and for speeches delivered at a normal rate.

The Effects of Time Expansion on English as a Second Language Individuals

“…Specifically, we developed a phase vocoder with framewise magnitude interpolation and frequency-wise phase advanced as described in [13,14]. An appropriate choice of interpolation in this vocoder acts to stretch or expand audio without altering the pitch or tonal qualities of the audio our user interface used a simple on-screen slider interface so that, while playing an audio clip, moving the slider left would slow the audio down and the opposite would speed the audio up.…”

Exploring listening comprehension difficulty in language proficiency testing

“…Accent and rate of speech are among the most common paralinguistic features of oral language which differentiate it from the written language (Buck, 2001). Up until today, very few studies have attempted to explore the relationship between listening comprehension text difficulty and speaker's accent or fast rate of speech (Griffiths, 1990;Khatib & Khodabakhsh, 2010). In the context of the current thesis, it was my intention to cater for this gap in the relevant research.…”