Angus wrote :
" I'm taking a class in spoken-language phonetics right now, and
it's interesting to learn all the different methods that people have come
up with for speech synthesis."
Hi Angus and listmembers,
" keyword : different methods ...speech ...
as you might know - German is a difficult language to learn for the deaf
children -
In the first phase of first class we concentrate very much on getting
familiar with the letters of the alphabet and their pronounciation within a
given context.
The first time when I showed my new system of SW articulation-signs to the
list, Valerie was very amused because it is so difficult to compare our
German sound for the letter A and the English or American version - I guess
it depends on my German accent - as well
Nevertheless - I succeeded to develop a whole set of sound-signs for the
German Language which is a tremendous help for my students to improve their
articulation - or to get started from the beginning ;-)
The good experiences with this system are wonderfull.
Looking and concentrating on these SW- faces - my students improved a lot to
get informations from looking at my mouth when Iīm speaking to them : short
words, their names, special phonems ...
They learn to concentrate on lipreading much better !!!
I would like to ask you or other interested SW -listmembers if they can
imagine of any improvements ?
Especially the following problem needs a solution: I havenīt decided yet how
to indicate the long-vocal sounds compared to the vocals of normal lenght.
Only about 30 percent of the articulation can be identified clearly from the
lips of the speaker. Within my system I added the "aspiration" - lines for
voiceless sounds. Sometimes I added handshapes in order to inform about the
sound ( d vs. t etc)
The foto shows Irina - explaining the SW-faces to the students .
All the best Stefan ;-)
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