Dublin Institute of Technology

Department Member, Digital Media Centre

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Research Topic: Research, Development and Application of a Learning Resource for Enhancing Listening and Spoken Skills in Spanish.

When we speak, besides linking the sounds with which we form words, we change the pitch and the intensity, lengthen some elements and modify the quality of the voice. Thus, our words are perceived as emphatic, assertive, rushed, dubious or suggestive among many other nuances. In order to interpret messages, speakers not only focus their attention on the phonological contrasts between segments; they are sensitive to other elements of the signal that provide information regarding aspects like lexical stress, sentence modality or the speaker’s intention. DMC technology and methodology has been used as the basis of the linguistic analysis.

Duologues are natural, relaxed dialogues between two people who know each other and recorded in such a manner that each interlocutor’s performance can be studied in isolation, thus avoiding problems normally caused by cross-talk and back-channeling. To this end the isolation booths in the DMC have been made available to record the samples which ultimately will allow the construction of a corpus of natural spoken Spanish for analysis and provide a basis for effectively applying the time-scaling tool.

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