Articulation tests of the first and the second languages in classrooms
Coriolanus C. L. Lam, Kai Ming Li, Stanley M. L. Cheung · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2004
The current study is motivated by the needs of improving acoustic environments in classrooms for the primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong because one of the main education policies is to enable pupils be biliterate and trilingual. Being biliterate means that the pupils are expected to write good English and Chinese. Being trilingual requires that pupils be able to speak English, Cantonese (dialect spoken in Hong Kong) and Mandarin (dialect spoken in China). There are many related studies investigating the speech intelligibility in both English and Mandarin. However, these studies are targeted at the respective native listeners. On the other hand, there are few research studies using Cantonese as the first language of listeners. A series of articulation tests, which were based on the phonetical characteristics of these different languages, was carried out for university students in Hong Kong. Other relevant parameters, such as the speech transmission index, reverberation time and signal-to-noise ratio, were also examined. The outcomes of the present study will provide a basis for further investigations involving pupils of primary and secondary schools. [Work supported by the Research Grants Council of the Hong SAR Government and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.]