The past years have witnessed the collection of various corpora for the study of Irish English (IE). Most have been developed and driven by diverse research foci with a specific aim in mind, however, at present data sources consist of unavailable and/or outdated audio files of English spoken primarily in Dublin and Belfast. Additionally, a very limited number of investigations on the prosodic features of IE varieties have been conducted to date. As a result, a comprehensive overview of IE prosodic diversity is still missing and existing speech corpora do not allow for the analysis of intonation patterns, which requires more controlled, purpose-built data sets. A prosodic corpus devoted to the analysis of IE varieties needs to be incorporated into the research agenda. This contribution presents the corpus of Irish English Speech (IES) with the following objectives: to collect recordings of spoken IE across present-day Ireland under a unified protocol in order to guarantee comparisons among different datasets; to obtain an initial phonological inventory of each variety examined; to compare the phonological systems of diverse IE varieties; and to provide researchers with accessible and open data sources. The core of the corpus has been gathered in accordance with the guidelines of the Interactive Atlas of Romance Intonation project (Prieto, Borràs-Comes & Roseano, 2011-2014) via a questionnaire based on the Discourse Completion Task, which was translated and readapted for Irish English speakers, and a Map Dialogue Task designed to obtain spontaneous speech productions. This method has yielded the collection of a wide range of intonation patterns concerning different types of context-specific utterances, such as statements, questions, imperatives and vocatives. After an overview of the segmental phonology of IE, previous studies on the prosodic features of IE varieties and the speech corpora of IE will be examined with the purpose of identifying the gaps in existing literature, which will then be followed by a detailed outline of the development of the corpus of IES. This contribution will provide an illustrative example for fully exploiting the potential of the IES database and call for further in-depth investigations on IE prosody.

Este artículo explora la estructura de un curso de idiomas basado en Traducción Audiovisual (TAV) con el objetivo de adecuarlo para su impartición a niños en un entorno virtual. Dado el potencial de los programas audiovisuales, ricos en información contextualizada, las varias prácticas de TAV se presentan como herramientas poderosas para mantener un nivel alto de motivación entre los discentes, promover su bienestar y facilitar la adquisición de la lengua extranjera. No obstante, el uso de la TAV en estos contextos ha recibido escasa atención y son pocos los estudios realizados con estudiantes jóvenes. No sorprende, pues, que escaseen los recursos didácticos para profesores y que estos informen de dificultades a la hora de gestionar entornos virtuales y de diseñar experiencias efectivas de aprendizaje, especialmente durante el periodo de la pandemia. Presentamos aquí el primer estudio en el que se evalúan las percepciones de los niños sobre el uso tanto de Zoom como de tareas basadas en TAV a la hora de aprender el italiano de manera virtual. Dos años después de que se implementara en su formato inicial híbrido, el curso Impariamo coi cartoni! Learning Italian by captioning and revoicing cartoons, impartido como parte del programa Youth Academy en la Universidad de Galway, Irlanda, se reestructuró para adecuarlo a un entorno virtual. El curso, de 6 semanas de duración, se impartió tres veces, a un total de 38 niños de edades comprendidas entre los 9 y los 12 años. Se han recopilado datos a través de una encuesta y una entrevista realizadas al final del módulo así como observaciones recogidas durante las clases. Los resultados demuestran la valía de un curso de idiomas con enfoque en TAV impartido a niños en un entorno virtual. Su actitud es positiva en relación tanto con la plataforma Zoom como con las dos modalidades de TAV. Los participantes expresan preferencia por el locutado de las traducciones que ven como una actividad colaborativa síncrona, realizada en línea, que combate el aislamiento y promueve la sociabilidad. Su opinión sobre el subtitulado es que es una tarea más difícil, aunque algunos disfrutaron con sus experimentos como aprendices independientes remotos. Los resultados revelan que los niños son capaces de utilizar el software Aegisub de manera autónoma, aunque también necesitan el apoyo de sus progenitores en casa. Los beneficios y retos identificados durante el proceso de aprendizaje han sido esenciales a la hora de formular recomendaciones para profesores y señalan la necesidad de realizar más investigación sobre la TAV en contextos educativos tempranos.

This work investigates the production of Italian dental affricates /ts dz/ by Irish English learners at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Dental affricates are sounds that are difficult for non-native speakers to acquire, and they vary greatly across Italian dialects. Previous works on the topic have demonstrated that learners tend to reduce affricates to fricatives, and that the voiced /dz/ is often substituted with the voiceless in every context. This survey investigates the production of 7 speakers divided into A2 and B1 levels.Participants were asked to compile a background questionnaire and to read a list of 47 sentences containing 52 dental affricates in different phonological contexts. Phonetic annotation was manually conducted on PRAAT, and the analysis focused on durational cues and realization of voicing. The results showed that voiced affricates were rarely produced and were often substituted with their voiceless counterpart, thus leading to the general non-acquisition of voicing for this class of phoneme. Furthermore, the length of the occlusive segment was shorter than the fricative one, particularly in the post-sonorant context; a gap between the occlusive and fricative portion has also been detected. No substantial differences between the A2 and B1 levels emerged.