bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Individual gains from auditory training of English vowels for Greek native speakers.
Authors: Lengeris A.
Published: October 2013

Several studies have shown that high-variability auditory training can improve the perception of second-language (L2) sounds by adult learners. However, even when testing a homogenous L2 group, considerable differences are commonly found between individuals not only in pre-training performance but also in how each trainee responds to training. Additionally, it is not clear what aspects of perceptual processing are actually being trained. To address these issues the present study trained Greek native speakers in perceiving the vowels of Southern British English. The trainees received five sessions of high-variability auditory training (including multiple words spoken by multiple talkers). The pre- and post-training tests included identification and discrimination tasks in L1 (Greek) and L2 (English), and a nonspeech (F2 only) discrimination task. Preliminary results show significant improvement in the trainees’ identification of L2 vowels, but no significant change in their L2 discrimination. The relationships between pre-training L1, L2, and nonspeech performance and gains in L2 identification for individuals will be discussed.
The roles of second-language experience and accent in speech recognition in noise.
Authors: Preece-Pinet Melanie , Iverson Paul
Published: October 2013

Previous work has demonstrated that there is an interaction between native (L1) and non-native (L2) accents in speech recognition in noise, with listeners being better at L1 or L2 accents that match their own speech. This study investigated how L2 experience modulates this talker-listener interaction. L1 southern British English (SE) and L1 French listeners with varying L2 English experience (inexperienced FI, experienced FE, and bilinguals FB) were tested on the recognition of English sentences mixed in speech-shaped noise that was spoken with a range of accents (SE, FE, FI, Northern Irish, and Korean-accented English). The results demonstrated that FI listeners were more accurate with strongly accented FI talkers, and were progressively worse for the other accents, perhaps based on accent similarity. The SE listeners, however, had a strong advantage for SE speech, but were similarly poor at understanding the other accents. Their recognition processes were thus selectively tuned to their own accent, rather than having the graded sensitivity of FI listeners. FE and FB listeners were more similar to SE listeners as their experience with English increased. The results thus suggest that increased exposure to L1 speech changes both the intelligibility of accents and the selectivity of accent processing.
Do first-language (L1) phonemic categories play a role in the perception of second-language (L2) phonemic contrasts? A look from the perception of Cantonese codas by Mandarin speakers.
Authors: Chu Patrick Chun Kau
Published: October 2013

This study investigated whether the phonological system of L1 or universal hierarchy of perceptual similarities has a larger effect on Mandarin speakers’ perception of Cantonese phonemic categories. In Mandarin and Cantonese, there are differences in the distribution of nasals and plosives in the coda position. Both nasals (/m/, /n/, and /ng/) and plosives (/p/, /t/, and /k/) are possible codas in Cantonese while only nasals (/n/ and /ng/) can appear in the coda position in Mandarin. Non-native phonemic categories (e.g., /t/) will be assimilated to a native phonemic category (e.g., /n/) if L1 plays a larger role while assimilation to a non-native phonemic category (e.g., /p/ or /k/) may support the idea that universal hierarchy of perceptual similarities plays a more important role. An AX discrimination task is carried out to see whether Mandarin and Cantonese speakers can discriminate these six phonemic contrasts in Cantonese monosyllabic words. Results showed that Mandarin speakers have poorer discrimination ability in the later type (e.g., /t/ vs /k/) than the former type (e.g., /t/ vs /n/). This suggests that the Perceptual Assimilation Model may need to take universal hierarchies of perceptual similarities into account when predicting L2 learners’ discrimination ability in a second language.
Effects of audiovisual auditory and articulatory training on second-language (L2) vowel category learning.
Authors: Aliaga-Garcia Cristina
Published: October 2013

Cross-language speech perception research has documented learners’ difficulties in using and accessing L2 durational and spectral information. This study investigated the short-term effects of two types of audiovisual high-variability phonetic training—auditory versus articulatory training—on the perception of the 11 English RP monophthongal vowels. Bilingual Catalan/Spanish learners of English (N=20 in each training condition) and one control group (N=20) were tested before and after training. Perceptual gains were assessed through a four-choice categorization task with natural CVC words, a forced-choice categorization task based on four synthesized /hVd/ continua (/i:/-/ɪ/, /æ/-/ʌ/, /ʌ/-/ɑ:/ and /u:/-/U/), and an AX discrimination task including 16 contrasting pairs. Significant perceptual accuracy gains were obtained in both auditory and audiovisual conditions. Pre- and postcategorization of synthesized vowels suggests that vowel perception improved, and that both training modalities had a similar positive effect on the learners’ use of spectral and duration information in vowel categorization. These results are further discussed in terms of input effects on vowel category learning and the reweighting of acoustic cues through phonetic training.
Perception of dialectal variation: Can speakers of Western Canadian English perceive New Zealand English /r/-sandhi?
Authors: Dickout Verona J. , Tucker Benjamin V.
Published: October 2013

The current study investigates perception of New Zealand English /r/-sandhi by speakers of Western Canadian English. It investigates whether speakers of Western Canadian English can differentiate between intrusive-/r/ (e.g., sawing [sæoɹəŋ]) and linking-/r/ (e.g., soaring [sæoɹəŋ]) of /r/-sandhi across morpheme boundaries and across word boundaries (e.g., linking: boar and, intrusive: boa and). Reaction time and accuracy were recorded in a two-alternative forced choice experiment. Stimuli showed significant acoustic differences between the linking-/r/ and intrusive-/r/ environments, with intrusive-/r/ having a shorter duration than linking-/r/. Participants were highly accurate and faster at recognizing words with linking-/r/ (e.g., soaring) and extremely inaccurate and slower at recognizing intrusive-/r/ (e.g., sawing). Participants’ responses to linking-/r/ at a morpheme boundary were significantly more accurate and faster than responses with linking-/r/ across word boundaries. The results of this experiment address the phonetic variability present in cross-dialect perception and begin to investigate strategies listeners utilize to accurately perceive speech.
The effects of linguistic experience on the perception of breathy phonation.
Authors: Esposito Christina
Published: October 2013

This study investigates the role linguistic experience has on the perception of phonation and the acoustic properties that correlate with this perception. Listeners from Gujarati (contrasts breathy versus modal vowels), Spanish (no breathiness), and English (allophonic breathiness) participated in two tasks. In the visual sort, subjects sorted breathy and modal vowels from a variety of languages into two groups based on perceived similarity of the talkers’ voices. In the multidimensional scaling task, listeners heard pairs of Mazatec vowels, and moved a slider to indicate perceived similarity of vowels in each pair. Results showed that judgments were more uniform across subjects who had breathy categories present in their native language and varied across subjects who lack a breathy category. Despite allophonic breathiness, English listeners did no better at distinguishing phonations than Spanish listeners. The perceived similarity among the stimuli correlated with measurable acoustic properties (H1-H2, H1-A3, H1-A1, etc.). H1-H2 was the most salient acoustic property for Gujarati listeners (which correlates with their production of breathy vowels). English listeners relied weakly on the measure H1-H2, which is associated with the production of phonation in English. In addition, Spanish listeners, despite lacking a breathy category, relied on H1-H2 and H1-A1.
The role of linguistic experience in the hemispheric perception of Mandarin tone.
Authors: Lu Shuang , van Heuven Vincent J. , Wayland Ratree
Published: October 2013

The current study investigated whether and to what extent lexical tone is processed as linguistic information by native Mandarin listeners, early Mandarin-Dutch bilinguals, second year Dutch students of Chinese, and monolingual Dutch students. Dichotic listening task was conducted in each of the four groups in order to determine to what extent the processing of lexical tones in Mandarin was lateralized to the left hemisphere. The majority of native Mandarin listeners revealed a right-ear advantage (REA) corresponding to a left-hemisphere lateralization in the perception of Mandarin tones. Similar to the native Chinese listeners, the Dutch-Mandarin bilinguals also exhibited an REA. Moreover, the left-hemisphere dominance was even more evident for these proficient bilinguals than for the native listeners. However, the Dutch listeners without any experience with Mandarin or other tonal languages showed no ear advantage. For the second year Chinese major listeners, five listeners revealed an REA, while others exhibited a bilateral pattern. The results suggested that there is a tendency for a right-ear advantage corresponding to left-hemisphere superiority for listeners with at least some basic experience of Mandarin tones.
The benefit of variation in cross-language perception of voice onset time (VOT).
Authors: Sumner Meghan
Published: October 2013

Listeners are consistently able to adjust to perceptually ambiguous sounds (Norris et al., 2003; among others). When listeners are exposed to sounds ambiguous between two phonetic categories, boundaries adjust to the ambiguous signal. Perceptual learning has been suggested to account for adjustment to unfamiliar accents. It is not necessarily true, though, that this flexibility extends to more extreme cases of variation. Many sounds in accented speech are unambiguously mapped to the wrong category (e.g., unaspirated voiceless stops in French-accented English are perceived as voiced by native English listeners). We examined English listeners’ perception of accented English in a perceptual learning paradigm with two exposure conditions: native French VOT mean and range in words that are lexically unambiguous (e.g., poach, *boach, not pet bet). Perceptual learning completely fails when listeners are exposed to the mean VOT, and in fact, this is coupled with an expanded voiced category, even though the words are lexically biased. Listeners make large adjustments when exposed to a range of VOTS, even those that are not good exemplars of English voiceless stops. The results are counter to models that suggest less variability improves learning, and suggest that variability in speech is used by and beneficial for listeners.
Investigating non-native category learning using a video-game-based training paradigm.
Authors: Lim Sung-joo , Holt Lori L.
Published: October 2013

Adults have difficulty learning non-native speech categories, presenting an opportunity to study adult learning and plasticity with non-native speech categorization. Long-term training within laboratory-based response-feedback paradigms has produced modest non-native category learning in previous studies. The current study investigates the effectiveness of a video-game-based categorization training paradigm, found to be effective in learning novel nonspeech auditory categories [W. Holt, (2005)], to train native Japanese adults to categorize English /r/ and /l/. This approach emphasizes functional associations between sound categories and players’ responses to video-game characters rather than overt phonetic categorization. Although categorization is not explicit in the game it is helpful to overall performance, providing a functional and perhaps more ecologically valid training signal than traditional feedback in standard laboratory training procedures. Japanese participants who played the game for about 2.5 h across 5 days with /r/ and /l/ sounds matched to game characters showed more nativelike perception of English /r/ and /l/ than control participants who played the game with nonspeech sounds. Listeners’ categorization performance furthermore reflected regularities of the /r/-/l/ input distributions. In particular, variability across second-formant (F2) frequency may have encouraged listeners to shift perceptual cue weights toward more nativelike use of third formant (F3) frequency.
Second language influence on perception of first language phonotactics.
Authors: Kilpatrick Cynthia
Published: October 2013

The results of a speech perception experiment are reported, examining the responses of speakers of the same L1 (Spanish) with varying experience in the L2 (English). Three groups of speakers participated in a wordlikeness rating task in Spanish, in which nonce words were presented in sets that varied as to whether the final consonant of the word was phonotactically legal or illegal: (1) bilinguals who learned both English and Spanish before the age of 5, (2) L1 Spanish speakers that learned English after the age of 12, (3) monolingual speakers without communicative exposure to a second language. All groups differed significantly in the strength of their overall ratings, even though all speakers were technically native speakers of Spanish. In addition, for both the bilingual and second language speakers, ratings for legal vs illegal codas were significantly different. For monolingual speakers, on the other hand, ratings for legal and illegal codas were similar, but response times for these two conditions were significantly different. These results support the idea that native speaker judgements are affected by the extent of language experience that a speaker possesses, and the processing of phonotactic legality may not proceed similarly for monolingual, second language, and bilingual speakers.
Phonetic variability in bilinguals’ acquisition of native-vowel category contrasts.
Authors: Bosch Laura , Ramon-Casas Marta
Published: October 2013

Previous research has shown that bilingual infants and toddlers follow a slightly different developmental pattern in building and stabilizing some native vowel contrastive categories, compared to monolingual populations. Once in the lexical stage, bilingual toddlers do not always show the expected mispronunciation effect when presented with familiar words in which a vowel change has been introduced. To better understand bilinguals’ protracted process in setting the boundaries for certain, perceptually close, native vowel categories, a phonetic analysis of the input characteristics was undertaken. Speech samples containing target words with Catalan midfront vowel sounds were recorded from two groups of Catalan-speaking mothers from monolingual and bilingual environments, differing in the use of their L2 (Spanish). First and second formant values of the target vowels were obtained and compared between groups. The vowels were always correctly and contrastively produced, but bilinguals’ formant values differed significantly from monolinguals’: categories were closer in space and greater variability in production was found. Young bilinguals’ sensitivity to phonetic variability in the words they hear may constrain the development of neat representations of contrastive vowel categories in the early lexicon. [Work supported by CONSOLIDER 2010 Program (CSD2007-012).]
How are speech sound categories acquired in bilingual first language acquisition?
Authors: Sundara Megha , Scutellaro Adrienne
Published: October 2013

For bilingual infants, phonetic categories of the two languages develop interdependently. This is supported by the differences in time course and trajectory of development of phonetic perception between Spanish-Catalan bilingual and monolingual infants (Bosch and Sebastián-Gallés, 2003a, 2003b, 2005; Sebastián-Gallés and Bosch, in press). Bosch and Sebastián-Gallés argue that for similar phones, at least initially, infants track statistical regularities across the two languages. This results in a temporary inability of bilingual infants to discriminate acoustically similar phonemes. Research on French-English bilingual infants shows a different pattern. There is evidence that French-English bilingual infants may not differ from their monolingual peers in discrimination of phonetic contrasts (Burns et al., 2007; Sundara et al., 2008). In this talk, data will be presented from Spanish-English bilingual infants to evaluate how development of phonetic perception is affected by (a) frequency of phones and (b) the rhythmic (dis)similarity of the two languages to which bilinguals are exposed.
The development of English vowel perception in monolingual and bilingual infants: Neurophysiological correlates.
Authors: Shafer Valerie L.
Published: October 2013

This research examines the maturation of I-E vowel discrimination, in terms of neurophysiological responses, in infants exposed monolingually to English or bilingually to English and Spanish. The vowels [I] as in “pit” and [E] as in “pet” contrast meaning in English but not in Spanish. Bilingual exposure to English and Spanish alters the distribution of phonetic information heard by an infant and may alter the timecourse of vowel category development in the two languages [e.g., L. Bosch and N. Sebastian-Galles (2003)]. The goal of the current study is to examine whether there is evidence from brain responses indicating differences in the development of this English vowel category as a function of amount of English versus Spanish in the input. Preliminary results reveal that both monolingually and bilingually exposed infants and children show evidence of good discrimination of the English vowels, but that the groups with bilingual exposure more often show increased contribution of the right hemisphere to discrimination compared to the groups receiving monolingual exposure. It is not currently clear why these hemispheric differences are found, but they may be related to differences in how attention is allocated in processing the vowels. [This research was supported by NIH HD46193.]
English vowel perception by native speakers of European Portuguese and Mandarin.
Authors: Rauber Andreia S.
Published: October 2013

This study investigated the perception of eight American English stressed syllabic monophthongs (/i, I, E, æ, V, O, U, u/) by two groups of nonnative listeners: Portuguese and Chinese. Each group was formed by 15 English as a foreign language (EFL) learners, with an upper-intermediate level of English proficiency, all undergraduate students at a Portuguese university. An identification test was designed to investigate how the participants would perceive the English vowels, which are not present in their first language (L1) inventory as stressed monophthongs (/I, æ, V, U/ in the case of the Portuguese speakers, and all vowels but /i, u/ in the case of the Mandarin speakers). The large number of target vowels played as stimuli allowed a cross-language analysis of vowel distribution in the acoustic space: for the two groups of EFL listeners, it was more difficult to perceive the English vowels located in a high density area of the English vowel space than those in less crowded areas. For the two groups of speakers, the vowels /æ/ and /U/ had the greatest misidentification rates.
Does the native language use of duration affect the perception of non-native length contrasts?
Authors: Hirata Yukari , Ueyama Motoko
Published: October 2013

This study compared native Italian (NI) and American English (NE) speakers’ abilities to perceive Japanese phonemic length contrasts. Japanese has both vowel and consonant length contrasts, Italian has only consonant length contrast, and English has neither. The study examined to which extent the differential use of duration in their native languages affects their abilities to perceive length contrasts in an unfamiliar language. Twenty-two monolingual NI speakers perceived Japanese words in isolation and in sentences and were asked to identify the number of moras in target words, e.g., /o.do.t.ta/ as four moras. Their test scores were compared to those of 18 NE participants [Hirata (2004)] in an analysis of variance. Group (NE, NI) was a between-subjects factor, and context (isolation, sentences) and word type (long vowels, geminates, combination, and short segments) were within-subjects factors. While there was no main effect of group (NI: 44.6%; NE: 39.5%), there was a significant three-way interaction. The NI group scored significantly higher than the NE group on words with geminates spoken in sentences (43.3 vs 31.1%). Results are discussed as to whether the perception of non-native length contrasts is driven by language-specific ability [McAllister et al. (2002)] or by more general auditory ability [Bohn (1995)].
Linguistic experience in tone perception.
Authors: Kirby James
Published: October 2013

This paper examines the effect of regional dialect on tone perception. Thirty speakers of Northern and Southern Vietnamese performed an AX discrimination task using natural speech tokens of Northern (NVN) speech. NVN distinguishes six tones, three of which are produced with creaky voice, while Southern Vietnamese (SVN) distinguishes only five tones, none of which are canonically produced with creaky voice; however, both groups of listeners have shown some sensitivity to voice quality as well as F0 cues (Brunelle, 2008). While the results of hierarchical cluster analysis show both Northern and Southern listeners broadly group tones by F0 onset, multidimensional scaling shows the effects of dialect-specific perception: despite some familiarity with NVN speech, SVN listeners did not adjust their perceptual cue space when listening to NVN talkers. As a result, tones with similar F0 profiles but different voice qualities were more likely to be confused by SVN listeners. This is consistent with studies showing that perceptual processes are organized in a language-specific fashion, with the acoustic cue space weighted by phonological relevance to L1 perception (Werker and Tees, 1999; Strange, 2002). It is argued that language-specific prosodic as well as segmental experience affects speech processing at the prelexical level.
Cross-linguistic interpretation of duration.
Authors: Broselow Ellen , Hwang Jiwon , Squires Nancy
Published: October 2013

In Korean, intervocalic [l] is realized as tap ([tal]/[tar-i] ‘moon/moon+nom’). In English loanwords, however, intervocalic /l/ is generally adapted as a geminate lateral ([sollo] ‘solo’ but [sara] ‘Sarah’). We present evidence from event-related potentials supporting an analysis in which Korean listeners perceive intervocalic single [l] (illegal in Korean) as geminate [ll], reinterpreting the English [r-l] contrast in terms of the Korean [r-ll] contrast ([dari] ‘bridge’, [dalli] ‘differently’). Korean and English participants heard two sets of oddball paradigms, [ele-elle] and [ene-enne]. In both cases, the acoustic difference is the same, 48 versus 98 msec. However, the nasal pair represents a cross-category contrast in Korean ([kanan] ‘poverty’, [kannan] ‘newborn’) while the lateral pair represents a noncontrastive difference. Consistent with studies showing a stronger mismatch negativity (MMN) to cross-category changes than to within-category changes, Korean listeners displayed a significantly larger MMN for the nasal pair than for the lateral pair. In contrast, English listeners (for whom the pairs do not differ in categorical status) did not show significantly different responses to the durational changes in nasals versus laterals. Korean listeners’ relatively weak response to durational differences in laterals suggests that their adaptation pattern reflects inaccurate mapping of the acoustic signal to phonological representations. [Work supported by NSF BCS-07460227.]
Discrimination of English, French, and Spanish liquids by Japanese listeners.
Authors: Ooigawa Tomohiko
Published: October 2013

The present study examines the discrimination of English, French, and Spanish intervocalic liquids’ contrasts (English /l/-/r/, French /l/-/r/, and Spanish /l/-/r/, /l/-/rr/, /l/-/rr/) by native speakers of Japanese. The results show that the Japanese listeners discriminated the contrasts of French liquids and Spanish trill versus lateral/tap at the rate of more than 95%. On the other hand, they poorly discriminated the contrasts of English liquids and Spanish tap versus lateral. This study discusses whether the current models on second language speech perception account for the phenomena. It has been said that native speakers of Japanese have difficulty in distinguishing the contrasts of liquids both productively and perceptually. A lot of empirical studies on the perception of English liquids by Japanese listeners have been carried out so far. However, there are few empirical studies on the perception of other languages’ liquids by Japanese listeners. This is the first study which compares the discrimination of the liquids of the three languages by native speakers of Japanese. In the experiment, utterances of /peCV/ were recorded from the native speakers of the three languages. AXB task was used for the perception experiment.
Do words in the native language influence second-language speech perception? Evidence from Japanese listeners’ perception of English words that exist as Japanese loanwords.
Authors: Tajima Keiichi
Published: October 2013

It is well known that native-language (L1) sound structure influences adult learners’ perception of second-language (L2) speech. However, it is not as clear whether L2 speech perception can also be influenced by L1 mental lexicon. Specifically, L2 words may be inaccurately perceived if familiar loanword counterparts exist in L1 and if these loanwords have different sound patterns from the original words. To examine this, the present study took advantage of Japanese loanwords from English (e.g., Japanese /sutoresu/ from English “stress”), which typically undergo syllable structure changes, and investigated whether Japanese listeners can accurately perceive the syllable structure of English words even when loanwords exist in Japanese. Thirty native Japanese listeners were asked to count syllables in 189 English words spoken by a native English talker, and rate their subjective familiarity with the English words and their loanword counterparts transcribed in Japanese katakana orthography. Results indicated that syllable-counting accuracy (65% on average) was not influenced by familiarity with the English words nor with the Japanese loanwords. Results suggest that even though loanwords resemble the original words in their sound and meaning, knowledge of such words in L1 does not necessarily influence perceptual processing of L2 words. [Work supported by MEXT and JSPS.]
Dutch listeners’ perception of Korean stop triplets.
Authors: Broersma Mirjam
Published: October 2013

This study investigates Dutch listeners’ perception of Korean stop triplets. Whereas Dutch distinguishes prevoiced and voiceless unaspirated stops, Korean distinguishes fortis, lenis, and aspirated stops. Here, perception of fortis, lenis, and aspirated bilabial (/pp/-/p/-/ph/), alveolar (/tt/-/t/-/th/), and velar (/kk/-/k/-/kh/) stops is investigated. In Dutch, VOT is the most important perceptual cue for initial stop voicing. Korean fortis stops fall within the VOT range of Dutch voiceless stops; VOTs of lenis and especially aspirated stops are longer than Dutch VOTs. Therefore, Dutch listeners were expected to distinguish fortis stops more accurately from the other two than lenis and aspirated stops from one another. In a phonetic categorization experiment, Dutch listeners categorized Korean stops in naturally recorded CVs as fortis/lenis, lenis/aspirated, or fortis/aspirated. Indeed, for all places of articulation, fortis stops were distinguished relatively accurately from the other two stops. The most difficult distinction was between lenis and aspirated stops (both outside the Dutch VOT range), the easiest distinction between fortis and aspirated stops (the former within the Dutch VOT range, the latter the most remote from Dutch VOTs). Thus, although all Korean VOT category boundaries are outside the Dutch VOT range, the distance from Dutch VOT values affected Dutch listeners' categorization.
Word-level rhythm in non-native English.
Authors: Baker Rachel E. , Bonnasse-Gahot Laurent , Van Engen Kristin J. , Baese-Berk Melissa , Kim Midam
Published: October 2013

Motivated by traditional rhythm class typologies, studies of language-learners’ rhythm typically focus on the syllable or segment level. Studying word-level rhythm lets us explore the effects of lexical features (e.g., part of speech, predictability) on word durations in non-native speech. This study examined whether native and non-native English can be distinguished by variation in the realization of English lexical features, and whether non-native-like word-level rhythm leads to a stronger foreign accent. Word durations were measured in English paragraphs read by 12 native American English (AE), 20 native Korean, and 20 native Chinese speakers. AE listeners rated the “accentedness” of these speakers. AE speakers showed greater within-speaker word duration variance than non-natives, and non-native speakers with greater variance received more native-like accent ratings. Increased AE variance had two causes. AE speakers had shorter relative durations for function words than non-natives. AE speakers also showed greater variance in their content word durations than non-natives, perhaps due to differences between words with and without pitch accents. However, both AE and non-native speakers produced shorter second mentions of words than first mentions, showing sensitivity to lexical predictability. Overall, these findings implicate word-level rhythm as an important and complex feature of foreign-accented English.
English vowel contrast perception on monolingual and bilingual 4- to 7-year olds: Behavioral and neurophysiological evidence.
Authors: Yu Yan , Vidal Nancy , Datta Hia , Gerometta Jennifer , Shafer Valerie
Published: October 2013

The role of simultaneous bilingual language exposure on speech perception development has been far from definitive. Behavioral literature has been controversial in terms of whether bilingual children keep pace with their monolingual peers [Burns et al. (2007); Sundara et al. (2006)]. The purpose of the current study is to: (1) investigate whether bilingual exposure to Spanish and English affects processing of speech stimuli that are phonemic only in English in children from 4–7 years of age; (2) whether the event-related potential (ERP) measures correlate with the behavioral measure (e.g., phoneme identification). Phonetically similar vowel contrasts (I versus E) were presented in an oddball paradigm while ERPs were collected from 65 scalp sites. Vowel discrimination and vowel identification were carried out using I-E vowel continuum. Preliminary analyses suggest that there is no difference in how monolingual and bilingual children behaviorally identify this vowel contrast. In terms of the ERP responses, children in both groups showed vowel discrimination as indexed by the presence of mismatch responses (MMRs). Younger children tended to still have a positive MMR that preceded the adult-like negative MMR. Individual patterns of response will be discussed in relation to amount of English versus Spanish exposure.
Using voice quality to learn non-native tonal categories.
Authors: Yu Kristine M.
Published: October 2013

An artificial language learning experiment will be used to study if voice quality can be used to learn tonal systems. Cross-linguistically, tone, and voice quality can co-vary in different ways. For instance, Mazatec (Jalapa de Diaz), has three phonation types (modal, breathy, creaky) fully crossed with three level tone levels [Ladefoged et al. (1988)], while Mandarin has creaky phonation in Tone 3 and Tone 4, which are also distinguished from one another and Tone 1 and 2 by f0 contour [Davison (1991); Belotel-Grenié and Grenié (2004)]. The goal of the study is to investigate if English listeners unfamiliar with tone languages can use phonation-type contrasts to learn tonal contrasts in artificial tone languages differing in how tone and voice quality co-vary. There will be a comparison of how learners generalize from training to novel stimuli for artificial languages where voice quality and tone contrasts are correlated and uncorrelated cues.
Intelligibility of Spanish-accented English words in noise.
Authors: Dalby Jonathan , Rogers Catherine L.
Published: October 2013

The intelligibility of Mandarin-accented English sentences, even those spoken by highly proficient non-native speakers, is degraded more than is native speech when presented to native listeners in noise [Rogers et al. (2004)]. Comprehension of accented speech may require more processing time than native speech even when presented in quiet [Munro and Derwing (1995)]. These effects are similar to effects found by Pisoni and his colleagues for synthetic, as compared to natural speech [Winters and Pisoni (2003)] and together suggest that the ability of native listeners to adapt relatively quickly and effectively to accented speech [Bradlow and Bent (2008); Clark and Garrett (2004)] may come at the expense of increased cognitive effort. The present study examines the effects of noise on the intelligibility of Mandarin-accented isolated words from speakers representing a wide range of oral English proficiency based on connected-speech measures. A subset of these words, those with the highest open-set identification scores as rated by a jury of 10 native listeners, will be presented for identification to a second jury at four signal-to-noise ratios: quiet, +10, 0, and −5 dB. Results are compared to those found for connected speech from the same group of talkers. [Work supported by NIH-NIDCD.]
Perception of second-language (L2) production by first-language (L1) speakers of different dialectal backgrounds: The case of Japanese-speaking learners’ /u/ perceived by French and Quebec native speakers.
Authors: Tremblay Marie-Claude , Kamiyama Takeki
Published: October 2013

The high back rounded /u/ of Parisian French (PF) is characterized by a concentration of energy in the low frequency zone (< 1000 Hz) due to the grouping of the first two formants, while Quebec French (QF) has a “lax” variant [U] in closed syllables (as in “soupe”), with its F2 amounting to 1000–1100 Hz [P. Martin, “Le système vocalique du français du Québec. De l’acoustique à la phonologie.” La linguistique, 38(2), 71–88 (2002)]. Japanese-speaking learners of French (JSL) tend to produce French /u/ with high F2 as in Japanese /u/, which in turn tends to be perceived by PF listeners as /φ/. Do QF listeners show different behavior because of their lax variant of /u/? Our perception experiment using 18 tokens each of /u y φ/ produced by five JSL showed that the 16 PF listeners examined perceived those stimuli of /u/ with F2 between 1000 and 1100 Hz as /u/ and /φ/ almost equally often, but considered as very poor exemplars of either of them. By contrast, the 16 QF listeners tested identified the same stimuli of /u/ almost always as /u/ with a better goodness rating than NF listeners’. These findings suggest that native speakers’ judgment about non-native speakers’ production might depend on the native dialect of the listener.
Effects of first-language (L1) voicing assimilation rules on the second-language (L2) perception of English word-final consonants by Polish and Hungarian listeners.
Authors: Monteleone Marisa A.
Published: October 2013

This study explores whether knowledge of a L1 regressive voicing assimilation rule interferes with perception of word-final voicing contrasts in an L2. Due to a regressive voicing assimilation rule, voicing in word-final consonants is neutralized in both Hungarian and Polish. American English (AE) maintains a voicing contrast in this same context. In a perception task, 11 native Hungarian and 12 native Polish listeners identified AE word-final consonants (e.g., [s]-[z]) followed by voiced versus voiceless consonants. In a separate task, they identified the same consonants with the following consonantal context removed. The Hungarian and Polish listeners performed less accurately when the following context was present than when it was removed, suggesting that word-final perception was influenced by the interference of the L1 rule.
Perception of consonant length by Russian and American listeners.
Authors: Dmitrieva Olga
Published: October 2013

An experimental investigation of Russian geminates revealed that intervocalic, post-stress, and word-initial geminates have an earlier perceptual boundary in relation to the average singleton duration in these positions. This provides an articulatory and perceptual advantage for geminate production and discrimination, which may explain cross-linguistic preference for these types of geminates. The proximity of the boundary to the average singleton means that a smaller articulatory effort is needed to reach the geminate status; its greater distance from the average geminate means that fewer intended geminates are misperceived as singletons, hence less danger of perceptually driven neutralization. To confirm that this generalization holds across languages a group of monolingual American English listeners was tested in addition to Russian listeners. The results strongly suggest that perception of the contrast between geminates and singletons has a linguistically universal basis. Speakers of American English—a language without phonemic consonant length—showed a pattern of responses very similar to that of the Russian listeners, in particular for post-stress and intervocalic geminates. The consistency of the results in both languages further supports the hypothesis that the observed shift in perceptual boundary is responsible for cross-linguistic dominance of intervocalic and post-stress geminates.
Cross-linguistic perception of the epenthetic vowel in obstruent + liquid clusters in Spanish.
Authors: Ramirez Carlos
Published: October 2013

This research explores the perception of the epenthetic vowel (EV) that occurs in the obstruent + liquid clusters in Spanish. The perceptibility of EV and its effect in the cluster is analyzed in Spanish native speakers and English native speakers learning Spanish at different levels: beginners; intermediate; and advanced. For this study, two tests were used: a perceptual identification test and a discrimination test (AXB protocol). The study explores the effect of linguistic and prosodic variables such as place and manner of articulation, voicing, type of liquid, and stress. The statistical analysis was conducted using mixed logit models, which can better account for subject and item random effects. This procedure, in contrast to other analyses, builds a model that predicts the effect of each factor. The results show that the different groups use different cues. For English speakers, place, voicing, and stress are predictors for the beginner and intermediate group (WaldZ = 0.000p < 0.000) whereas only voicing is a predictor for the advanced group (WaldZ = 0.008p < 0.01). For the Spanish native speakers voicing and stress are predictors (WaldZ = 0.02p < 0.05). The results suggest that perceptual cues vary according to L1 and proficiency level.
Perception of Moroccan Arabic geminates by native English speakers.
Authors: Pajak Bozena
Published: October 2013

Adult listeners often have difficulty perceiving phonetic distinctions that are not contrastive in their native language (e.g., Lisker and Abramson 1970, Miyawaki et al. 1975, Trehub 1976, MacKain et al. 1980, Werker et al. 1981, among others). However, the same contrast may be perceived with more or less difficulty depending on the environment in which it is embedded. This study investigated the perception of geminate consonants in Moroccan Arabic by native English speakers who had not had previous exposure to the geminate-singleton contrast. The geminates [ss] and [zz] were paired with singleton counterparts in four different environments: medial-intervocalic ([assa]-[asa], [azza]-[aza]); medial-consonant-adjacent ([assta]-[asta], [azzda]-[azda]); initial-vowel-adjacent ([ssa]-[sa], [zza]-[za]); and initial-consonant-adjacent ([ssta]-[sta], [zzda-[zda]]). The words were recorded by a native Moroccan Arabic speaker, and subsequently used as stimuli in a perception experiment (AX discrimination task; 80 participants). The sensitivity to the geminate-singleton contrast was measured by calculating A-prime scores (Grier 1971) and performing an ANOVA. The analysis showed a significant main effect of environment [F(3,237)=28.7; p<0.001]. The participants performed above chance, and their perception of the geminate-singleton contrast was best in the medial-intervocalic environment (A′=0.83), worse in the medial-consonant-adjacent (A′=0.73) and initial-vowel-adjacent environments (A′=0.74), and worst in the initial-consonant-adjacent context (A′=0.58).
Newborn infant perception of vowels is affected by ambient language.
Authors: Moon Christine , Lagercrantz Hugo , Kuhl Patricia K.
Published: October 2013

Behavioral research has shown that by 6 months of age, infants show an effect of experience with native language vowels. In a previous study of category organization, infants in Sweden and the United States treated a vowel prototype as equivalent to variants of the vowel in the native, but not the non-native language. In the current behavioral study of Swedish and U.S. neonates, results were consistent with those of the 6-month-olds. Eighty infants (M=32.8 h since birth) in Washington State and Stockholm participated in a procedure in which non-nutritive sucking activated one of 17 stimuli (a prototype and 16 variants) from the same vowel category. Twenty infants in each country heard their native vowel, and 20 the non-native vowel. The vowels were English /i/ and Swedish /y/. Stimuli were serially and randomly activated by the onset of a sucking bout, and once a stimulus was activated, frequency of presentation was infant-controlled. The dependent measure was number of sucks for each stimulus. For the non-native vowel only, the mean number of sucks was significantly higher for the prototype than the mean for the 16 variants. This suggests that category organization of vowels begins in utero.
Brain, behavioral, and sociocultural factors in bilingual language learning.
Authors: Garcia-Sierra Adrian , Rivera-Gaxiola Maritza , Conboy Barbara , Romo Harriet , Klarman Lindsay , Kuhl Patricia
Published: October 2013

Previous behavioral studies have shown improved sensitivity to native-language contrasts and reduced sensitivity to non-native phonetic contrasts when comparing 6–8- and 10–12-month-old monolingual infants. It has been argued that exposure to language dedicates neural networks to the acoustic properties of native-language speech, and that, in adulthood, this commitment interferes with nonnative speech processing [native language neural commitment or (NLNC)]. There are very few studies on how early speech perception in bilinguals relates to future language advancement. Recently it has been shown that infants’ early native-language speech perception skill predicts their later success at language acquisition. In the present investigation, we examined how brain measures of speech perception in bilingual infants and socio-cultural factors of their environment predict later vocabulary growth. Our results showed excellent neural discrimination of both English and Spanish phonetic contrasts in 12-month-old infants, distinguishing them from monolingual infants. To our knowledge, this is the first study of bilingual infants using a brain measure to show that bilingual infants’ speech specialization includes both languages by the end of the first year of life.
Bilinguals mind their language (mode): Vowel perception patterns of simultaneous bilingual and monolingual speakers.
Authors: Molnar Monika , Polka Linda , Menard Lucie , Baum Shari
Published: October 2013

It is well-established that the speech perception abilities of monolingual speakers are highly tuned to the sounds of their native language, and that this language specificity affects how monolingual speakers distinguish the sounds of a non-native language. The present study addressed how the speech perception skills of simultaneous bilingual speakers, who are native speakers of two languages, may be affected by control of active language mode. We tested monolingual (English and French) and simultaneous bilingual (English/French) adults in an identification and rating task with 42 vowels along a continuum from a high back rounded vowel (/u/) to a high front rounded vowel (/y/) that are both phonemic in French, with only the back vowel represented in English. Bilinguals completed the task in three language modes: English, French, and bilingual. As expected, monolingual speakers demonstrated a language-specific perceptual pattern for the vowels. Bilingual participants displayed different perceptual patterns in each active language mode to accommodate the vowel categories relevant in the target language. These findings indicate that simultaneous bilinguals rely on a finely detailed perceptual space and are flexible as they adapt their perception to different language environments.
Optical simulation of bistatic specular reflection by a rigid cone on a flat surface.
Authors: Smith Anthony R. , D’Asaro Matthew , Marston Philip L.
Published: October 2013

To gain insight into the high-frequency scattering of sound by cone-shaped objects near flat reflecting surfaces, a small conical mirror was placed on a flat horizontal mirror and illuminated by a tilted laser beam. The symmetry axis of the cone was vertical. Light scattering patterns were recorded by imaging with a camera on a white vertical screen that intersected the scattering. Bright regions on the screen were associated with specular reflections from the cone and from the flat mirror. To determine which contributions depended on the presence of the flat mirror, the screen was also imaged with the cone on a nonreflecting surface. The patterns were recorded with the screen placed sideways relative to the laser beam as well as in front of the cone and behind the cone. The cone half-angle was 45 deg but the grazing angle of the laser beam could be changed. The bright patterns were described by a geometric analysis of bistatic reflection previously summarized [P. Marston, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 124, 2584 (2008)] modified so as to allow for images caused by the flat mirror. The pattern for a vertical circular cylinder on a mirror was also studied. [Research supported by ONR.]
Impulse noise reduction for hearing protectors.
Authors: Murphy William
Published: October 2013

In 2009, the United States Environmental Protection Agency will propose a revision to the federal regulation for the labeling of hearing protection devices, 40 CFR 211 Subpart B. One of the new features of the proposed rule was the measurement of an impulse noise reduction rating for hearing protection devices. Measurement of impulsive sounds is challenging technically from an acoustics perspective. This paper will report on the performance of an acoustic shock tube used to generate impulses between 140 and 170 dB peak sound pressure level. The calibration methods for the microphones will be discussed and the measurements for a variety of hearing protectors will be presented. Typical earmuffs are capable of impulsive noise reduction ratings of between 20 and 35 dB. Earplugs provide similar range of performance. Combinations of earmuff and earplug have yielded impulse peak reductions of more than 50 dB. The reduction of the impulse peak level should provide a means to predict exposure at the ear when a hearing protector is worn in an impulsive noise environment.