Pub Date : 2023-11-28DOI: 10.1017/s0142716423000449
Peter T. Richtsmeier, Lisa Goffman
Children typically produce high-frequency phonotactic sequences, such as the /st/ in “toaster,” more accurately than the lower frequency /mk/ in “tomcat.” This high-frequency advantage can be simulated experimentally with a statistical learning paradigm, and when 4-year-old children are familiarized with many examples of a sequence like /mk/, they generally produce it more accurately than if they are exposed to just a few examples. Here, we sought to expand our understanding of the high-frequency advantage, but surprisingly, we instead uncovered an exception. Twenty-nine children between 4 and 5 years of age completed a phonotactic statistical learning experiment, but they also completed a separate experiment focused on statistical learning of prosodic contours. The order of the experiments was randomized, with the phonotactic statistical learning experiment occurring first for half of the children. For the children who completed the phonotactic learning experiment first, the results were consistent with previous research and a high-frequency advantage. However, children who completed the phonotactic learning experiment second produced low-frequency sequences more accurately than high-frequency sequences. There is little precedent for the latter effect, but studies of multistream statistical learning may provide some context for unpacking and extending the result.
{"title":"Statistical learning of phonotactics by children can be affected by another statistical learning task","authors":"Peter T. Richtsmeier, Lisa Goffman","doi":"10.1017/s0142716423000449","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0142716423000449","url":null,"abstract":"Children typically produce high-frequency phonotactic sequences, such as the /st/ in “toaster,” more accurately than the lower frequency /mk/ in “tomcat.” This high-frequency advantage can be simulated experimentally with a statistical learning paradigm, and when 4-year-old children are familiarized with many examples of a sequence like /mk/, they generally produce it more accurately than if they are exposed to just a few examples. Here, we sought to expand our understanding of the high-frequency advantage, but surprisingly, we instead uncovered an exception. Twenty-nine children between 4 and 5 years of age completed a phonotactic statistical learning experiment, but they also completed a separate experiment focused on statistical learning of prosodic contours. The order of the experiments was randomized, with the phonotactic statistical learning experiment occurring first for half of the children. For the children who completed the phonotactic learning experiment first, the results were consistent with previous research and a high-frequency advantage. However, children who completed the phonotactic learning experiment second produced low-frequency sequences more accurately than high-frequency sequences. There is little precedent for the latter effect, but studies of multistream statistical learning may provide some context for unpacking and extending the result.","PeriodicalId":48065,"journal":{"name":"Applied Psycholinguistics","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138540911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-24DOI: 10.1017/s0142716423000462
Vincenzo Moscati, Andrea Marini, Nicoletta Biondo
Data from 996 Italian-speaking children were collected and analyzed to assess whether a movement-based notion of grammatical complexity is adequate to capture the developmental trend of clitics and passives in Italian. A second goal of the study was to address the relationship between working memory and syntactic development, exploring the hypothesis that higher digit span values predict better comprehension of complex matrix sentences. The results confirm the validity of a ranking of grammatical structures based on constituent movement, with both clitics and passives developing in parallel and later than canonical SVO sentences. Working memory also shows an effect on sentence comprehension in general, but standard measures (digit span forward/backward) do not show a selective advantage in handling complex constructions such as clitics and passives.
{"title":"What a thousand children tell us about grammatical complexity and working memory: A cross-sectional analysis on the comprehension of clitics and passives in Italian","authors":"Vincenzo Moscati, Andrea Marini, Nicoletta Biondo","doi":"10.1017/s0142716423000462","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0142716423000462","url":null,"abstract":"Data from 996 Italian-speaking children were collected and analyzed to assess whether a movement-based notion of grammatical complexity is adequate to capture the developmental trend of clitics and passives in Italian. A second goal of the study was to address the relationship between working memory and syntactic development, exploring the hypothesis that higher digit span values predict better comprehension of complex matrix sentences. The results confirm the validity of a ranking of grammatical structures based on constituent movement, with both clitics and passives developing in parallel and later than canonical SVO sentences. Working memory also shows an effect on sentence comprehension in general, but standard measures (digit span forward/backward) do not show a selective advantage in handling complex constructions such as clitics and passives.","PeriodicalId":48065,"journal":{"name":"Applied Psycholinguistics","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138540873","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-16DOI: 10.1017/s0142716423000450
Richard L. Sparks, Philip S. Dale
In this conceptual replication of Sparks and Dale ([2023]. The prediction from MLAT to L2 achievement is largely due to MLAT asessment of underlying L1 abilities. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1–25) utilizing a dataset previously reported by Sparks et al. ([2009]. Long-term relationships among early L1 skills, L2 aptitude, L2 affect, and later L2 proficiency. Applied Psycholinguistics, 30, 725–755.), L1 achievement scores over 1st–5th grades and L2 aptitude scores from the Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT) in 9th grade were examined as predictors of L2 achievement for U.S. secondary students completing L2 courses in 9th and 10th grades. The study’s focus was on the uniqueness and efficiency of MLAT with respect to measuring L1 achievement in predicting L2 achievement. All L1 measures and MLAT predicted L2 literacy and language, and L1 measures predicted MLAT scores. Word decoding was the strongest overall L1 predictor, though there was variation across the L2 measures. The unique contribution of MLAT was modest, as the majority of total prediction (77–86%) was due to L1 measures. The efficiency of MLAT in capturing predictive variance from L1 abilities was moderately high (median ∼73%) but variable across the L1 and L2 measures. Findings are generally consistent with those of Sparks and Dale (2023) showing that prediction from MLAT to L2 is largely due to MLAT’s assessment of L1 abilities, even though a substantial amount of L2 prediction-relevant L1 variance is missed by MLAT.
{"title":"Quantifying the uniqueness and efficiency of the MLAT relative to L1 attainment as a predictor of L2 achievement: A conceptual replication","authors":"Richard L. Sparks, Philip S. Dale","doi":"10.1017/s0142716423000450","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0142716423000450","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this conceptual replication of Sparks and Dale ([2023]. The prediction from MLAT to L2 achievement is largely due to MLAT asessment of underlying L1 abilities. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1–25) utilizing a dataset previously reported by Sparks et al. ([2009]. Long-term relationships among early L1 skills, L2 aptitude, L2 affect, and later L2 proficiency. Applied Psycholinguistics, 30, 725–755.), L1 achievement scores over 1<span>st</span>–5<span>th</span> grades and L2 aptitude scores from the Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT) in 9<span>th</span> grade were examined as predictors of L2 achievement for U.S. secondary students completing L2 courses in 9<span>th</span> and 10<span>th</span> grades. The study’s focus was on the uniqueness and efficiency of MLAT with respect to measuring L1 achievement in predicting L2 achievement. All L1 measures and MLAT predicted L2 literacy and language, and L1 measures predicted MLAT scores. Word decoding was the strongest overall L1 predictor, though there was variation across the L2 measures. The unique contribution of MLAT was modest, as the majority of total prediction (77–86%) was due to L1 measures. The efficiency of MLAT in capturing predictive variance from L1 abilities was moderately high (median ∼73%) but variable across the L1 and L2 measures. Findings are generally consistent with those of Sparks and Dale (2023) showing that prediction from MLAT to L2 is largely due to MLAT’s assessment of L1 abilities, even though a substantial amount of L2 prediction-relevant L1 variance is missed by MLAT.</p>","PeriodicalId":48065,"journal":{"name":"Applied Psycholinguistics","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138540919","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-31DOI: 10.1017/s0142716423000413
María Noel Macedo, Matías Yerro, Jorge Vivas, Mauricio Castillo, Maximiliano Meliande, Adriana de León, Alejandro Fojo, Roberto Aguirre
Abstract The mental lexicon offers a window into the configuration of conceptual domains such as space and time, which has been labeled as concrete the former and abstract the latter in the current embodiment approach to cognition. Space has a phonological and semantic value in sign languages, but not in spoken languages. Additionally, the representation of time by spatial means is robust in oral and sign languages. This research asks if Deaf signers and hearing nonsigners have the same conceptual organization of those domains. In their respective languages, sixty-two participants made a repeated free word association task. These results showed that the studied populations have a little overlap in the associates evocated for each clue. The analysis of the preferences of the semantic relations of the pairs clue-associate showed a greater tendency of the Deaf signers to establish thematic relations. In contrast, the hearing participants indicated a bias toward taxonomic relations. The results suggest that the abstractness or concreteness of concepts may be modulated by factors associated with linguistic modalities. However, in this compared free association norms factors related to the language deprivation of Deaf, the asymmetries in the cross-modal language contact and cross-modal borrowing were not exhaustively controlled.
{"title":"Contrasting the semantic typology biases of Deaf and hearing nonsigners in their conceptualization of time and space","authors":"María Noel Macedo, Matías Yerro, Jorge Vivas, Mauricio Castillo, Maximiliano Meliande, Adriana de León, Alejandro Fojo, Roberto Aguirre","doi":"10.1017/s0142716423000413","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0142716423000413","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The mental lexicon offers a window into the configuration of conceptual domains such as space and time, which has been labeled as concrete the former and abstract the latter in the current embodiment approach to cognition. Space has a phonological and semantic value in sign languages, but not in spoken languages. Additionally, the representation of time by spatial means is robust in oral and sign languages. This research asks if Deaf signers and hearing nonsigners have the same conceptual organization of those domains. In their respective languages, sixty-two participants made a repeated free word association task. These results showed that the studied populations have a little overlap in the associates evocated for each clue. The analysis of the preferences of the semantic relations of the pairs clue-associate showed a greater tendency of the Deaf signers to establish thematic relations. In contrast, the hearing participants indicated a bias toward taxonomic relations. The results suggest that the abstractness or concreteness of concepts may be modulated by factors associated with linguistic modalities. However, in this compared free association norms factors related to the language deprivation of Deaf, the asymmetries in the cross-modal language contact and cross-modal borrowing were not exhaustively controlled.","PeriodicalId":48065,"journal":{"name":"Applied Psycholinguistics","volume":" 38","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135863690","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract In this study, we compared affective ratings of emotional valence and arousal for 882 Serbian words at three points in time: before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (2018), during the COVID-19 lockdown (2020), and after the government measures were abandoned (2022). We did not observe a significant change in average valence or arousal ratings across time points. A more detailed look into the data revealed the change in arousal that was different across the valence values. An increase in their linear correlations and a decrease in the nonlinearity of the GAMM smooth demonstrated that, upon the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, emotionally negative words elicited higher arousal ratings, whereas emotionally positive words elicited lower arousal ratings. It revealed that our participants became more sensitive to the negative content and less sensitive to the positive content. Our results add to the findings, which showed that the relationship between emotional valence and arousal is a function of contextual factors, which primarily influence the arousal of words.
{"title":"Flattening the curve: COVID-19 induced a decrease in arousal for positive and an increase in arousal for negative words","authors":"Milica Popović Stijačić, Ksenija Mišić, Dušica Filipović Đurđević","doi":"10.1017/s0142716423000425","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0142716423000425","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this study, we compared affective ratings of emotional valence and arousal for 882 Serbian words at three points in time: before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (2018), during the COVID-19 lockdown (2020), and after the government measures were abandoned (2022). We did not observe a significant change in average valence or arousal ratings across time points. A more detailed look into the data revealed the change in arousal that was different across the valence values. An increase in their linear correlations and a decrease in the nonlinearity of the GAMM smooth demonstrated that, upon the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, emotionally negative words elicited higher arousal ratings, whereas emotionally positive words elicited lower arousal ratings. It revealed that our participants became more sensitive to the negative content and less sensitive to the positive content. Our results add to the findings, which showed that the relationship between emotional valence and arousal is a function of contextual factors, which primarily influence the arousal of words.","PeriodicalId":48065,"journal":{"name":"Applied Psycholinguistics","volume":"182 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135778899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-16DOI: 10.1017/s0142716423000401
Evangelia Daskalaki, Adriana Soto-Corominas, Aisha Barisé, Johanne Paradis, Xi Chen, Alexandra Gottardo
Abstract Previous studies show that even though monolingual children find subject relatives easier than object relatives, their comprehension of object relatives can be facilitated by morphological cues. Given that in heritage contexts functional morphology is a vulnerable domain, a question that needs to be addressed is whether bilingual children, who are heritage speakers of their L1, will also be able to use morphological cues to comprehend complex syntax. To contribute to this line of research, we focused on monolingual (N = 18; Mean Age: 11.43) and bilingual/first generation (N = 108; Mean Age: 11.98), Syrian Arabic-speaking children in Canada, and examined their ability to use gender morphology in their comprehension of relative clauses, while taking into consideration cognitive, environmental, and age-related variables. To this end, we used two offline sentence-picture matching tasks targeting relative clauses and gender (as encoded in SV agreement and object clitics). Results showed that, like monolingual children, first-generation, Arabic-speaking children living in Canada used morphological cues to comprehend complex syntax in their L1. Furthermore, even though there was an association between comprehension of gender agreement and comprehension of relative clauses, performance in gender agreement was higher than performance in relative clauses, suggesting that challenges with complex syntactic structures are not necessarily an epiphenomenon of a morphological deficit.
{"title":"The interplay between syntactic and morphological comprehension in heritage contexts: The case of relative clauses in heritage Syrian Arabic","authors":"Evangelia Daskalaki, Adriana Soto-Corominas, Aisha Barisé, Johanne Paradis, Xi Chen, Alexandra Gottardo","doi":"10.1017/s0142716423000401","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0142716423000401","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Previous studies show that even though monolingual children find subject relatives easier than object relatives, their comprehension of object relatives can be facilitated by morphological cues. Given that in heritage contexts functional morphology is a vulnerable domain, a question that needs to be addressed is whether bilingual children, who are heritage speakers of their L1, will also be able to use morphological cues to comprehend complex syntax. To contribute to this line of research, we focused on monolingual (N = 18; Mean Age: 11.43) and bilingual/first generation (N = 108; Mean Age: 11.98), Syrian Arabic-speaking children in Canada, and examined their ability to use gender morphology in their comprehension of relative clauses, while taking into consideration cognitive, environmental, and age-related variables. To this end, we used two offline sentence-picture matching tasks targeting relative clauses and gender (as encoded in SV agreement and object clitics). Results showed that, like monolingual children, first-generation, Arabic-speaking children living in Canada used morphological cues to comprehend complex syntax in their L1. Furthermore, even though there was an association between comprehension of gender agreement and comprehension of relative clauses, performance in gender agreement was higher than performance in relative clauses, suggesting that challenges with complex syntactic structures are not necessarily an epiphenomenon of a morphological deficit.","PeriodicalId":48065,"journal":{"name":"Applied Psycholinguistics","volume":"74 2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136113803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-16DOI: 10.1017/s0142716423000383
Jeffrey Witzel, Naoko Witzel
Abstract This study investigates whether the perceptual salience of grammatical morphemes influences the online processing of temporarily ambiguous sentences during adult first-language (L1) comprehension. In a bidirectional self-paced reading task, adult L1 English participants ( N = 44) read sentences with time adjuncts that were in a structural position in which they could attach either to the most recent verb phrase (VP) or to a VP in a higher clause. Consistent with previous findings, the reading times on these sentences indicated processing difficulty when this adjunct allowed only for high attachment. Crucially, this effect was modulated by the perceptual salience of the grammatical morphemes used to indicate time reference in these clauses. Specifically, the processing cost for high attachment was larger when time in the lower clause was indicated by the auxiliary verb will compared to when it was indicated by the relatively less salient past - ed morpheme. These findings were taken to indicate that the influence of perceptual salience extends beyond the acquisition of and sensitivity to grammatical morphemes during L1 and L2 development. Rather, the perceptual salience of these forms also appears to affect online structural processing during adult L1 sentence comprehension.
{"title":"Perceptual salience and structural ambiguity resolution","authors":"Jeffrey Witzel, Naoko Witzel","doi":"10.1017/s0142716423000383","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0142716423000383","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This study investigates whether the perceptual salience of grammatical morphemes influences the online processing of temporarily ambiguous sentences during adult first-language (L1) comprehension. In a bidirectional self-paced reading task, adult L1 English participants ( N = 44) read sentences with time adjuncts that were in a structural position in which they could attach either to the most recent verb phrase (VP) or to a VP in a higher clause. Consistent with previous findings, the reading times on these sentences indicated processing difficulty when this adjunct allowed only for high attachment. Crucially, this effect was modulated by the perceptual salience of the grammatical morphemes used to indicate time reference in these clauses. Specifically, the processing cost for high attachment was larger when time in the lower clause was indicated by the auxiliary verb will compared to when it was indicated by the relatively less salient past - ed morpheme. These findings were taken to indicate that the influence of perceptual salience extends beyond the acquisition of and sensitivity to grammatical morphemes during L1 and L2 development. Rather, the perceptual salience of these forms also appears to affect online structural processing during adult L1 sentence comprehension.","PeriodicalId":48065,"journal":{"name":"Applied Psycholinguistics","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136114552","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-10DOI: 10.1017/s0142716423000395
Ángel-Armando Betancourt, Marc Guasch, Pilar Ferré
Abstract This study aimed at examining the contribution of affective content to the organization of words in the lexicon. Based on existing free association norms and on a series of questionnaires we developed, we examined the characteristics of the words produced as associates to 840 Spanish cue words. Half of them were affective words and the other half were neutral (non-affective) words. Among the affective cue words, some words directly labeled an emotion (emotion words, EM) and others did not label an emotion but could elicit it (emotion-laden words, EL). The words produced as associates were also classified according to this distinction. Furthermore, we examined the relationship between the lexico-semantic and affective properties of the cue words and the associated words. The results revealed that EM, EL, and neutral associated words were elicited to a greater extent by cue words of the same type than by other types of cue words. Furthermore, the degree of correspondence between the affective properties of the cues and their associates was higher than that of lexico-semantic variables. These results have methodological implications for research on semantic memory and are of interest for applied studies focused on affective word organization in specific populations.
{"title":"The contribution of affective content to cue-response correspondence in a word association task: Focus on emotion words and emotion-laden words","authors":"Ángel-Armando Betancourt, Marc Guasch, Pilar Ferré","doi":"10.1017/s0142716423000395","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0142716423000395","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This study aimed at examining the contribution of affective content to the organization of words in the lexicon. Based on existing free association norms and on a series of questionnaires we developed, we examined the characteristics of the words produced as associates to 840 Spanish cue words. Half of them were affective words and the other half were neutral (non-affective) words. Among the affective cue words, some words directly labeled an emotion (emotion words, EM) and others did not label an emotion but could elicit it (emotion-laden words, EL). The words produced as associates were also classified according to this distinction. Furthermore, we examined the relationship between the lexico-semantic and affective properties of the cue words and the associated words. The results revealed that EM, EL, and neutral associated words were elicited to a greater extent by cue words of the same type than by other types of cue words. Furthermore, the degree of correspondence between the affective properties of the cues and their associates was higher than that of lexico-semantic variables. These results have methodological implications for research on semantic memory and are of interest for applied studies focused on affective word organization in specific populations.","PeriodicalId":48065,"journal":{"name":"Applied Psycholinguistics","volume":"229 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136294041","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-02DOI: 10.1017/s0142716423000371
Xiaoluan Liu, Paola Escudero
Abstract The current study examines how bidialectalism influences non-native speech production. We compared monodialectal Mandarin Chinese with bidialectal Shanghai-Mandarin Chinese speakers in terms of their ability to produce easy and difficult American English vowels. The results showed a general advantage for the bidialectal group compared with the monodialectal group in the production of the vowel formants and duration of the easy English vowels [i] and [u]. However, for the English vowels [ɪ] and [ʊ] known to be difficult for Chinese learners of English, both groups experienced the same challenges in terms of accurately producing the formants of the target vowels. Nevertheless, the bidialectal Shanghai-Mandarin speakers were still better than the monodialectal Mandarin speakers in the durational aspect of the two difficult English vowels. The results are explained by the Second Language Linguistic Perception (L2LP) model and suggest that the bidialectal advantage in non-native speech acquisition is subject to the modulation of cross-linguistic difficulty of the target speech sounds.
{"title":"How bidialectalism affects non-native speech acquisition: Evidence from Shanghai and Mandarin Chinese","authors":"Xiaoluan Liu, Paola Escudero","doi":"10.1017/s0142716423000371","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0142716423000371","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The current study examines how bidialectalism influences non-native speech production. We compared monodialectal Mandarin Chinese with bidialectal Shanghai-Mandarin Chinese speakers in terms of their ability to produce easy and difficult American English vowels. The results showed a general advantage for the bidialectal group compared with the monodialectal group in the production of the vowel formants and duration of the easy English vowels [i] and [u]. However, for the English vowels [ɪ] and [ʊ] known to be difficult for Chinese learners of English, both groups experienced the same challenges in terms of accurately producing the formants of the target vowels. Nevertheless, the bidialectal Shanghai-Mandarin speakers were still better than the monodialectal Mandarin speakers in the durational aspect of the two difficult English vowels. The results are explained by the Second Language Linguistic Perception (L2LP) model and suggest that the bidialectal advantage in non-native speech acquisition is subject to the modulation of cross-linguistic difficulty of the target speech sounds.","PeriodicalId":48065,"journal":{"name":"Applied Psycholinguistics","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135833742","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1017/S014271642300036X
Tatiana Verkhovtceva, Maria Polinsky, N. Meir
Abstract This study investigated the morphosyntax of adjectival concord in case and number and subject-verb person agreement by monolingual and bilingual speakers of Russian. The main focus of the study is on the potential factors that may trigger divergence between Heritage Language (HL) speakers and those speakers who are dominant in that language, be they monolingual or bilingual. We considered the effects of cross-linguistic influence; limited input (as indexed by Age of Onset of Bilingualism, AOB), and working-memory limitations. An auditory offline grammaticality judgment task was performed by 119 adult participants split into four groups: (1) Monolingual Russian-speaking controls (MonoControl), (2) Immigrant Controls, that is, Russian-Hebrew bilinguals with AOB after the age of 13 (IMMControl); (3) bilinguals with AOB between 5–13 (BL-Late); and (4) bilinguals with AOB before the age of 5 (BL-Early). The latter group represents HL speakers. We did not find effects of cross-linguistic influence or extra memory load; at the same time, the effects of AOB were robust. Additionally, HL speakers (BL-Early group) differed from the other groups in poor performance on adjectival concord, but patterned with the others on person agreement, which indicates that the feature [person] is more robust than other agreement/concord features in HL grammars.
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