Language and Speech最新文献

This study examines variation in coarticulatory vowel nasalization in Seoul Korean as a function of prosodic boundaries and gender, exploring its role in an emerging denasalization sound change. Coarticulatory vowel nasality, measured by A1-P0, was analyzed in the word-initial vowels of /ma.mi/ across three prosodic boundary conditions (IP-initial, AP-initial, and Wd-initial) in 35 speakers in their 20s. Results show that phrase-initial vowels exhibit reduced nasality as part of domain-initial articulatory strengthening, suggesting that denasalization of word-initial nasal consonants extends to the following vowel, reducing its coarticulatory nasalization and thus signaling the progression of a position-driven sound change. Significant gender differences were found: male speakers consistently adhere to this change throughout the vowel, exhibiting greater reductions in coarticulatory vowel nasalization in phrase-initial contexts. In contrast, female speakers retain higher nasality levels in both phrase-initial and phrase-medial positions by regulating the coarticulatory process. These gender-related differences may reflect socially grounded perceptions of nasality and/or female speakers' tendency to preserve phonological features, influencing speech production choices. These findings highlight the interplay between prosodically driven phonetic variation and gender: speakers actively control the degree of vowel nasalization, and this phonetic variation, in turn, is further shaped by gender, potentially evolving into a systematic sound change.

Previous work has shown that L2-accented speech incurs a processing cost even when accurately understood. It remains unknown, however, whether an online processing cost is found when listeners process speech produced in L1 accents that are not their own. In this study, we examine this question by using comparative pupil dilation as a measure of cognitive load. Participants from the South of England heard sentences produced in four different accents: Southern British English (the listeners' own familiar accent), American English (a standard L1 accent widely used in media), Glaswegian English (a less-familiar regional L1 accent), and Mandarin Chinese-accented English (an L2 English accent). Results show that Chinese-accented speech elicited significantly larger pupil dilation responses compared with Southern British English. Speech from less-familiar L1 accents elicited pupil dilation responses of different shapes and trajectories, suggesting differences in processing of these accents. Furthermore, participants showed larger mean pupil dilation when they heard relatively less-familiar L1 American-accented speech than when hearing Glaswegian English. Interestingly, this effect was found despite participants self-reporting that they were less familiar with the Glaswegian accent and found it more effortful to comprehend compared with American English. These results suggest that accurately perceived and highly intelligible L1 accents such as American English also incur a cognitive cost in processing, but to a smaller extent compared with L2-accented speech. We discuss the implications of our findings for the relationship between exposure, subjective effortfulness measures, and pupil dilation responses.

Certain studies report facilitatory effects of multiple-talker exposure on cross-talker generalization of L2-accented speech (often defined as greater comprehension of novel talkers). However, a confound exists in prior work: do multiple-talker exposure benefits stem from the greater number of talkers (numerosity) or greater phonological variability (heterogeneity)? This study examined how apparent talker variability and speaking style affect L2-accent adaptation, while keeping phonological variation as constant as possible across exposure conditions. L1-English participants transcribed sentences in noise for a single Mandarin-accented English talker in an exposure phase and a novel Mandarin-accented English speaker in a test phase (a control condition received no exposure). Although all exposure stimuli came from one speaker, half of the listeners who received exposure were led to believe that multiple talkers were present by shifting the F0 and formants of a subset of sentences. We find: (a) when the test talker produces casual speech, all critical conditions with exposure enhance generalization (i.e., greater comprehension of the test talker relative to control); (b) when the test talker produces hard-of-hearing-directed speech, there is no difference in transcription accuracy between the control and critical conditions; and (c) when the test talker produces casual speech, generalization is greatest when listeners are exposed to multiple apparent talkers, but only given speaking style similarity between exposure and test (i.e., when the exposure phase also presents casual speech). This work lends credence to numerosity accounts-given a minimal change in phonological variability, the illusion of multiple-talker exposure can facilitate cross-talker generalization of L2-accented speech.

This study compared online and face-to-face (f2f) testing using the short Polish version of the LITMUS Sentence Repetition Task (SRep) with multilingual and monolingual Polish-speaking children. The shift to remote testing during the COVID-19 pandemic prompted questions about whether online methods yield results comparable with in-person testing for assessing multilingual children's grammatical abilities. Reliable online testing could enhance access to underrepresented populations, enabling families from diverse backgrounds to participate from home. We tested 92 multilingual children (speaking Polish and English or German) and 55 monolingual Polish-speaking children aged 4;6-7;6. Each child completed the SRep task twice (online and f2f) in a counterbalanced order. Results showed better performance on f2f tasks for both groups. Multilingual children improved on their second attempt, regardless of format, while monolinguals consistently scored higher in the f2f condition. These findings indicate differences in performance across testing modalities and the need to adapt and norm the SRep task for both online and f2f administration separately.

Aegyo is a culturally salient speaking style in Korea, often described as a baby talk-like register used by young adults to convey affection or cuteness. Yet, its acoustic profile and perception across genders remain understudied. This study investigates the acoustic and perceptual characteristics of aegyo through a production study and a perception study. In the production study, 12 native Seoul Korean speakers (six females, six males) produced sentences in both aegyo and non-aegyo styles. Acoustic analyses revealed that aegyo is characterized by significantly longer vowel durations, slower speech rate, and higher mean and maximum F0, along with greater variability in F0 and vowel duration: F0 range was significant only for male speakers. In addition, "hyper-score" analyses showed that male speakers exhibited more increases in mean and maximum F0 compared with female speakers. In the perception study, 49 Korean listeners (25 females, 24 males) judged whether the stimuli were produced in aegyo. Results showed a significant interaction between sensitivity and bias: listeners were less accurate but more prone to label the stimuli as aegyo when the speaker was male, whereas they were more accurate and more conservative when the speaker was female. These findings suggest that listeners interpret the same speaking style differently depending on speaker gender. Overall, our results support the Speaker Design model by evidencing that speakers systematically shift their vocal behavior to construct social identity, while also showing that listener interpretation of such shifts may vary by speaker gender.

Short tongue pronunciation (STP) refers to an enregistered set of pronunciation variants in Korean that is popularly thought to result from underdeveloped speech articulation, having a physically shorter tongue, or intentionally imitating such a pronunciation. Because these explanations can be tied to children's speech, there is a potential role of gender in mediating the social evaluation of STP. To investigate this, we carried out a between-subjects (n = 474) survey on beliefs and attitudes toward STP produced by adult men and women. The results confirmed that STP is a familiar concept to Korean speakers, primarily referring to the stopping, affrication, fronting, and tensification of obstruents, resembling certain child-like speech patterns. While STP was generally perceived negatively, the gender of both the listener and the imagined talker influenced its evaluation. Stopping and affrication were more frequently associated with female talkers, and male listeners perceived female STP, but not male STP, as cute in certain sociopragmatic contexts. In contrast, fronting, which was more frequently associated with male talkers, was regarded as an innate speech deficit and consistently evaluated negatively, regardless of talker gender. These findings highlight the complex interplay of sociophonetic perception and gendered expectations in Korean.

Studies of word recognition have demonstrated that listeners show graded sensitivity to mispronunciations of consonants in words, as well as better mispronunciation detection for more familiar words. However, little research has considered whether this graded sensitivity to mispronunciation can also be found for vowels and how that might interact with word familiarity. In this study, 73 English-speaking adults learned novel consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) labels for novel objects, with varying amounts of exposure to those labels during learning. Participants were then tested on their learning of these word-referent pairs, as well as on their responses when these newly learned words were mispronounced with a vowel that either had the same backness (±) as the original vowel (small mispronunciation) or the opposite backness as the original vowel (large mispronunciation). Participants reliably matched learned words to referents when the words were correctly pronounced but sometimes selected a distractor referent when the words were mispronounced, suggesting interpretation as a new word. Larger mispronunciations, particularly of more familiar words, increased the likelihood of distractor selection. These findings add to the growing body of evidence that perception of mispronounced words is affected by both lexical familiarity and degree of mispronunciation.

Articulatory setting, the underlying tendency of the articulators to assume a certain overall configuration during speech, is language-specific and can be measured by observing the inter-speech posture (ISP) of the articulators during the brief pauses between utterances. To determine a given language's ISP, observing bilingual speakers in each of their languages is ideal, so that questionable normalization across different vocal tracts does not have to be done. In this study, four English-Japanese bilinguals of various English proficiencies participated. To this end, we quantitatively tested for the existence of two settings in each bilingual, and the results showed no systematic differences between the tongue ISPs of Japanese and English. We also tried to shed light on the origin of articulatory setting, which is thought to emerge from the configurations of the most frequent phonemes of a language. We qualitatively compared the predicted ISP based on Japanese spoken frequency of occurrence data with the mean measured ISP in Japanese. Ultrasound movies of the tongue were recorded and analyzed, and the results showed that for three participants, the predicted ISP's tongue tip and blade were substantially lower than for the mean measured ISP. The mean measured ISPs also displayed greater variability in English (L2) than in Japanese (L1), much more so in the lower proficiency English speakers.

This study tested whether the Perceptual Assimilation Model of Second Language Speech Learning (PAM-L2) predicts second language (L2) Cantonese tone discrimination across different perceptual modes. Punjabi speakers of Cantonese completed the Cantonese tone assimilation and discrimination tasks. In the assimilation task, the Punjabi listeners assimilated the Cantonese tones as two-category (TC), single-category (SC), uncategorized-categorized without overlap (UC-no), and uncategorized-categorized with partial overlap (UC-po) pairs, yielding testable predictions for PAM-L2 in the discrimination task (TC = UC-no > UC-po > SC). In the discrimination task, the model-driven predictions were largely supported in the double-talker context but not in the single-talker and pure tone contexts. These results suggest that PAM-L2 applies to phonological but not non-phonological discrimination of L2 tones. Moreover, our findings indicate that the distinction between partial and complete overlap may not be necessary for UC pairs.