Language and Speech最新文献

Tone perception has drawn much attention in recent years. However, previous studies have mainly focused on tones with different contours, while systematic investigation of tones with the same contour-particularly falling tones-remains scarce. Given that different tone contours may elicit distinct perceptual patterns, examining tones with the same contour is crucial for understanding how listeners distinguish closely related tonal categories. Taking the four falling tones in Bai (Meiba variety) as an example, this study first demonstrates the acoustic foundation of these tones using acoustic analysis. On this basis, the perceptual experiment reveals that identification of these four falling tones shows gradient boundaries and no sharp discrimination peaks, a pattern often described as continuous perception in previous literature. Moreover, the phonation types of tones also affect the identification score and boundary position. Based on the systematic relationship between phonation types and perceptual measures (i.e., identification score and boundary position), this study proposes an operational criterion to identify whether the phonation types of speech sounds are the same.

This study investigated Japanese, Cantonese, English, and French listeners' ability to perceive non-native quantity contrasts (e.g., short vs. long). In these languages, duration is used to mark phonemic quantity contrasts to different degrees. We had native listeners of these four languages listen to resynthesized pseudo-Japanese and pseudo-Estonian stimuli in AXB and identification tasks. The stimuli contrasted in consonant and vowel quantity. The results showed that while Japanese listeners, who have systematic phonemic quantity contrasts in their L1, generally outperformed other listeners in identification and in discrimination, their identification accuracy for overlong Estonian vowels and consonants was not as high as that for long Estonian vowels and consonants. Meanwhile, French listeners, who have no quantity contrasts in their L1 phonology, did not perform worse than the other groups as predicted. Our findings show that the role of duration in L1 phonology alone is not enough to predict the perception accuracy of non-native quantity contrasts when duration is the only acoustic cue.

This study investigated how social-pragmatic cues modulate causal inference during Chinese discourse comprehension, bridging social cognition and language processing. Two self-paced reading experiments manipulated causal strength (Strong vs. Weak) and respect consistency (Respect "nin" vs. Disrespect "ni") across coherent five-sentence discourses. Experiment 1, using an explicit causal judgment task, found that weak causality elicited longer reading times than strong causality. Notably, this causal strength effect was amplified under respectful address but reduced under disrespectful address. We interpret this finding as suggesting that the cognitive cost of processing a sociopragmatic violation-driven by mechanisms such as attentional diversion, emotional arousal, or pragmatic reanalysis-interferes with causal inference. Experiment 2, using an implicit reading paradigm, showed a persistent causal strength effect without modulation by respectfulness, and no spillover to subsequent sentences. This pattern indicates that sociopragmatic influences on inference may depend on task context and processing goals. Overall, the results suggest that while causal inference can occur automatically, its interaction with social cues appears constrained by cognitive resources and task demands. These findings offer new insights for how social-pragmatic norms interact with cognitive mechanisms in language comprehension, with implications for cross-cultural pragmatics and models of discourse coherence.

The study aims to contribute to the understanding of the role of the putamen-claustrum-insular region (region of interest, ROI) in speech motor control processes, considering functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and acoustic analysis. Forty-three neurotypical participants performed visually presented motor planning and execution tasks (two highly frequent non-word CV-syllable sequences), which differ in gestural complexity. First, it can be shown that the ROI generally plays a role during motor planning and motor execution. Second, comparing blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) responses across the complexity conditions revealed that syllables with greater gestural complexity elicited increased activation in the bilateral ROI. This region may help to coordinate articulatory movements in articulatory subsystems. The intricacy of these glottal and supraglottal articulatory movements defines the gestural complexity of the respective speech sound. Finally, our results suggest that these differences in BOLD response in the ROI reflect the differential contribution of articulatory mechanisms that are required to produce phonologically distinct speech sounds.

Previous research has shown that tonal second language (L2) experience can enhance the third language (L3) tone perception of native speakers of non-tone languages. However, tone is a multidimensional concept, and phonation type also serves as an important cue in the tone perception of some tone languages. In this study, 38 native English speakers of different Mandarin proficiency levels, 15 native English and 15 native Mandarin speakers, all of whom were naïve to the Wenzhou Wu dialect, participated in an AX discrimination task. The Wenzhou dialect was used for the naïve L3 stimuli because of its breathy voice feature in the low-register tones. Mandarin Tone 3 (T3) is often realized with creaky voice, while in English, creaky voice is a prosodic and sociophonetic marker. We asked whether the exposure to one phonation type (creaky voice) at a different linguistic level (indexical in English, allophonic in Mandarin) could lead to better performance on another phonation type (breathy voice). Our results showed that in addition to its effect on pitch perception, Mandarin-learning experience was associated with higher accuracy in phonation perception for native English speakers, and high-level L2 learners could even outperform native Mandarin speakers. Longer length of Mandarin-learning and Mandarin-immersion experience had a facilitative effect on naïve L3 tone perception, resulting in higher accuracy in the perception of both pitch and phonation to varying degrees. Moreover, the study demonstrated that acoustic similarity significantly affects pitch perception in the initial stages of L3 processing, with acoustically similar tone pairs posing greater perceptual difficulty than dissimilar pairs.

The tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon is traditionally considered a retrieval failure; however, it may also reflect cognitive advantages in semantic memory. Semantic memory refers to the repository of general world knowledge, including word meanings, objects, people, and their relationships, and is underpinned by a network of multiple brain regions. Prior studies on the relationship between semantic memory and TOT occurrences have yielded inconsistent results, warranting further investigation. Here, we examined this relationship by applying graph theory to analyze the topological properties of the semantic memory network, using diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) data from the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) repository (N = 576; age: 18-87). Our results demonstrated that global metrics of the semantic memory structural network-global efficiency, local efficiency, mean degree centrality, and mean clustering coefficient-positively predicted TOT rates. At the nodal level, increased metrics in the right posterior lateral temporal cortex (pLTC) and left dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) were associated with higher TOT rates. These findings suggest that a more extensive semantic memory, characterized by a richer network of general knowledge, may hinder word retrieval.

Multimodal phonetic training with hand gestures can support L2 speech learning, but few studies have examined its generalization effects. In this between-subjects study with a pretest/post-test paradigm, 39 Japanese learners of Mandarin practiced Mandarin aspirated stops, high back rounded vowel /u/, and T3 Sandhi over four training sessions. The gesture (G) group (n = 20) received training with hand gestures illustrating the phonetic and articulatory features of the target sounds, while the no gesture (NG) group (n = 19) received the same training without gestures. Participants read trained words during the pre- and post-tests and untrained words in a generalization test. Results showed that the G group outperformed the NG group in improving the pronunciation accuracy of aspirated stops and vowels, but not T3 Sandhi. Importantly, the G group showed better generalization to untrained items across all targets. These findings highlight the robust effects of hand gestures in multimodal phonetic training and the role of embodied cognition in L2 speech acquisition.

A well-known property of vowel duration is that it tends to be mediated by vowel height: higher vowels are usually shorter than lower vowels (aka "intrinsic vowel duration"). Results from previous work on a limited number of languages suggest two possible scenarios: (A) vowel duration is entirely driven by the duration of the gesture necessary to reach the tongue height target of the specific vowel, (B) vowel duration targets are part of the cognitive representation of the vowel. However, a third scenario has been put forward theoretically: (C) the duration of the vocalic gesture partially determines vowel duration, but a vowel duration target for each vowel category is also necessary. This study set out to investigate vowel duration data from Northern Italian to assess which of the three scenarios finds support. The first formant frequency (F1) of vowels was used as a proxy for tongue height position, and directed acyclic graph theory was employed to determine the causal relationship between vowel duration, vowel category, and F1. Bayesian modeling results suggest a robust non-linear effect of F1 on vowel duration, together with a direct effect of vowel category, which matches scenario (C).

This study examined how infants exploit an interlocutor's eye gaze for word learning, using a novel eye-tracking paradigm. The final sample included 25 Hebrew-speaking infants aged 12 and 18 months. Infants completed three experimental phases: (a) a 2-part validation phase: (1) recognition of a familiar object (ball) among two items (ball, bottle) upon hearing its label (e.g., "Where is the ball?"), and (2) exposure to an interlocutor gazing at and talking to an unfamiliar object (rattle) without labeling it (e.g., "Look, it is here"); (b) a learning phase, in which two unfamiliar animal dolls of similar visual salience were presented, and the interlocutor labeled one doll (e.g., "Look, here is bícket"); and (c) a test phase, in which the four objects (ball, rattle, and the two animal dolls) were shown together, and infants were tested to see if they look at the target object upon hearing the learned label (e.g., "Where is bícket?") but not upon hearing a novel label. Eighteen-month-olds followed the interlocutor's gaze more often and attended longer to the labeled object during learning compared with 12-month-olds. In the test phase, both age groups showed word recognition, looking longer at the target object after hearing its label than at familiar or unlabeled distractors, although differences with the visually similar distractor were nonsignificant. When hearing the non-learned word, infants looked longer at the similar distractor. Infants demonstrated word-object learning based on the interlocutor's gaze, with gaze -following abilities strengthening with age.

Speakers' perception of phonemes can be shifted based on hearing tokens of them with altered acoustic characteristics, and those shifts are extended to phonemes not heard during exposure. The patterns of extension from one vowel to others can help clarify the phonological representation of vowels and the processes that underlie extension of acoustic shifts. Three perceptual learning tasks tested how exposure to shifted F1 or F2 in a single vowel quality in American English influences other vowels with a range of characteristics, and how differences between dialects interact with those patterns of extension. In Experiment 1, shifted F1 in /ɪ/ exposure items produced perceptual shifts in the boundary between several high and mid vowels, as well as the /ε-æ/ boundary. In Experiment 2, shifted F2 in /u/ exposure items produced perceptual shifts in the boundary between front and back vowels. In Experiment 3, shifted F2 in /ε/ or /ei/ produced different patterns; shifted /ei/ only impacted the /ou-ei/ boundary, while shifted /ε/ impacted /ʌ-ε/ and /ʊ-ɪ/. The results can be explained by shifts in perception extending to vowels that share phonological features which are linked to the manipulated acoustic characteristic. However, the results are also largely consistent with extension based on acoustic similarity. There was little evidence for the listener's dialect affecting patterns of extension.