Language and Speech最新文献

Outcomes of early phonological acquisition in multi-accent contexts can be especially wide-ranging, raising the question of whether children exposed to multiple accents in one community are building the same linguistic systems. This present study investigates the English coda clear laterals in the spontaneous, mother-directed speech of English-Malay early bilingual preschoolers raised in multi-accent Singapore. Previous work has shown that these children were exposed to highly variable input involving three different English coda /l/ variants within and outside of their ethnic community. To elucidate the complex nature of language acquisition in such diverse settings, we examine both individual differences and group behaviors. Our findings reveal that despite the considerable between- and within-child variation, production patterns are generally systematic. Malay children with close Chinese peers, however, exhibited greater variability and unpredictability in their production, revealing word-specific inconsistencies that suggest a restructuring of or instability in their phonological representations. This study underscores the complexity of phonological development in multi-accent contexts and highlights the challenges in predicting the contributors of these variable outcomes.

The debate about the rhotic sound in Standard Mandarin (i.e., Putonghua) focuses on its articulation as a retroflex and its classification as either a fricative or an approximant. To address these questions, this study examines the syllable-initial r-sound, quantifying tongue contours for the r-phoneme itself and in relation to the retroflex sibilants (i.e., /ʂ, tʂ^h, tʂ/). Both established and novel articulatory and acoustic measures are employed to assess their effectiveness in distinguishing phonetic contrasts. The ultrasound imaging results reveal that Putonghua onset /r/ is articulated with either a tip-up retroflex or a tip-down bunched tongue posture, specifying both coronal and dorsal gestures. Compared to /ʂ, tʂ^h, tʂ/, the syllable-initial /r/ is produced with a greater degree of tip-up retroflexion and more pronounced tongue inflections, supported by vertical tongue displacement and discrete Fourier transform measurements. Acoustically, Putonghua /r/ is most often produced without frication and is characterized by low F3, F3F2 distance and zero crossing rates. The results find that even the fricated /r/ variant remains substantially distinct from sibilants both in tongue gestures and acoustic properties. The study argues that this phoneme should be classified as a retroflex approximant, transcribed as [ɻ], rather than a fricative [ʐ]. The results contribute substantial evidence to the limited articulatory corpus and enhance the understanding of the Putonghua rhotic's articulatory-acoustic correspondence, highlighting the importance of contextualizing phonetic variability within the phonology of the language.

Research into iconicity, systematicity, and sound-symbolism has revealed that the connection between linguistic form and meaning is not completely arbitrary. In the present study, native Czech speakers, unfamiliar with Hindi, were presented with a task in which they had to match Hindi words with their corresponding Czech translations. The words were randomly selected from a Hindi corpus. Despite the considerable linguistic gap between the two languages, the analysis showed that the Czech participants were able to accurately discern the meanings of approximately 60% of the Hindi word pairs, surpassing the 50% success rate that would be expected by random guessing alone. This experiment was subsequently replicated using Turkish, Japanese, and Latvian words, demonstrating the robustness of this phenomenon across different languages. In the case of a closer language like Latvian, the success rate reached 80%. However, even a distant language such as Japanese reached the 60% success level. Furthermore, the study explored potential factors influencing intelligibility. Data collected from a total of 1,128 participants found that the phonological similarity of Czech words and their translation, word length alignment, presence of cognates, and the way the trials were presented had a significant effect on the success rate of guessing the correct translation across all four languages. In addition, language-specific effects were identified.

We motivate a possible relationship between the psychological concept of mental boundaries and the linguistic phenomenon of phonetic accommodation, proposing that thinner boundaries may indicate a greater disposition to phonetically adapt to an interlocutor. To enable research on this relationship with German speakers, we translated the English short version of the Boundary Questionnaire (BQ-Sh), an established instrument for measuring the strength of mental boundaries, and demonstrated that the resulting German adaptation (BQ-Sh-G) can be used equivalently to the BQ-Sh. As the Big Five personality traits have previously been considered in research on both mental boundaries and phonetic accommodation, we explored the relationship between the BQ-Sh-G and the NEO-Five Factor Inventory. Consistent with previous literature, the BQ-Sh-G score correlated positively with Neuroticism and Openness, as well as negatively with Conscientiousness. We collected BQ-Sh-G scores from participants of an experiment on phonetic accommodation in a human-computer interaction context, specifically investigating the realization of the word ending 〈-ig〉 and the intonation of wh-questions in German. The analysis revealed a tendency for thicker mental boundaries to correspond with more convergence to 〈-ig〉 variants. Taking into account the results of previous work exploring the influence of the Big Five on the same data, we conclude that speakers may accommodate to different types of phonetic features depending on different personality traits. We encourage future work to investigate this further, while also exploring the predictive potential of the boundary construct with respect to a general disposition to phonetic accommodation, that is, examining a large number of phonetic features simultaneously.

Clear speech is a speaking style adopted by talkers who perceive a barrier to effective communication. Clear speech has been reported to have acoustic characteristics that are similar to those of speech perceived as feminine (e.g., expanded vowel space, longer vowel duration, and increased fundamental frequency compared with conversational speech). The present study therefore explored whether clear speech is indeed perceived as more feminine than conversational speech by naïve listeners. Clear and conversational sentences produced by 20 male and 21 female talkers were presented to 17 young adults with normal hearing, who used a visual analog scale with "masculine" and "feminine" endpoints to rate the talkers' gender. Results showed that clear speech was rated significantly more feminine than conversational speech for male talkers but not female talkers (β = -4.273, t = -7.407, p < .001). Perceived femininity was significantly correlated with median fundamental frequency for female (r = .55, p < .001) and male talkers (r = .54, p < .001) and with vowel space perimeter for male talkers (r = .49, p < .001). Perceived femininity was more weakly correlated with fundamental frequency interquartile range (r = .24, p < .001) and speaking rate (r = -.16, p < .001). These results suggest that adopting a clear speaking style may increase perceived femininity. Although using clear speech alone may not suffice for a talker to be perceived as female, it could be used as one of many tools to help talkers achieve more "feminine" speech.

This short report describes a longitudinal examination of the acquisition of English-aspirated stops by an initial cohort of 24 adult Slavic-language (Russian, Ukrainian, and Croatian) speakers. All had arrived in Canada with low oral English proficiency, and all were enrolled in the same language instruction program at the outset. Initial bilabial stops in CVCs were recorded at eight testing times: six during the first year of the study, again at year 7, and finally at year 10. Intelligibility was evaluated through a blind listening assessment of the stop productions from the first seven testing times. Voice onset times (VOT) were measured for /p/ from all eight times. Mean /p/ intelligibility improved-mainly during a proposed Window of Maximal Opportunity for L2 speech acquisition-but remained below 100%, even after 7 years. For some speakers, early /p/ productions were minimally aspirated, with VOT increasing over time but remaining intermediate between L1 English and L1 Slavic-Language values at 10 years. However, inter-speaker variability was dramatic, with some speakers showing full intelligibility throughout the study and others showing many unintelligible productions at all times. Individual learning trajectories tended to be non-linear and often non-cumulative. Overall, these findings point to a developmental process that varies considerably from one learner to another. It also demonstrates the serious drawbacks of relying on group means to characterize the process of L2 segmental learning.

This study investigated how input modes (reading vs. listening) and learners' perceptual learning style (visual vs. auditory) affected the incidental learning of collocations. A total of 182 college students were first assigned to either a visual or auditory group based on their performance on a perceptual learning style questionnaire. Each style group was subsequently subdivided into three groups who were exposed to a series of texts containing unfamiliar collocation items under one of the input conditions: written input, aural input, or no input. Results of the study indicated that both written and aural input led to gains in collocational knowledge, and aural input was more effective than written input. Furthermore, the study provided empirical evidence that there was a moderating role of perceptual learning style on incidental collocation learning. The auditory learners under aural input showed the highest rate of collocation learning among all treatment subgroups.

Researchers investigating a broad array of questions in spoken language prosody routinely base their arguments on measurements taken from the F0 contours of representative speech samples. These analyses, however, frequently involve abstracting F0 contours away from the segmental strings that bear them, potentially overlooking in the process the role played by segmental qualities such as sonority or periodicity in the realization of F0 patterns by speakers and their interpretation by listeners. This paper reports the results of two experiments investigating how perception of F0 contours is affected by the segmental string over which those contours are realized. The first focuses on gaps in F0 contours created by voiceless obstruents such as stops and fricatives, while the second investigates F0 intervals spanning lower-sonority voiced segments, such as nasals and voiced fricatives. While these two scenarios might at first seem unrelated, we argue that listeners treat both with a single mechanism in perception, namely, by reducing (potentially to zero) the amount of weight accorded to those portions of the contour for determination of the speaker's intended F0 scaling level. We present an account of both effects within a unified model of F0 scaling perception called TCoG-F, with discussion of its implications for phonetic and phonological intonation research going forward.

In English, the pronunciation of a vowel digraph can vary; for example, ea is pronounced /ɛ/ in bread but /i/ in beach and /eɪ/ in break. We investigated participant-level effects on the pronunciation of ambiguous vowel digraphs in nonwords (e.g., yeath) using standardized test measures of six reading-related skills in 80 young adults. We employed both an established written task and set of nonword stimuli and a spoken version of the task with the same stimuli. We largely replicated the previously reported pattern of preferred nonword pronunciations in both the written and spoken versions of the task. Generalized linear mixed-effects model analyses revealed that individual differences in phonological memory, spelling knowledge, and word reading efficiency contributed to pronunciation choice beyond item-level effects. Overall, taken together with the results of item-level analyses, our findings are consistent with models and theories in which specific reading-related skills, intralexical context, and interlexical pronunciation knowledge influence ambiguous vowel digraph pronunciation in nonword reading in fluently reading young adults.

This study examined the second language (L2) speech development of a group of Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) college-level learners (N = 83) and the association between their aptitude, anxiety, and L2 speech development. The performance of the participants' L2 speech, including speech comprehensibility and accentedness, was evaluated using a sentence reading task and a pair of picture description tasks (pre- and post-test). In addition, students completed the LLAMA tests (language learning and aptitude measurement in adults) and the Second Language Speaking Anxiety Scale (SLSAS). The t-test revealed that after one semester of English speaking and pronunciation instruction, the EFL students in the study demonstrated significant gains in their L2 speech performance in terms of accentedness and comprehensibility in both controlled and impromptu tasks. Regression analyses revealed that phonemic coding ability positively predicted gains in comprehensibility but negatively predicted gains in accentedness during sentence reading. In addition, associative memory was positively associated with comprehensibility gains in the picture description task. Anxiety appeared to be a strong predictor of participants' gains in speech comprehensibility and accentedness during the picture description task.