Language and Speech最新文献

English listeners often struggle to perceive tones, but some are easier than others. This study examined these phenomena grounded in the feature weighing perspective (FWP) and the Perceptual Assimilation Model for Suprasegmentals (PAM-S). Forty-seven English and Cantonese listeners completed 4,212 trials of Cantonese tone discrimination and sequence recall tasks. The English listeners showed asymmetrical perceptual patterns of discrimination but not sequence recall. Specifically, these English listeners discriminated T1-T5, T3-T5, and T4-T5 more accurately than T1-T4, T3-T4, and T1-T3. However, they recalled the contour tone and level tone sequences with similar accuracies. Results of the discrimination task aligned with the predictions of PAM-S but not FWP. However, results of the sequence recall task did not support PAM-S. Together, these results suggest that PAM-S only applies to simple discrimination, not abstract phonological processing with a high memory load.

Individual talkers vary in their relative use of different cues to signal phonological contrast. Previous work provides limited and conflicting data on whether such variation is modulated by cue trading or individual differences in speech style. This paper examines differential cue weighting patterns in Mandarin sibilants as a test case for these hypotheses. Standardized Mandarin exhibits a three-way place contrast between retroflex, alveopalatal, and alveolar sibilants with individual differences in relative weighting of spectral center of gravity (COG) and the second formant of the following vowel (F2). In results from a speech production task, cue weights of COG and F2 are inversely correlated across speakers, demonstrating a trade-off relationship in cue use. These findings are consistent with a cue trading account of individual differences in contrast signaling.

In many English varieties, /l/ is produced differently in onsets and codas. Compared with "light" syllable-initial realizations, "dark" syllable-final variants involve reduced tongue tip-alveolar ridge contact and a raised/retracted tongue dorsum. We investigate whether native French and Spanish speakers whose L1 lacks such positionally conditioned variation can acquire English-/l/ allophony, testing the hypotheses that (1) the allophonic pattern will be acquired by both groups but (2) learners will differ from native speakers in their phonetic implementation, particularly in codas; and (3) French-speaking learners will outperform their Spanish-speaking counterparts. The production of syllable-initial and -final /l/ (singletons and clusters) in words read in isolation and a carrier sentence by 4 French- and 3 Spanish-speaking learners as well as three native English speakers was analyzed via electropalatography and acoustic analysis. While some learners produced distinct onset and coda variants and all learners had moved away to some extent from their L1 production, they differed from the native speakers in certain ways. Moreover, between- and within-group variability was observed including greater target-like anterior and posterior contact reduction in codas in the L1 French versus L1 Spanish group and generally higher F2 values in both learner groups compared with their native speaker peers. A comparison of the learners' L1 and L2 production revealed L1-based patterns of positional reduction of the tongue tip and dorsum gestures. We conclude by addressing the contributions of EPG to our understanding of L2 speech and highlight avenues for future research including the study of both linguistic and speaker variables.

This work presents the results of an auditory language of origin identification experiment. Disyllabic and trisyllabic logatomes were recorded by speakers of Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, and Russian, and presented to L1 speakers of the abovementioned Slavic languages. The goals of the test were to verify the ability of lay listeners to recognize the linguistic origin of speakers, based on spoken samples with limited segmental and suprasegmental information, and to correlate the signal features with the subjects' performance. It was found that position of word stress is not an important predictor in language recognition. However, inherent vowel characteristics such as duration and vowel space computed by the means of Pillai scores correlate with subjects' performance. Both the linguistic profile and the familiarity with closely related languages also appear to be relevant predictors of listeners' performance. Finally, the information-theoretic notion of surprisal applied on regular cross-linguistic sound correspondences was correlated with recognition scores; though, the correlations did not reach the threshold of statistical significance. We conclude that auditory identification of linguistic origin by lay persons, native speakers of closely related languages, is possible even when exposed to limited segmental information, which can serve as a cue in the identification of linguistic origin.

This study uses non-native perception data to examine the relationship between perceived phonetic similarity of segments and their phonological patterning. Segments that are phonetically similar to one another are anticipated to pattern together phonologically, and segments that share articulatory or acoustic properties are also expected to be perceived as similar. What is not yet clear is whether segments that pattern together phonologically are perceived as similar. This study addresses this question by examining how L1 English listeners and L1 Guébie listeners perceive non-native implosive consonants compared with plosives and sonorants. English does not have contrastive implosives, whereas Guébie has a bilabial implosive. The bilabial implosive phonologically patterns with sonorants in Guébie, to the exclusion of obstruents. Two perception experiments show English listeners make more perceptual categorization errors between implosives and voiced plosives than Guébie listeners do, but both listener groups are more likely to classify implosives as similar to voiced plosives than sonorants. The results also show that Guébie listeners are better at categorizing non-native implosive consonants (i.e., alveolar implosives) than English listeners, showing that listeners are able to extend features or gestures from their L1 to non-native implosive consonants. The results of these experiments suggest a cross-linguistic perceptual similarity hierarchy of implosives compared with other segments that are not affected by L1 phonological patterning.

A recurring finding of research on the L2 acquisition of coda obstruent voicing is that, in terms of the phonetic parameters that serve to realize the voicing contrast, learners are overwhelmingly more accurate with duration than the voicing of the obstruent itself. The current work expands our understanding of this asymmetry in two ways. First, as previous studies have focused almost exclusively on learners of English, we investigate here whether L2 learners' superior production of duration is also found among learners of other target languages via a study of Mandarin-speaking learners' production of French stop and fricative codas. Results from 18 Mandarin-speaking learners of French, primarily of beginner and intermediate proficiency who completed a sentence reading task, parallel those of previous studies with greater accuracy observed for vowel duration than the laryngeal voicing of the obstruent. Second, we explore potential sources of this asymmetry, in particular, the roles of L1 experience as well as of universal factors, namely, the relative perceptual salience of duration versus voicing, and the articulatory difficulty of voicing obstruents.

Heritage speakers contend with at least two languages: the less dominant first language (L1), that is, the heritage language, and the more dominant second language (L2). In some cases, their L1 and L2 bear striking phonological differences. In the current study, we investigate Toronto-born Cantonese heritage speakers and their maintenance of Cantonese lexical tone, a linguistic feature that is absent from English, the more dominant L2. Across two experiments, Cantonese heritage speakers were tested on their phonetic/phonological and lexical encoding of tone in Cantonese. Experiment 1 was an AX discrimination task with varying inter-stimulus intervals (ISIs), which revealed that heritage speakers discriminated tone pairs with disparate pitch contours better than those with shared pitch contours. Experiment 2 was a medium-term repetition priming experiment, designed to extend the findings of Experiment 1 by examining tone representations at the lexical level. We observed a positive correlation between English dominance and priming in tone minimal pairs that shared contours. Thus, while increased English dominance does not affect heritage speakers' phonological-level representations, tasks that require lexical access suggest that heritage Cantonese speakers may not robustly and fully distinctively encode Cantonese tone in lexical memory.

The current study investigated the merger-in-progress between word-initial nasal and lateral consonants in Fuzhou Min, examining the linguistic and social factors that modulate the merger. First, the acoustic cues to the l-n distinction were examined in Fuzhou Min. Acoustic analyses suggested a collapse of phonemic contrast between prescriptive L and N (phonemes in the unmerged system), with none of the six acoustic cues showing any difference across L and N. Linear discriminant analysis did identify acoustically distinct [l] and [n] tokens, although the mapping onto the phonetic space of prescriptive L and N substantially overlapped. Speakers of all ages and both genders tended to produce [l], and low vowels correlated with more [n]-like classification. In perception, AX discrimination data showed Fuzhou Min listeners confused both prescriptive L and N and acoustic [l] and [n]. Greater sensitivity to the acoustic differences occurred in the context of low vowels and a nasal coda, supported by the acoustics of the stimuli, and younger listeners were more sensitive to the difference between [l] and [n] than older listeners. In two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) identification, Fuzhou Min listeners also identified the merged form as L more frequently than N, with more L responses elicited in the context of low vowels and in the absence of nasal codas. Overall, although Fuzhou Min speakers produced some acoustically distinct [l] and [n] tokens in the context of a sound merger, these productions did not map onto prescriptive L and N. In addition, younger listeners were more sensitive to the acoustic distinction than older listeners, suggesting an emerging acoustic contrast possibly arising due to contact with Mandarin.

Prosodic cues help to disambiguate incoming information in spoken language perception. In structurally ambiguous coordinate utterances, such as three-name sequences, the intended grouping is marked by three prosodic cues: F0-range, final lengthening, and pause. To indicate that the first two names are grouped together, speakers typically weaken the durational and tonal cues on the first name whereas they are strengthened on the second name, compared with a structure without internal grouping. The current study uses a gating paradigm to test whether listeners can decide about the internal grouping of a coordinate structure by already exploiting prosodic information on the first name. One hundred ninety-two stimuli were cut into seven parts (gates) and presented to naive participants (n = 45) successively (gate by gate) with increasing length of the utterance and amount of prosodic information. In a two-alternative forced-choice decision task, accuracy was above chance level after the second name. However, more than half of the participants could already reliably detect grouping patterns after the first name. These interindividual differences point toward the existence of different subgroups with diverging prosodic parsing strategies. Furthermore, listeners were sensitive to speaker-specific prosodic patterns. Depending on speaker-specific characteristics and individual parsing capacities, it seems possible-at least for a subgroup of listeners-to make predictions about the underlying grouping structure of coordinated name sequences based on early prosodic cues.

When a sentence is produced with contrastive prosodic prominence, the word that carries the prominence becomes more salient, and alternatives to that word are usually implied. In processing, this implies that focused words and their alternatives should be more strongly activated. Previous research on focus processing has primarily been confined to Germanic languages. The current paper reports on two experiments investigating the role of prosodic prominence in immediate (Experiment 1) and long-term processing (Experiment 2) of focused words and focus alternatives in Mandarin. Prosodic prominence was effective in activating focused words and their alternatives. In the memory task, this facilitation effect was only found toward the beginning of the experiment. We attribute this difference to task-related adaptive use of prosodic prominence in utterance processing. This research sheds light on whether, when, and how listeners use prosodic prominence to identify important information and to evoke alternatives during sentence comprehension.