Der philologischen Ausspracheschulung liegen wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse aus dem Bereich der Pho-nologie und der Phonetik zugrunde, die dann noch in der sog. Phonodidaktik herausgearbeitet werden. ...Nicht selten sind aber phonologische Vorgehensweisen in der Fremdsprachendidaktik kaum anwendbar. Als Paradebeispiel gilt in diesem Zusammenhang die bekannte Theorie der distinktiven Merkmale. Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden Prinzipien formuliert, die die Effektivität einer fremdsprachendidaktischen Phonetik optimieren. The philological pronunciation training is based on scientific knowledge from the field of phonology and phonetics, which are then worked out in the so-called phonodidactics. However, it is not uncommon for phonological approaches to be hardly applicable in foreign language didactics. In this context, the well-known theory of distinctive features is a prime example. In this article, principles are formulated that optimize the effectiveness of foreign language didactic phonetics.
Research on the early lexical-semantic system has described how toddlers organize word representations based on semantic and phonological features. This study is a longitudinal investigation of the ...development of this organization during infancy. Middle-high socioeconomic status Mexican toddlers (n = 28, 15 female) were presented with a preferential looking task using an eye-tracker at 18, 21, and 24 months of age, manipulating semantic and phonological lexical links. The experimental task consisted of presenting an auditory label, which was phonologically or semantically related or unrelated, with a displayed target image. Mean proportion of target looking, time-course of fixations, pupillometry, and vocabulary network analysis were used to describe the properties of priming effects. The results showed that phonological priming developed earlier than semantic priming, and that they were produced by behavioral interference. In addition, pupil dilation showed differential use of cognitive effort in critical developmental periods. Finally, the density of vocabulary networks correlated with semantic effects, and vocabulary size and local network features with phonological effects. These findings extend our understanding of the development of the lexical-semantic system during infancy.
To what extent do complex phonological patterns require the postulation of universal mechanisms specific to language? In this volume, we explore the Emergent Hypothesis, that the innate ...language-specific faculty driving the shape of adult grammars is minimal, with grammar development relying instead on cognitive capacities of a general nature. Generalisations about sounds, and about the way sounds are organised into meaningful units, are constructed in a bottom-up fashion: As such, phonology is emergent. We present arguments for considering the Emergent Hypothesis, both conceptually and by working through an extended example in order to demonstrate how an adult grammar might emerge from the input encountered by a learner. Developing a concrete, data-driven approach, we argue that the conventional, abstract notion of unique underlying representations is unmotivated; such underlying representations would require some innate principle to ensure their postulation by a learner. We review the history of the concept and show that such postulated forms result in undesirable phonological consequences. We work through several case studies to illustrate how various types of phonological patterns might be accounted for in the proposed framework. The case studies illustrate patterns of allophony, of productive and unproductive patterns of alternation, and cases where the surface manifestation of a feature does not seem to correspond to its morphological source. We consider cases where a phonetic distinction that is binary seems to manifest itself in a way that is morphologically ternary, and we consider cases where underlying representations of considerable abstractness have been posited in previous frameworks. We also consider cases of opacity, where observed phonological properties do not neatly map onto the phonological generalisations governing patterns of alternation.
Is speech in the mouth or in the brain? Do we hear with our ears or with our minds? How different can phonology and phonetics be? How similar? Where exactly does the border between them lie?.
Previous studies indicate that the effectiveness of reading and spelling predictors in transparent orthographies is affected by the onset of literacy training at school entry. In this longitudinal ...study with 65 German speaking children, the effects of literacy predictors on reading and spelling abilities were compared before and after school entry. Phonological awareness, letter sound knowledge, and rapid naming were assessed before and after school entry. In addition, reading and spelling abilities were assessed at the end of first grade. Path model analyses showed that letter sound knowledge before school entry predicted reading and spelling at the end of first grade, while rapid naming after school entry predicted reading but not spelling abilities. This study shows that the onset of schooling influences the predictability of early literacy predictors and indicates that with the onset of formal literacy education, predictors representing automaticity in serial processing increase in significance for reading abilities.
Tone and Intonation are two types of pitch variation, which are used by speakers of all languages in order to give shape to utterances. More specifically, tone encodes segments and morphemes, and ...intonation gives utterances a further discoursal meaning that is independent of the meanings of the words themselves. In this comprehensive survey, Carlos Gussenhoven provides an overview of research into tone and intonation, discussing why speakers vary their pitch, what pitch variations mean, and how they are integrated into our grammars. He also explains why intonation in part appears to be universally understood, while at other times it is language-specific and can lead to misunderstandings. After eight chapters on general topics relating to pitch modulation, the book's central arguments are illustrated with comprehensive phonological descriptions - partly in Optimality Theory - of the tonal and intonational systems of six languages, including Japanese, Dutch, and English.
As they develop into mature speakers of their native language, infants must not only learn words but also the sounds that make up those words. To do so, they must strike a balance between accepting ...speaker-dependent variation (e.g., mood, voice, accent) but appropriately rejecting variation when it (potentially) changes a word's meaning (e.g., cat vs. hat). This meta-analysis focuses on studies investigating infants' ability to detect mispronunciations in familiar words, or mispronunciation sensitivity. Our goal was to evaluate the development of infants' phonological representations for familiar words as well as explore the role of experimental manipulations related to theoretical questions and of analysis choices. The results show that although infants are sensitive to mispronunciations, they still accept these altered forms as labels for target objects. Interestingly, this ability is not modulated by age or vocabulary size, suggesting that a mature understanding of native language phonology may be present in infants from an early age, possibly before the vocabulary explosion. These results support several theoretical assumptions made in the literature, such as sensitivity to mispronunciation size and position of the mispronunciation. We also shed light on the impact of data analysis choices that may lead to different conclusions regarding the development of infants' mispronunciation sensitivity. Our article concludes with recommendations for improved practice in testing infants' word and sentence processing online.
The relation between nonword repetition and vocabulary has been the focus of a theoretical controversy for several decades. The point of contention is whether the ability underlying nonword ...repetition drives vocabulary growth or vice versa. The present study examines longitudinal interrelations between nonword repetition and vocabulary from age 3 to 5 with random intercept cross-lagged panel models (RI-CLPMs). RI-CLPMs have the advantage of separating within-child dynamic processes from more stable differences between children, including time-stable unmeasured confounders. For n = 260 monolingual German-speaking children assessed at three time points with a lag of eleven months, RI-CLPM and, for comparison purposes, "classical" cross-lagged panel models (CLPMs) were estimated. The ill-fitting CLPMs in which cross-lagged effects combine within-child processes and stable differences between children yielded evidence consistent with reciprocal effects between nonword repetition and vocabulary (without covariates) or from nonword repetition to vocabulary (with covariates). Adding a random intercept markedly improved model fit. All within-child cross-lagged effects in the RI-CLPM were nonsignificant. Thus, the results provided no evidence consistent with within-child processes such as nonword repetition affecting vocabulary or vice versa for preschool-age children. Instead, results are more consistent with, for example, third variable explanations, within-child processes fading out by age 3 or occurring on a time frame that is not captured with a lag of approximately 1 year.
Animacy is an important semantic assignment principle in both gender and numeral classifier systems. Linguistic research has shown that animacy is not a simple binary feature but represents a ...fine-grained taxonomy of different animacy levels. We used the classifier system of Mandarin Chinese, with classifiers varying in semantic constraint, to assess whether the referents' degree of animacy influences the processing of classifier-noun pairs. ERP results show an effect of agreement mismatch only when the general classifier 个 gè is paired with nouns referring to higher animals (chimpanzee, lion). For these pairs, the sortal classifier 只 zhī has to be chosen. No such effect was observed for nouns that refer to intermediate-level and lower animals (octopus, earthworm), indicating that 个 gè does not constitute an agreement mismatch here. We also observed significant ERP effects indicating that speakers of Mandarin Chinese process the general classifier and the specific sortal classifiers differently.
According to ideomotor accounts, actions are cognitively represented by their sensory effects. The response-effect compatibility (R-E compatibility) paradigm investigates this notion by presenting ...predictable effect stimuli that are produced by the response (“response effects”). The R-E compatibility effect denotes the finding of better performance in R-E compatible conditions than in incompatible conditions, suggesting that anticipation of the effect stimulus primes the response. Most previous studies employed perceptual R-E overlap manipulations (e.g., spatial, temporal or phonological overlap of response and predictable response effect). In the present study, we examined verbal-semantic response-effect overlap. In Experiment 1, we used category words as vocal responses and semantically associated vs. non-associated exemplar words for auditory response effects (or exemplar words as responses and category words as effects, respectively) to manipulate verbal-semantic R-E overlap without perceptual-phonological similarity. In Experiments 2A and 2B, we used the response word also as an “identical” auditory effect word (i.e., both verbal-semantic and perceptual-phonological R-E overlap). An R-E compatibility effect was observed only when there was both verbal-semantic and perceptual-phonological R-E overlap. These data suggest that anticipation of perceptual response features may be critical in the R-E compatibility paradigm, whereas the role of verbal-semantic processes in response-effect anticipation still needs to be established more firmly. We discuss how perceptual and conceptual processes can interact in ideomotor control of action.
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