This study longitudinally examined the effects of cognitive and sociopsychological individual differences (aptitude, motivation, personality) and the quantity and quality of second language (L2) ...experience on L2 speech gains in naturalistic settings. We elicited L2 spontaneous speech from 50 Chinese learners of English at the beginning and the end of their first 4 months of study abroad. Then, we linked the participants’ gains in comprehensibility (ease of understanding) and accentedness (linguistic nativelikeness) to their individual difference and experience profiles. The participants’ gains in comprehensibility were associated mainly with the amount of their interaction with fluent English speakers during immersion and secondarily with certain cognitive (grammatical inferencing) and sociopsychological (extraversion) individual differences. Furthermore, the amount of interactive L2 use mediated the effect of sociopsychological individual differences (extraversion and potentially ideal L2 self). In contrast, gains in accentedness tended to be less subject to experience effects but could be affected by certain pronunciation‐related cognitive individual differences (phonemic coding).
A one‐page Accessible Summary of this article in non‐technical language is freely available in the Supporting Information online and at https://oasis‐database.org
This study investigates the conditioning effects of neighbouring consonants on the realisation of the phonemes /k/ and /dʒ/ in Emirati Arabic (EA), which are optionally realised as tʃ and j, ...respectively. Based on previous accounts of EA and other Gulf Arabic (GA) dialects, we set out to test the prediction that proximity of other, phonetically similar coronal (COR) obstruents COR, −son, −cont and coronal postalveolar fricatives COR, −ant inhibit the surface realisation of the affricate variants of these phonemes. We examine elicitation data from twenty young female native speakers of EA, using stimuli with the target segment in the presence of a similar neighbour, as compared to words with the neighbour at a longer distance or with another coronal consonant. The results point to an asymmetry in the behaviour of the voiced and voiceless targets, such that the predicted inhibitory effect is confirmed for the voiced, but not the voiceless target. We argue that this finding, coupled with a consideration of the intra-participant and lexical trends in the data, is compatible with an approach that treats the two processes as being at different stages of development, where the k∼tʃ alternation is a completed phonemic change, while the dʒ∼j alternation is a synchronic phonological process.
The role of phonology in bilingual word recognition has focused on a phonemic level especially in the recognition of cognates. In this study, we examined differences in metrical structure to test ...whether first language (L1) metrical structure influences the processing of second language (L2) words. For that, we used words of Romance origin (e.g.,
,
), which both German and English have borrowed extensively. However, the existing metrical patterns are not identical nor are the borrowed vocabularies the same. Rather, those identical words differ systematically in their foot structure. We conducted a cross-modal form fragment priming EEG experiment (auditory–visual) with German native speakers who were highly proficient in English. Both behavioral and ERP results showed an effect of the native phonology and the loan status, that is, whether the loan exists only in the speaker's L2 or is shared across languages. Priming effects (RTs) were largest for nonshared loanwords indicating some interference from German (L1). This was also evident in a reduced N400 but only if the metrical structure aligned with German patterns for Germanic words, that is, two light syllables as in
. If the words exist in both languages, metrical structure also mattered shown by the modulation of different ERP components across conditions. Overall, our study indicates that metrical phonology plays a role in loanword processing. Our data show that the more similar a word is in terms of its metrical phonology across L1 and L2, the more effortful the processing of a word within a priming paradigm indicating interference from the L1 phonology.
Verbal fluency is a measure of cognitive flexibility and word search strategies that is widely used to characterize impaired cognitive function. Despite the wealth of research on identifying and ...characterizing distinct aspects of verbal fluency, the anatomic and functional substrates of retrieval-related search and post-retrieval control processes still have not been fully elucidated.
Twenty-one native English-speaking, healthy, right-handed, adult volunteers (mean age = 31 years; range = 21-45 years; 9 F) took part in a block-design functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) study of free recall, covert word generation tasks when guided by phonemic (P), semantic-category (C), and context-based fill-in-the-blank sentence completion (S) cues. General linear model (GLM), Independent Component Analysis (ICA), and psychophysiological interaction (PPI) were used to further characterize the neural substrate of verbal fluency as a function of retrieval cue type.
Common localized activations across P, C, and S tasks occurred in the bilateral superior and left inferior frontal gyrus, left anterior cingulate cortex, bilateral supplementary motor area (SMA), and left insula. Differential task activations were centered in the occipital, temporal and parietal regions as well as the thalamus and cerebellum. The context-based fluency task, i.e., the S task, elicited higher differential brain activity in a lateralized frontal-temporal network typically engaged in complex language processing. P and C tasks elicited activation in limited pathways mainly within the left frontal regions. ICA and PPI results of the S task suggested that brain regions distributed across both hemispheres, extending beyond classical language areas, are recruited for lexical-semantic access and retrieval during sentence completion.
Study results support the hypothesis of overlapping, as well as distinct, neural networks for covert word generation when guided by different linguistic cues. The increased demand on word retrieval is met by the concurrent recruitment of classical as well as non-classical language-related brain regions forming a large cognitive neural network. The retrieval-related search and post-retrieval control processes that subserve verbal fluency, therefore, reverberates across distinct functional networks as determined by respective task demands.
ポケモンの名付けにおいてロシア語話者は進化をどのように表現するか―対立的硬口蓋化と名前の長さの効果 Kumagai, Gakuji; Watabe, Naoya; Kawahara, Shigeto
Onsei Kenkyū = Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan,
2023/10/31, Letnik:
27, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Kumagai & Kawahara (2022) found that Russian speakers tend to judge names with Ca to be more suitable for larger, post-evolution Pokémon characters than names with Ci. This result raised a new ...question regarding whether it is the vowel quality difference or consonant palatalization caused by i that affected the responses. The current experiment compared three conditions (Ca vs. Cja vs. Ci) and found that names with Cja were judged to be least appropriate for post-evolution characters, suggesting the important role of phonemic palatalization. The current experiment additionally showed that Russian speakers tend to judge longer names to be more suitable for post-evolution characters.
Purpose: Reduced use of visible articulatory information on a speaker's face has been implicated as a possible contributor to language deficits in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We employ an ...audiovisual (AV) phonemic restoration paradigm to measure behavioral performance (button press) and event-related potentials (ERPs) of visual speech perception in children with ASD and their neurotypical peers to assess potential neural substrates that contribute to group differences. Method: Two sets of speech stimuli, /ba/-"/a/" ("/a/" was created from the /ba/ token by a reducing the initial consonant) and /ba/-/pa/, were presented within an auditory oddball paradigm to children aged 6-13 years with ASD (n = 17) and typical development (TD; n = 33) within two conditions. The AV condition contained a fully visible speaking face; the pixelated (PX) condition included a face, but the mouth and jaw were PX, removing all articulatory information. When articulatory features were present for the /ba/-"/a/" contrast, it was expected that the influence of the visual articulators would facilitate a phonemic restoration effect in which "/a/" would be perceived as /ba/. ERPs were recorded during the experiment while children were required to press a button for the deviant sound for both sets of speech contrasts within both conditions. Results: Button press data revealed that TD children were more accurate in discriminating between /ba/-"/a/" and /ba/-/pa/ contrasts in the PX condition relative to the ASD group. ERPs in response to the /ba/-/pa/ contrast within both AV and PX conditions differed between children with ASD and TD children (earlier P300 responses for children with ASD). Conclusion: Children with ASD differ in the underlying neural mechanisms responsible for speech processing compared with TD peers within an AV context.
Why do swear words sound the way they do? Swear words are often thought to have sounds that render them especially fit for purpose, facilitating the expression of emotion and attitude. To date, ...however, there has been no systematic cross-linguistic investigation of phonetic patterns in profanity. In an initial, pilot study we explored statistical regularities in the sounds of swear words across a range of typologically distant languages. The best candidate for a cross-linguistic phonemic pattern in profanity was the absence of approximants (sonorous sounds like
l
,
r
,
w
and
y
). In Study 1, native speakers of various languages (Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, French, German, Spanish;
N
= 215) judged foreign words less likely to be swear words if they contained an approximant. In Study 2 we found that sanitized versions of English swear words – like
darn
instead of
damn
– contain significantly more approximants than the original swear words. Our findings reveal that not all sounds are equally suitable for profanity, and demonstrate that sound symbolism – wherein certain sounds are intrinsically associated with certain meanings – is more pervasive than has previously been appreciated, extending beyond denoting single concepts to serving pragmatic functions.
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