Discourse comprehension in L2: Making sense of what is not explicitly said.

PubMed

Foucart, Alice; Romero-Rivas, Carlos; Gort, Bernharda Lottie; Costa, Albert

2016-12-01

Using ERPs, we tested whether L2 speakers can integrate multiple sources of information (e.g., semantic, pragmatic information) during discourse comprehension. We presented native speakers and L2 speakers with three-sentence scenarios in which the final sentence was highly causally related, intermediately related, or causally unrelated to its context; its interpretation therefore required simple or complex inferences. Native speakers revealed a gradual N400-like effect, larger in the causally unrelated condition than in the highly related condition, and falling in-between in the intermediately related condition, replicating previous results. In the crucial intermediately related condition, L2 speakers behaved like native speakers, however, showing extra processing in a later time-window. Overall, the results show that, when reading, L2 speakers are able to process information from the local context and prior information (e.g., world knowledge) to build global coherence, suggesting that they process different sources of information to make inferences online during discourse comprehension, like native speakers. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Negative Transfer Effects on L2 Word Order Processing

PubMed Central

Erdocia, Kepa; Laka, Itziar

2018-01-01

Does first language (L1) word order affect the processing of non-canonical but grammatical syntactic structures in second language (L2) comprehension? In the present study, we test whether L1-Spanish speakers of L2-Basque process subject–verb–object (SVO) and object–verb–subject (OVS) non-canonical word order sentences of Basque in the same way as Basque native speakers. Crucially, while OVS orders are non-canonical in both Spanish and Basque, SVO is non-canonical in Basque but is the canonical word order in Spanish. Our electrophysiological results showed that the characteristics of L1 affect the processing of the L2 even at highly proficient and early-acquired bilingual populations. Specifically, in the non-native group, we observed a left anterior negativity-like component when comparing S and O at sentence initial position and a P600 when comparing those elements at sentence final position. Those results are similar of those reported by Casado et al. (2005) for native speakers of Spanish indicating that L2-Basque speakers rely in their L1-Spanish when processing SVO–OVS word order sentences. Our results favored the competition model (MacWhinney, 1997). PMID:29593626

Negative Transfer Effects on L2 Word Order Processing.

PubMed

Erdocia, Kepa; Laka, Itziar

2018-01-01

Does first language (L1) word order affect the processing of non-canonical but grammatical syntactic structures in second language (L2) comprehension? In the present study, we test whether L1-Spanish speakers of L2-Basque process subject-verb-object (SVO) and object-verb-subject (OVS) non-canonical word order sentences of Basque in the same way as Basque native speakers. Crucially, while OVS orders are non-canonical in both Spanish and Basque, SVO is non-canonical in Basque but is the canonical word order in Spanish. Our electrophysiological results showed that the characteristics of L1 affect the processing of the L2 even at highly proficient and early-acquired bilingual populations. Specifically, in the non-native group, we observed a left anterior negativity-like component when comparing S and O at sentence initial position and a P600 when comparing those elements at sentence final position. Those results are similar of those reported by Casado et al. (2005) for native speakers of Spanish indicating that L2-Basque speakers rely in their L1-Spanish when processing SVO-OVS word order sentences. Our results favored the competition model (MacWhinney, 1997).

The Relationship between L1 Fluency and L2 Fluency Development

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Derwing, Tracey M.; Munro, Murray J.; Thomson, Ronald I.; Rossiter, Marian J.

2009-01-01

A fundamental question in the study of second language (L2) fluency is the extent to which temporal characteristics of speakers' first language (L1) productions predict the same characteristics in the L2. A close relationship between a speaker's L1 and L2 temporal characteristics would suggest that fluency is governed by an underlying trait. This…

An Investigation of Syntactic Priming among German Speakers at Varying Proficiency Levels

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ruf, Helena T.

2011-01-01

This dissertation investigates syntactic priming in second language (L2) development among three speaker populations: (1) less proficient L2 speakers; (2) advanced L2 speakers; and (3) LI speakers. Using confederate scripting this study examines how German speakers choose certain word orders in locative constructions (e.g., "Auf dem Tisch…

L2 Word Recognition: Influence of L1 Orthography on Multi-syllabic Word Recognition.

PubMed

Hamada, Megumi

2017-10-01

L2 reading research suggests that L1 orthographic experience influences L2 word recognition. Nevertheless, the findings on multi-syllabic words in English are still limited despite the fact that a vast majority of words are multi-syllabic. The study investigated whether L1 orthography influences the recognition of multi-syllabic words, focusing on the position of an embedded word. The participants were Arabic ESL learners, Chinese ESL learners, and native speakers of English. The task was a word search task, in which the participants identified a target word embedded in a pseudoword at the initial, middle, or final position. The search accuracy and speed indicated that all groups showed a strong preference for the initial position. The accuracy data further indicated group differences. The Arabic group showed higher accuracy in the final than middle, while the Chinese group showed the opposite and the native speakers showed no difference between the two positions. The findings suggest that L2 multi-syllabic word recognition involves unique processes.

Phonetic Encoding of Coda Voicing Contrast under Different Focus Conditions in L1 vs. L2 English

PubMed Central

Choi, Jiyoun; Kim, Sahayng; Cho, Taehong

2016-01-01

This study investigated how coda voicing contrast in English would be phonetically encoded in the temporal vs. spectral dimension of the preceding vowel (in vowel duration vs. F1/F2) by Korean L2 speakers of English, and how their L2 phonetic encoding pattern would be compared to that of native English speakers. Crucially, these questions were explored by taking into account the phonetics-prosody interface, testing effects of prominence by comparing target segments in three focus conditions (phonological focus, lexical focus, and no focus). Results showed that Korean speakers utilized the temporal dimension (vowel duration) to encode coda voicing contrast, but failed to use the spectral dimension (F1/F2), reflecting their native language experience—i.e., with a more sparsely populated vowel space in Korean, they are less sensitive to small changes in the spectral dimension, and hence fine-grained spectral cues in English are not readily accessible. Results also showed that along the temporal dimension, both the L1 and L2 speakers hyperarticulated coda voicing contrast under prominence (when phonologically or lexically focused), but hypoarticulated it in the non-prominent condition. This indicates that low-level phonetic realization and high-order information structure interact in a communicatively efficient way, regardless of the speakers’ native language background. The Korean speakers, however, used the temporal phonetic space differently from the way the native speakers did, especially showing less reduction in the no focus condition. This was also attributable to their native language experience—i.e., the Korean speakers’ use of temporal dimension is constrained in a way that is not detrimental to the preservation of coda voicing contrast, given that they failed to add additional cues along the spectral dimension. The results imply that the L2 phonetic system can be more fully illuminated through an investigation of the phonetics-prosody interface in

Long-Distance Wh-Movement and Long-Distance Wh-Movement Avoidance in L2 English: Evidence from French and Bulgarian Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Slavkov, Nikolay

2015-01-01

This article investigates spoken productions of complex questions with long-distance wh-movement in the L2 English of speakers whose first language is (Canadian) French or Bulgarian. Long-distance wh-movement is of interest as it can be argued that it poses difficulty in acquisition due to its syntactic complexity and related high processing load.…

"Cool" English: Stylized Native-Speaker English in Japanese Television Shows

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Furukawa, Gavin

2015-01-01

This article analyzes stylized pronunciations of English by Japanese speakers on televised variety shows in Japan. Research on style and mocking has done much to reveal how linguistic forms are utilized in interaction as resources of identity construction that can oftentimes subvert hegemonic discourse (Chun 2004). Within this research area,…

Motion Event Similarity Judgments in One or Two Languages: An Exploration of Monolingual Speakers of English and Chinese vs. L2 Learners of English.

PubMed

Ji, Yinglin

2017-01-01

Languages differ systematically in how to encode a motion event. English characteristically expresses manner in verb root and path in verb particle; in Chinese, varied aspects of motion, such as manner, path and cause, can be simultaneously encoded in a verb compound. This study investigates whether typological differences, as such, influence how first and second language learners conceptualize motion events, as suggested by behavioral evidences. Specifically, the performance of Chinese learners of English, at three proficiencies, was compared to that of two groups of monolingual speakers in a triads matching task. The first set of analyses regarding categorisation preferences indicates that participants across groups preferred the path-matched (rather than manner-matched) screens. However, the second set of analyses regarding reaction time suggests, firstly, that English monolingual speakers reacted significantly more quickly in selecting the manner-matched scenes compared with monolingual speakers of Chinese, who tended to use an approximately equal amount of time in making manner- and path-matched decisions, a finding that can arguably be mapped onto the typological difference between the two languages. Secondly, the pattern of response latency in low-level L2 learners looked more like that of monolingual speakers of Chinese. Only at intermediate and advanced levels of acquisition did the behavioral pattern of L2 learners become target-like, thus suggesting language-specific constraints from the L1 at an early stage of acquisition. Overall, our results suggest that motion event cognition may be linked to, among other things, the linguistic structure of motion description in particular languages.

Motion Event Similarity Judgments in One or Two Languages: An Exploration of Monolingual Speakers of English and Chinese vs. L2 Learners of English

PubMed Central

Ji, Yinglin

2017-01-01

Languages differ systematically in how to encode a motion event. English characteristically expresses manner in verb root and path in verb particle; in Chinese, varied aspects of motion, such as manner, path and cause, can be simultaneously encoded in a verb compound. This study investigates whether typological differences, as such, influence how first and second language learners conceptualize motion events, as suggested by behavioral evidences. Specifically, the performance of Chinese learners of English, at three proficiencies, was compared to that of two groups of monolingual speakers in a triads matching task. The first set of analyses regarding categorisation preferences indicates that participants across groups preferred the path-matched (rather than manner-matched) screens. However, the second set of analyses regarding reaction time suggests, firstly, that English monolingual speakers reacted significantly more quickly in selecting the manner-matched scenes compared with monolingual speakers of Chinese, who tended to use an approximately equal amount of time in making manner- and path-matched decisions, a finding that can arguably be mapped onto the typological difference between the two languages. Secondly, the pattern of response latency in low-level L2 learners looked more like that of monolingual speakers of Chinese. Only at intermediate and advanced levels of acquisition did the behavioral pattern of L2 learners become target-like, thus suggesting language-specific constraints from the L1 at an early stage of acquisition. Overall, our results suggest that motion event cognition may be linked to, among other things, the linguistic structure of motion description in particular languages. PMID:28638355

Verbal Inflectional Morphology in L1 and L2 Spanish: A Frequency Effects Study Examining Storage versus Composition

PubMed Central

Bowden, Harriet Wood; Gelfand, Matthew P.; Sanz, Cristina; Ullman, Michael T.

2009-01-01

This study examines the storage vs. composition of Spanish inflected verbal forms in L1 and L2 speakers of Spanish. L2 participants were selected to have mid-to-advanced proficiency, high classroom experience, and low immersion experience, typical of medium-to-advanced foreign language learners. Participants were shown the infinitival forms of verbs from either Class I (the default class, which takes new verbs) or Classes II and III (non-default classes), and were asked to produce either first-person singular present-tense or imperfect forms, in separate tasks. In the present tense, the L1 speakers showed inflected-form frequency effects (i.e., higher frequency forms were produced faster, which is taken as a reflection of storage) for stem-changing (irregular) verb-forms from both Class I (e.g., pensar-pienso) and Classes II and III (e.g., perder-pierdo), as well as for non-stem-changing (regular) forms in Classes II/III (e.g., vender-vendo), in which the regular transformation does not appear to constitute a default. In contrast, Class I regulars (e.g., pescar-pesco), whose non-stem-changing transformation constitutes a default (e.g., it is applied to new verbs), showed no frequency effects. L2 speakers showed frequency effects for all four conditions (Classes I and II/III, regulars and irregulars). In the imperfect tense, the L1 speakers showed frequency effects for Class II/III (-ía-suffixed) but not Class I (-aba-suffixed) forms, even though both involve non-stem-change (regular) default transformations. The L2 speakers showed frequency effects for both types of forms. The pattern of results was not explained by a wide range of potentially confounding experimental and statistical factors, and does not appear to be compatible with single-mechanism models, which argue that all linguistic forms are learned and processed in associative memory. The findings are consistent with a dual-system view in which both verb class and regularity influence the storage vs

Stress-Induced Acoustic Variation in L2 and L1 Spanish Vowels.

PubMed

Romanelli, Sofía; Menegotto, Andrea; Smyth, Ron

2018-05-28

We assessed the effect of lexical stress on the duration and quality of Spanish word-final vowels /a, e, o/ produced by American English late intermediate learners of L2 Spanish, as compared to those of native L1 Argentine Spanish speakers. Participants read 54 real words ending in /a, e, o/, with either final or penultimate lexical stress, embedded in a text and a word list. We measured vowel duration and both F1 and F2 frequencies at 3 temporal points. stressed vowels were longer than unstressed vowels, in Spanish L1 and L2. L1 and L2 Spanish stressed /a/ and /e/ had higher F1 values than their unstressed counterparts. Only the L2 speakers showed evidence of rising offglides for /e/ and /o/. The L2 and L1 Spanish vowel space was compressed in the absence of stress. Lexical stress affected the vowel quality of L1 and L2 Spanish vowels. We provide an up-to-date account of the formant trajectories of Argentine River Plate Spanish word-final /a, e, o/ and offer experimental support to the claim that stress affects the quality of Spanish vowels in word-final contexts. © 2018 S. Karger AG, Basel.

Integration of moral values during L2 sentence processing.

PubMed

Foucart, Alice; Moreno, Eva; Martin, Clara D; Costa, Albert

2015-11-01

This study reports an event-related potential (ERP) experiment examining whether valuation (i.e., one's own values) is integrated incrementally and whether it affects L2 speakers' online interpretation of the sentence. We presented Spanish native speakers and French-Spanish mid-proficiency late L2 speakers with visual sentences containing value-consistent and value-inconsistent statements (e.g., 'Nowadays, paedophilia should be prohibited/tolerated across the world.'). Participants' brain activity was recorded as they were reading the sentences and indicating whether they agreed with the statements or not. Behaviourally, the two groups revealed identical valuation. The ERP analyses showed both a semantic (N400) and an affect-related response (LPP) to value-inconsistent statements in the native group, but only an LPP in the non-native group. These results suggest that valuation is integrated online (presence of LPP) during L2 sentence comprehension but that it does not interfere with semantic processing (absence of N400).

Processing Focus Structure in L1 and L2 French: L2 Proficiency Effects on ERPs

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Reichle, Robert V.; Birdsong, David

2014-01-01

This study examined the event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by focus processing among first language (L1) speakers and second language (L2) learners of French. Participants read wh-questions containing explicit focus marking, followed by responses instantiating contrastive and informational focus. We hypothesized that L2 proficiency would…

Teaching First Language Speakers to Communicate across Linguistic Difference: Addressing Attitudes, Comprehension, and Strategies

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Subtirelu, Nicholas Close; Lindemann, Stephanie

2016-01-01

While most research in applied linguistics has focused on second language (L2) speakers and their language capabilities, the success of interaction between such speakers and first language (L1) speakers also relies on the positive attitudes and communication skills of the L1 speakers. However, some research has suggested that many L1 speakers lack…

Parallel deterioration to language processing in a bilingual speaker.

PubMed

Druks, Judit; Weekes, Brendan Stuart

2013-01-01

The convergence hypothesis [Green, D. W. (2003). The neural basis of the lexicon and the grammar in L2 acquisition: The convergence hypothesis. In R. van Hout, A. Hulk, F. Kuiken, & R. Towell (Eds.), The interface between syntax and the lexicon in second language acquisition (pp. 197-218). Amsterdam: John Benjamins] assumes that the neural substrates of language representations are shared between the languages of a bilingual speaker. One prediction of this hypothesis is that neurodegenerative disease should produce parallel deterioration to lexical and grammatical processing in bilingual aphasia. We tested this prediction with a late bilingual Hungarian (first language, L1)-English (second language, L2) speaker J.B. who had nonfluent progressive aphasia (NFPA). J.B. had acquired L2 in adolescence but was premorbidly proficient and used English as his dominant language throughout adult life. Our investigations showed comparable deterioration to lexical and grammatical knowledge in both languages during a one-year period. Parallel deterioration to language processing in a bilingual speaker with NFPA challenges the assumption that L1 and L2 rely on different brain mechanisms as assumed in some theories of bilingual language processing [Ullman, M. T. (2001). The neural basis of lexicon and grammar in first and second language: The declarative/procedural model. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4(1), 105-122].

The Role of Experience in the Acquisition and Production of Diminutives and Gender in Spanish: Evidence from L2 Learners and Heritage Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Montrul, Silvina; de la Fuente, Israel; Davidson, Justin; Foote, Rebecca

2013-01-01

This study examined whether type of early language experience provides advantages to heritage speakers over second language (L2) learners with morphology, and investigated knowledge of gender agreement and its interaction with diminutive formation. Diminutives are a hallmark of Child Directed Speech in early language development and a highly…

Semantic Ambiguity Effects in L2 Word Recognition.

PubMed

Ishida, Tomomi

2018-06-01

The present study examined the ambiguity effects in second language (L2) word recognition. Previous studies on first language (L1) lexical processing have observed that ambiguous words are recognized faster and more accurately than unambiguous words on lexical decision tasks. In this research, L1 and L2 speakers of English were asked whether a letter string on a computer screen was an English word or not. An ambiguity advantage was found for both groups and greater ambiguity effects were found for the non-native speaker group when compared to the native speaker group. The findings imply that the larger ambiguity advantage for L2 processing is due to their slower response time in producing adequate feedback activation from the semantic level to the orthographic level.

Prosodic and Lexical Marking of Contrast in L2 Italian

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Turco, Giuseppina; Dimroth, Christine; Braun, Bettina

2015-01-01

We investigated the second language (L2) acquisition of pragmatic categories that are not as consistently and frequently encoded in the L2 than in the first language (L1). Experiment 1 showed that Italian speakers linguistically highlighted affirmative polarity contrast (e.g. "The child ate the candies" following after "The child…

Morphosyntactic Processing in Advanced Second Language (L2) Learners: An Event-Related Potential Investigation of the Effects of L1-l2 Similarity and Structural Distance

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Alemán Bañón, José; Fiorentino, Robert; Gabriele, Alison

2014-01-01

Different theoretical accounts of second language (L2) acquisition differ with respect to whether or not advanced learners are predicted to show native-like processing for features not instantiated in the native language (L1). We examined how native speakers of English, a language with number but not gender agreement, process number and gender…

Lexical representation of novel L2 contrasts

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hayes-Harb, Rachel; Masuda, Kyoko

2005-04-01

There is much interest among psychologists and linguists in the influence of the native language sound system on the acquisition of second languages (Best, 1995; Flege, 1995). Most studies of second language (L2) speech focus on how learners perceive and produce L2 sounds, but we know of only two that have considered how novel sound contrasts are encoded in learners' lexical representations of L2 words (Pallier et al., 2001; Ota et al., 2002). In this study we investigated how native speakers of English encode Japanese consonant quantity contrasts in their developing Japanese lexicons at different stages of acquisition (Japanese contrasts singleton versus geminate consonants but English does not). Monolingual English speakers, native English speakers learning Japanese for one year, and native speakers of Japanese were taught a set of Japanese nonwords containing singleton and geminate consonants. Subjects then performed memory tasks eliciting perception and production data to determine whether they encoded the Japanese consonant quantity contrast lexically. Overall accuracy in these tasks was a function of Japanese language experience, and acoustic analysis of the production data revealed non-native-like patterns of differentiation of singleton and geminate consonants among the L2 learners of Japanese. Implications for theories of L2 speech are discussed.

The Effects of L2 Experience on L3 Perception

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Onishi, Hiromi

2016-01-01

This study examines the influence of experience with a second language (L2) on the perception of phonological contrasts in a third language (L3). This study contributes to L3 phonology by examining the influence of L2 phonological perception abilities on the perception of an L3 at the beginner level. Participants were native speakers of Korean…

Early Language Experience Facilitates the Processing of Gender Agreement in Spanish Heritage Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Montrul, Silvina; Davidson, Justin; De La Fuente, Israel; Foote, Rebecca

2014-01-01

We examined how age of acquisition in Spanish heritage speakers and L2 learners interacts with implicitness vs. explicitness of tasks in gender processing of canonical and non-canonical ending nouns. Twenty-three Spanish native speakers, 29 heritage speakers, and 33 proficiency-matched L2 learners completed three on-line spoken word recognition…

covert contrast: The acquisition of Mandarin tone 2 and tone 3 in L2 production and perception

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mar, Li-Ya

This dissertation investigates the occurrence of an intermediate stage, termed a covert contrast, in the acquisition of Mandarin Tone 2 (T2) and Tone 3 (T3) by adult speakers of American English. A covert contrast is a statistically reliable distinction produced by language learners that is not perceived by native speakers of the target language (TL). In second language (L2) acquisition, whether a learner is judged as having acquired a TL phonemic contrast has largely depended on whether the contrast was perceived and transcribed by native speakers of the TL. However, categorical perception has shown that native listeners cannot perceive a distinction between two sounds that fall within the same perceptual boundaries on the continuum of the relevant acoustic cues. In other words, it is possible that native speakers of the TL do not perceive a phonemic distinction that is produced by L2 learners when that distinction occurs within a phonemic boundary of TL. The data for the study were gathered through two elicitations of tone production, a longitudinal analysis, and two perception tasks. There were three key findings. First, both elicitations showed that most of the L2 participants produced a covert contrast between T2 and T3 on at least one of the three acoustic measures used in the study. Second, the longitudinal analysis reveals that some L2 participants progressed from making a covert contrast to a later stage of implementing an overt one, thereby supporting the claim that making a covert contrast is an intermediate stage in the process of acquiring a L2 phonemic contrast. Third, results of the perceptual tasks showed no reliable difference in identifying and discriminating Mandarin T2 and T3 on the part of the L2 learners who produced a covert contrast and those who produced an overt contrast, indicating that there was no reliable difference in the two groups' ability to perceive the target tones. In all, the occurrence of a covert contrast in the process of

L1 and L2 Word Recognotion in Finnish. Examining L1 Effects on L2 Processing of Morphological Complexity and Morphophonological Transparency

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Vainio, Seppo; Anneli, Pajunen; Hyona, Jukka

2014-01-01

This study investigated the effect of the first language (L1) on the visual word recognition of inflected nouns in second language (L2) Finnish by native Russian and Chinese speakers. Case inflection is common in Russian and in Finnish but nonexistent in Chinese. Several models have been posited to describe L2 morphological processing. The unified…

Gender agreement violations modulate beta oscillatory dynamics during sentence comprehension: A comparison of second language learners and native speakers.

PubMed

Lewis, Ashley Glen; Lemhӧfer, Kristin; Schoffelen, Jan-Mathijs; Schriefers, Herbert

2016-08-01

For native speakers, many studies suggest a link between oscillatory neural activity in the beta frequency range and syntactic processing. For late second language (L2) learners on the other hand, the extent to which the neural architecture supporting syntactic processing is similar to or different from that of native speakers is still unclear. In a series of four experiments, we used electroencephalography to investigate the link between beta oscillatory activity and the processing of grammatical gender agreement in Dutch determiner-noun pairs, for Dutch native speakers, and for German L2 learners of Dutch. In Experiment 1 we show that for native speakers, grammatical gender agreement violations are yet another among many syntactic factors that modulate beta oscillatory activity during sentence comprehension. Beta power is higher for grammatically acceptable target words than for those that mismatch in grammatical gender with their preceding determiner. In Experiment 2 we observed no such beta modulations for L2 learners, irrespective of whether trials were sorted according to objective or subjective syntactic correctness. Experiment 3 ruled out that the absence of a beta effect for the L2 learners in Experiment 2 was due to repetition of the target nouns in objectively correct and incorrect determiner-noun pairs. Finally, Experiment 4 showed that when L2 learners are required to explicitly focus on grammatical information, they show modulations of beta oscillatory activity, comparable to those of native speakers, but only when trials are sorted according to participants' idiosyncratic lexical representations of the grammatical gender of target nouns. Together, these findings suggest that beta power in L2 learners is sensitive to violations of grammatical gender agreement, but only when the importance of grammatical information is highlighted, and only when participants' subjective lexical representations are taken into account. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All

Collocational Links in the L2 Mental Lexicon and the Influence of L1 Intralexical Knowledge

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wolter, Brent; Gyllstad, Henrik

2011-01-01

This article assesses the influence of L1 intralexical knowledge on the formation of L2 intralexical collocations. Two tests, a primed lexical decision task (LDT) and a test of receptive collocational knowledge, were administered to a group of non-native speakers (NNSs) (L1 Swedish), with native speakers (NSs) of English serving as controls on the…

Acquiring Nothing?: The Use of Zero Pronouns by Nonnative Speakers of Chinese and the Implications for the Acquisition of Nominal Reference.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Polio, Charlene

1995-01-01

Examined how speakers of languages with zero pronouns (Japanese) and without them (English) use zero pronouns when acquiring a second language (L2) that has them (Mandarin Chinese). The findings show that L2 learners do not use zero pronouns as often as native speakers and that their use increases with proficiency. (51 references) (MDM)

Chinese L1 children's English L2 verb morphology over time: individual variation in long-term outcomes.

PubMed

Paradis, Johanne; Tulpar, Yasemin; Arppe, Antti

2016-05-01

This study examined accuracy in production and grammaticality judgements of verb morphology by eighteen Chinese-speaking children learning English as a second language (L2) followed longitudinally from four to six years of exposure to English, and who began to learn English at age 4;2. Children's growth in accuracy with verb morphology reached a plateau by six years, where 11/18 children did not display native-speaker levels of accuracy for one or more morphemes. Variation in children's accuracy with verb morphology was predicted by their English vocabulary size and verbal short-term memories primarily, and quality and quantity of English input at home secondarily. This study shows that even very young L2 learners might not all catch up to native speakers in this time frame and that non-age factors play a role in determining individual variation in child L2 learners' long-term outcomes with English morphology.

The influence of visual speech information on the intelligibility of English consonants produced by non-native speakers.

PubMed

Kawase, Saya; Hannah, Beverly; Wang, Yue

2014-09-01

This study examines how visual speech information affects native judgments of the intelligibility of speech sounds produced by non-native (L2) speakers. Native Canadian English perceivers as judges perceived three English phonemic contrasts (/b-v, θ-s, l-ɹ/) produced by native Japanese speakers as well as native Canadian English speakers as controls. These stimuli were presented under audio-visual (AV, with speaker voice and face), audio-only (AO), and visual-only (VO) conditions. The results showed that, across conditions, the overall intelligibility of Japanese productions of the native (Japanese)-like phonemes (/b, s, l/) was significantly higher than the non-Japanese phonemes (/v, θ, ɹ/). In terms of visual effects, the more visually salient non-Japanese phonemes /v, θ/ were perceived as significantly more intelligible when presented in the AV compared to the AO condition, indicating enhanced intelligibility when visual speech information is available. However, the non-Japanese phoneme /ɹ/ was perceived as less intelligible in the AV compared to the AO condition. Further analysis revealed that, unlike the native English productions, the Japanese speakers produced /ɹ/ without visible lip-rounding, indicating that non-native speakers' incorrect articulatory configurations may decrease the degree of intelligibility. These results suggest that visual speech information may either positively or negatively affect L2 speech intelligibility.

L2 Effects on L1 Event Conceptualization

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bylund, Emanuel; Jarvis, Scott

2011-01-01

The finding that speakers of aspect languages encode event endpoints to a lesser extent than do speakers of non-aspect languages has led to the hypothesis that there is a relationship between grammatical aspect and event conceptualization (e.g., von Stutterheim and Nuse, 2003). The present study concerns L1 event conceptualization in 40 L1…

Elaborations on L2 Interactional Competence: The Development of L2 Grammar-for-Interaction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pekarek Doehler, Simona

2018-01-01

This paper argues for a broadening of the analytic scope of research on L2 interactional competence so as to embrace systematic investigation of the linguistic resources that L2 speakers put to use for the specific purpose of coordinating social interaction. The paper first offers a conceptualisation of interactional competence in terms of…

The Emergence of a Phoneme-Sized Unit in L2 Speech Production: Evidence from Japanese–English Bilinguals

PubMed Central

Nakayama, Mariko; Kinoshita, Sachiko; Verdonschot, Rinus G.

2016-01-01

Recent research has revealed that the way phonology is constructed during word production differs across languages. Dutch and English native speakers are suggested to incrementally insert phonemes into a metrical frame, whereas Mandarin Chinese speakers use syllables and Japanese speakers use a unit called the mora (often a CV cluster such as “ka” or “ki”). The present study is concerned with the question how bilinguals construct phonology in their L2 when the phonological unit size differs from the unit in their L1. Japanese–English bilinguals of varying proficiency read aloud English words preceded by masked primes that overlapped in just the onset (e.g., bark-BENCH) or the onset plus vowel corresponding to the mora-sized unit (e.g., bell-BENCH). Low-proficient Japanese–English bilinguals showed CV priming but did not show onset priming, indicating that they use their L1 phonological unit when reading L2 English words. In contrast, high-proficient Japanese–English bilinguals showed significant onset priming. The size of the onset priming effect was correlated with the length of time spent in English-speaking countries, which suggests that extensive exposure to L2 phonology may play a key role in the emergence of a language-specific phonological unit in L2 word production. PMID:26941669

The Acquisition of English Focus Marking by Non-Native Speakers

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Baker, Rachel Elizabeth

This dissertation examines Mandarin and Korean speakers' acquisition of English focus marking, which is realized by accenting particular words within a focused constituent. It is important for non-native speakers to learn how accent placement relates to focus in English because appropriate accent placement and realization makes a learner's English more native-like and easier to understand. Such knowledge may also improve their English comprehension skills. In this study, 20 native English speakers, 20 native Mandarin speakers, and 20 native Korean speakers participated in four experiments: (1) a production experiment, in which they were recorded reading the answers to questions, (2) a perception experiment, in which they were asked to determine which word in a recording was the last prominent word, (3) an understanding experiment, in which they were asked whether the answers in recorded question-answer pairs had context-appropriate prosody, and (4) an accent placement experiment, in which they were asked which word they would make prominent in a particular context. Finally, a new group of native English speakers listened to utterances produced in the production experiment, and determined whether the prosody of each utterance was appropriate for its context. The results of the five experiments support a novel predictive model for second language prosodic focus marking acquisition. This model holds that both transfer of linguistic features from a learner's native language (L1) and features of their second language (L2) affect learners' acquisition of prosodic focus marking. As a result, the model includes two complementary components: the Transfer Component and the L2 Challenge Component. The Transfer Component predicts that prosodic structures in the L2 will be more easily acquired by language learners that have similar structures in their L1 than those who do not, even if there are differences between the L1 and L2 in how the structures are realized. The L2

Partially supervised speaker clustering.

PubMed

Tang, Hao; Chu, Stephen Mingyu; Hasegawa-Johnson, Mark; Huang, Thomas S

2012-05-01

Content-based multimedia indexing, retrieval, and processing as well as multimedia databases demand the structuring of the media content (image, audio, video, text, etc.), one significant goal being to associate the identity of the content to the individual segments of the signals. In this paper, we specifically address the problem of speaker clustering, the task of assigning every speech utterance in an audio stream to its speaker. We offer a complete treatment to the idea of partially supervised speaker clustering, which refers to the use of our prior knowledge of speakers in general to assist the unsupervised speaker clustering process. By means of an independent training data set, we encode the prior knowledge at the various stages of the speaker clustering pipeline via 1) learning a speaker-discriminative acoustic feature transformation, 2) learning a universal speaker prior model, and 3) learning a discriminative speaker subspace, or equivalently, a speaker-discriminative distance metric. We study the directional scattering property of the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) mean supervector representation of utterances in the high-dimensional space, and advocate exploiting this property by using the cosine distance metric instead of the euclidean distance metric for speaker clustering in the GMM mean supervector space. We propose to perform discriminant analysis based on the cosine distance metric, which leads to a novel distance metric learning algorithm—linear spherical discriminant analysis (LSDA). We show that the proposed LSDA formulation can be systematically solved within the elegant graph embedding general dimensionality reduction framework. Our speaker clustering experiments on the GALE database clearly indicate that 1) our speaker clustering methods based on the GMM mean supervector representation and vector-based distance metrics outperform traditional speaker clustering methods based on the “bag of acoustic features” representation and statistical

Mechanisms of Verbal Morphology Processing in Heritage Speakers of Russian

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Romanova, Natalia

2008-01-01

The goal of the study is to analyze the morphological processing of real and novel verb forms by heritage speakers of Russian in order to determine whether it differs from that of native (L1) speakers and second language (L2) learners; if so, how it is different; and which factors may guide the acquisition process. The experiment involved three…

Use of the BAT with a Cantonese-Putonghua speaker with aphasia.

PubMed

Kong, Anthony Pak-Hin; Weekes, Brendan Stuart

2011-06-01

The aim of this article is to illustrate the use of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT) with a Cantonese-Putonghua speaker. We describe G, who is a relatively young Chinese bilingual speaker with aphasia. G's communication abilities in his L2, Putonghua, were impaired following brain damage. This impairment caused specific difficulties in communication with his wife, a native Putonghua speaker, and was thus a priority for investigation. Given a paucity of standardised tests of aphasia in Putonghua, our goal was to use the BAT to assess G's impairments in his L2. Results showed that G's performance on the BAT subtests measuring word and sentence comprehension and production was impaired. His pattern of performance on the BAT allowed us to generate hypotheses about his higher-level language impairments in Putonghua, which were subsequently found to be impaired. We argue that the BAT is able to capture the primary language impairments in Chinese-speaking patients with aphasia when Putonghua is the second language. We also suggest some modifications to the BAT for testing Chinese-speaking patients with bilingual aphasia.

L2 and L3 Ultimate Attainment: An Investigation of Two Parameters

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hermas, Abdelkader

2014-01-01

This study considers the upper limit of ultimate attainment in the L2 French and L3 English of trilingual learners. The learners are native speakers of Moroccan Arabic who started learning L2 French at eight and L3 English at 16. They are advanced in both languages. Four constructions representing the verb movement and null subject parameter were…

L1 French Learning of L2 Spanish Past Tenses: L1 Transfer versus Aspect and Interface Issues

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Amenós-Pons, José; Ahern, Aoife; Gujarro-Fuentes, Pedro

2017-01-01

This paper examines the process of acquiring L2s that are closely related to the L1 through data on how adult French speakers learning L2 Spanish in a formal setting develop knowledge and use of past tenses in this L2. We consider the role of transfer and simplification in acquiring mental representations of the L2 grammar, specifically in the…

A Prerequisite to L1 Homophone Effects in L2 Spoken-Word Recognition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nakai, Satsuki; Lindsay, Shane; Ota, Mitsuhiko

2015-01-01

When both members of a phonemic contrast in L2 (second language) are perceptually mapped to a single phoneme in one's L1 (first language), L2 words containing a member of that contrast can spuriously activate L2 words in spoken-word recognition. For example, upon hearing cattle, Dutch speakers of English are reported to experience activation…

Articulatory settings of French-English bilingual speakers

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wilson, Ian

2005-04-01

The idea of a language-specific articulatory setting (AS), an underlying posture of the articulators during speech, has existed for centuries [Laver, Historiogr. Ling. 5 (1978)], but until recently it had eluded direct measurement. In an analysis of x-ray movies of French and English monolingual speakers, Gick et al. [Phonetica (in press)] link AS to inter-speech posture, allowing measurement of AS without interference from segmental targets during speech, and they give quantitative evidence showing AS to be language-specific. In the present study, ultrasound and Optotrak are used to investigate whether bilingual English-French speakers have two ASs, and whether this varies depending on the mode (monolingual or bilingual) these speakers are in. Specifically, for inter-speech posture of the lips, lip aperture and protrusion are measured using Optotrak. For inter-speech posture of the tongue, tongue root retraction, tongue body and tongue tip height are measured using optically-corrected ultrasound. Segmental context is balanced across the two languages ensuring that the sets of sounds before and after an inter-speech posture are consistent across languages. By testing bilingual speakers, vocal tract morphology across languages is controlled for. Results have implications for L2 acquisition, specifically the teaching and acquisition of pronunciation.

The impact of language co-activation on L1 and L2 speech fluency.

PubMed

Bergmann, Christopher; Sprenger, Simone A; Schmid, Monika S

2015-10-01

Fluent speech depends on the availability of well-established linguistic knowledge and routines for speech planning and articulation. A lack of speech fluency in late second-language (L2) learners may point to a deficiency of these representations, due to incomplete acquisition. Experiments on bilingual language processing have shown, however, that there are strong reasons to believe that multilingual speakers experience co-activation of the languages they speak. We have studied to what degree language co-activation affects fluency in the speech of bilinguals, comparing a monolingual German control group with two bilingual groups: 1) first-language (L1) attriters, who have fully acquired German before emigrating to an L2 English environment, and 2) immersed L2 learners of German (L1: English). We have analysed the temporal fluency and the incidence of disfluency markers (pauses, repetitions and self-corrections) in spontaneous film retellings. Our findings show that learners to speak more slowly than controls and attriters. Also, on each count, the speech of at least one of the bilingual groups contains more disfluency markers than the retellings of the control group. Generally speaking, both bilingual groups-learners and attriters-are equally (dis)fluent and significantly more disfluent than the monolingual speakers. Given that the L1 attriters are unaffected by incomplete acquisition, we interpret these findings as evidence for language competition during speech production. Copyright © 2015. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Comparing L1 and L2 Texts and Writers in First-Year Composition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Eckstein, Grant; Ferris, Dana

2018-01-01

Scholars have at various points discussed the needs of second language (L2) writers enrolled in "mainstream" composition courses where they are mixed with native (L1) English speakers. Other researchers have investigated the experiences of L2 writers in mainstream classes and the perceptions of their instructors about their abilities and…

Investigating Chinese Speakers' Acquisition of Telicity in English

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yin, Bin

2012-01-01

This dissertation is concerned with Chinese speakers' acquisition of telicity in L2 English. Telicity is a semantic notion having to do with whether an event has an inherent endpoint or not. Most existing work on L2 telicity is conceptualized within an L1-transfer framework and examines learning situations where L1 and L2 differ on whether…

Semantic Categorization of Placement Verbs in L1 and L2 Danish and Spanish

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cadierno, Teresa; Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide; Hijazo-Gascón, Alberto

2016-01-01

This study investigates semantic categorization of the meaning of placement verbs by Danish and Spanish native speakers and two groups of intermediate second language (L2) learners (Danish learners of L2 Spanish and Spanish learners of L2 Danish). Participants described 31 video clips picturing different types of placement events. Cluster analyses…

Use of Referential Discourse Contexts in L2 Offline and Online Sentence Processing.

PubMed

Yang, Pi-Lan

2016-10-01

The present study aimed to investigate (a) the extent to which Chinese-speaking learners of English in Taiwan use referential noun phrase (NP) information contained in discourse contexts to complete ambiguous noun/verb fragments in a sentence completion task, and (b) whether and when they use the contexts to disambiguate main verb versus reduced relative clause (MV/RRC) ambiguities in real time. Results showed that unlike native English speakers, English learners did not create a marked increase in RRC completions in biasing two-NP-referent discourse contexts except for advanced learners. Nevertheless, like native speakers, the learners at elementary, intermediate, and advanced English proficiency levels all used the information in a later stage of resolving the MV/RRC ambiguities in real time. The delayed effect of referential context information observed suggests that L2 learners, like native speakers, are able to construct syntax-to-discourse mappings in real time. It also suggests that processing of syntactic information takes precedence over integration of syntactic information with discourse information during L1 and L2 online sentence processing.

Multilingual Acquisition of Vowels in L1 Polish, L2 Danish and L3 English

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sypianska, Jolanta

2016-01-01

The aim of this paper is to determine whether all languages in the linguistic repertoire of a multilingual speaker manifest cross-linguistic influence (CLI) and establish the directions of CLI on the basis of chosen vowels from the linguistic repertoire of two groups: the Bilingual group (L1 Polish/L2 Danish) and the Multilingual group (L1…

The perception of phonological quantity based on durational cues by native speakers, second-language users and nonspeakers of Finnish.

PubMed

Ylinen, Sari; Shestakova, Anna; Alku, Paavo; Huotilainen, Minna

2005-01-01

Some languages, such as Finnish, use speech-sound duration as the primary cue for a phonological quantity distinction. For second-language (L2) learners, quantity is often difficult to master if speech-sound duration plays a less important role in the phonology of their native language (L1). By comparing the categorization performance of native speakers of Finnish, Russian L2 users of Finnish, and non-Finnish-speaking Russians, the present study aimed to determine whether the L2 users, whose native language does not have a quantity distinction, have been able to establish categories for Finnish quantity. The results suggest that the native speakers and some of the L2 users that have been exposed to Finnish for a longer time have access to phonological quantity categories, whereas the L2 users with shorter exposure and the non-Finnish-speaking subjects do not. In addition, by comparing categorization and discrimination tasks it was found that the native speakers show a phoneme-boundary effect for quantity that is cued by duration only, whereas the non-Finnish-speaking subjects and the subjects with low proficiency in Finnish do not.

English Native Speakers' L2 Acquisition of the Spanish Clitic Se

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bailey, Carolina

2013-01-01

This study investigated the acquisition of the Spanish clitic se by English native speakers in passive, middle, and impersonal constructions. Little research has been done on this topic in SLA within a UG framework (Bayona, 2005; Bruhn de Garavito, 1999). VanPatten (2004) proposed the Processing Instruction (PI) model arguing for the necessity of…

Grammar as a Joint Achievement: Co-Constructions in L2 Interactions

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Family, Neiloufar; Durus, Natalia; Ziegler, Gudrun

2015-01-01

In this study, we present and analyze co-constructions from L2 English data collected at the European School in Luxembourg. Co-constructions are morpho-syntactic structures split across two speakers, in which a second speaker completes a grammatical structure initiated by the first speaker in conversation. The corpus features multilingual 13-14…

Semantic Ambiguity Effects in L2 Word Recognition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ishida, Tomomi

2018-01-01

The present study examined the ambiguity effects in second language (L2) word recognition. Previous studies on first language (L1) lexical processing have observed that ambiguous words are recognized faster and more accurately than unambiguous words on lexical decision tasks. In this research, L1 and L2 speakers of English were asked whether a…

Brush Talk at the Conversation Table: Interaction between L1 and L2 Speakers of Chinese

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hwang, Menq-Ju

2009-01-01

Chinese characters are used in both Chinese and Japanese writing systems. When literate speakers of either language experience problems in finding or understanding words, they often resort to using Chinese characters or "kanji" (i.e., Chinese characters used in Japanese writing) in their talk, a practice known as "brush talk" ("bitan" in Chinese,…

Prosodic Marking of Information Structure by Malaysian Speakers of English

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gut, Ulrike; Pillai, Stefanie

2014-01-01

Various researchers have shown that second language (L2) speakers have difficulties with marking information structure in English prosodically: They deviate from native speakers not only in terms of pitch accent placement (Grosser, 1997; Gut, 2009; Ramírez Verdugo, 2002) and the type of pitch accent they produce (Wennerstrom, 1994, 1998) but also…

Suppression and Working Memory in Auditory Comprehension of L2 Narratives: Evidence from Cross-Modal Priming.

PubMed

Wu, Shiyu; Ma, Zheng

2016-10-01

Using a cross-modal priming task, the present study explores whether Chinese-English bilinguals process goal related information during auditory comprehension of English narratives like native speakers. Results indicate that English native speakers adopted both mechanisms of suppression and enhancement to modulate the activation of goals and keep track of the "causal path" in narrative events and that L1 speakers with higher working memory (WM) capacity are more skilled at attenuating interference. L2 speakers, however, experienced the phenomenon of "facilitation-without-inhibition." Their difficulty in suppressing irrelevant information was related to their performance in the test of working memory capacity. For the L2 group with greater working memory capacity, the effects of both enhancement and suppression were found. These findings are discussed in light of a landscape model of L2 text comprehension which highlights the need for WM to be incorporated into comprehensive models of L2 processing as well as theories of SLA.

L1 Korean and L1 Mandarin L2 English Learners' Acquisition of the Count/Mass Distinction in English

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Choi, Sea Hee; Ionin, Tania; Zhu, Yeqiu

2018-01-01

This study investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of the English count/mass distinction by speakers of Korean and Mandarin Chinese, with a focus on the semantics of atomicity. It is hypothesized that L1-Korean and L1-Mandarin L2-English learners are influenced by atomicity in the use of the count/mass morphosyntax in English. This…

Production of lexical stress in non-native speakers of American English: Kinematic correlates of stress and transfer

PubMed Central

Chakraborty, Rahul; Goffman, Lisa

2013-01-01

Purpose To assess the influence of L2 proficiency on production characteristics of rhythmic sequences in L1 (Bengali) and L2 (English), with emphasis on linguistic transfer. One goal was to examine, using kinematic evidence, how L2- proficiency influences the production of iambic and trochaic words, focusing on temporal and spatial aspects of prosody. A second goal was to assess whether prosodic structure influences judgment of foreign accent. Method Twenty Bengali-English bilinguals, 10 with low proficiency and 10 with high proficiency in English, and 10 monolingual English speakers participated. Lip and jaw movements were recorded while the bilinguals produced Bengali and English words embedded in sentences. Lower lip movement amplitude and duration were measured in trochaic and iambic words. Six native English listeners judged the nativeness of the bilingual speakers. Results Evidence of L1 to L2 transfer was observed through duration but not amplitude cues. More proficient L2 speakers varied duration to mark iambic stress. Perceptually, the high proficiency group received relatively higher native-like accent ratings. Trochees were judged as more native than iambs. Interpretation Even in the face of L1-L2 lexical stress transfer, non-native speakers demonstrated knowledge of prosodic contrasts. Movement duration appears to be more amenable to modifications than amplitude. PMID:21106699

Selectivity in L1 Attrition: Differential Object Marking in Spanish Near-Native Speakers of English

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chamorro, Gloria; Sturt, Patrick; Sorace, Antonella

2016-01-01

Previous research has shown L1 attrition to be restricted to structures at the interfaces between syntax and pragmatics, but not to occur with syntactic properties that do not involve such interfaces ("Interface Hypothesis", Sorace and Filiaci in "Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian." "Second Lang…

Use of the BAT with a Cantonese-Putonghua Speaker with Aphasia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kong, Anthony Pak-Hin; Weekes, Brendan Stuart

2011-01-01

The aim of this article is to illustrate the use of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT) with a Cantonese-Putonghua speaker. We describe G, who is a relatively young Chinese bilingual speaker with aphasia. G's communication abilities in his L2, Putonghua, were impaired following brain damage. This impairment caused specific difficulties in…

Grammatical Planning Units During Real-Time Sentence Production in Speakers With Agrammatic Aphasia and Healthy Speakers.

PubMed

Lee, Jiyeon; Yoshida, Masaya; Thompson, Cynthia K

2015-08-01

Grammatical encoding (GE) is impaired in agrammatic aphasia; however, the nature of such deficits remains unclear. We examined grammatical planning units during real-time sentence production in speakers with agrammatic aphasia and control speakers, testing two competing models of GE. We queried whether speakers with agrammatic aphasia produce sentences word by word without advanced planning or whether hierarchical syntactic structure (i.e., verb argument structure; VAS) is encoded as part of the advanced planning unit. Experiment 1 examined production of sentences with a predefined structure (i.e., "The A and the B are above the C") using eye tracking. Experiment 2 tested production of transitive and unaccusative sentences without a predefined sentence structure in a verb-priming study. In Experiment 1, both speakers with agrammatic aphasia and young and age-matched control speakers used word-by-word strategies, selecting the first lemma (noun A) only prior to speech onset. However, in Experiment 2, unlike controls, speakers with agrammatic aphasia preplanned transitive and unaccusative sentences, encoding VAS before speech onset. Speakers with agrammatic aphasia show incremental, word-by-word production for structurally simple sentences, requiring retrieval of multiple noun lemmas. However, when sentences involve functional (thematic to grammatical) structure building, advanced planning strategies (i.e., VAS encoding) are used. This early use of hierarchical syntactic information may provide a scaffold for impaired GE in agrammatism.

L2 Processing of Plural Inflection in English

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Song, Yoonsang

2015-01-01

This study investigates (1) whether late second language (L2) learners can attain native-like knowledge of English plural inflection even when their first language (L1) lacks an equivalent and (2) whether they construct hierarchically structured representations during online sentence processing like native speakers. In a self-paced reading task,…

Processing of English Focal Stress by L1-English and L1-Mandarin/L2-English Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Guigelaar, Ellen R.

2017-01-01

Late second language (L2) learners often struggle with L2 prosody, both in perception and production. This may result from first language (L1) interference or some property of how a second language functions in a late learner independent of what their L1 might be. Here we investigate prosody's role in determining information structure through…

Noun Countability Judgments by Arabic Speakers of English

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Alenizi, Aied

2017-01-01

In an attempt to better understand the role of relationship between the use of English indefinite article and L1 transfer in L2 countability judgments by speakers of non-classifier languages, the current study investigates how Saudi EFL learners judge noun countability in English. The current study aims to find; (1) if countability judgments…

Comprehensive Morpho-Electrotonic Analysis Shows 2 Distinct Classes of L2 and L3 Pyramidal Neurons in Human Temporal Cortex

PubMed Central

Deitcher, Yair; Eyal, Guy; Kanari, Lida; Verhoog, Matthijs B; Atenekeng Kahou, Guy Antoine; Mansvelder, Huibert D; de Kock, Christiaan P J; Segev, Idan

2017-01-01

Abstract There have been few quantitative characterizations of the morphological, biophysical, and cable properties of neurons in the human neocortex. We employed feature-based statistical methods on a rare data set of 60 3D reconstructed pyramidal neurons from L2 and L3 in the human temporal cortex (HL2/L3 PCs) removed after brain surgery. Of these cells, 25 neurons were also characterized physiologically. Thirty-two morphological features were analyzed (e.g., dendritic surface area, 36 333 ± 18 157 μm2; number of basal trees, 5.55 ± 1.47; dendritic diameter, 0.76 ± 0.28 μm). Eighteen features showed a significant gradual increase with depth from the pia (e.g., dendritic length and soma radius). The other features showed weak or no correlation with depth (e.g., dendritic diameter). The basal dendritic terminals in HL2/L3 PCs are particularly elongated, enabling multiple nonlinear processing units in these dendrites. Unlike the morphological features, the active biophysical features (e.g., spike shapes and rates) and passive/cable features (e.g., somatic input resistance, 47.68 ± 15.26 MΩ, membrane time constant, 12.03 ± 1.79 ms, average dendritic cable length, 0.99 ± 0.24) were depth-independent. A novel descriptor for apical dendritic topology yielded 2 distinct classes, termed hereby as “slim-tufted” and “profuse-tufted” HL2/L3 PCs; the latter class tends to fire at higher rates. Thus, our morpho-electrotonic analysis shows 2 distinct classes of HL2/L3 PCs. PMID:28968789

The Effect of Syntactic Complexity on Fluency: Comparing Actives and Passives in L1 and L2 Speech

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sadri Mirdamadi, Farhad; De Jong, Nivja H.

2015-01-01

This study investigates how syntactic complexity affects speaking performance in first (L1) and second language (L2) in terms of speaking fluency. Participants (30 Dutch native speakers with an average to advanced level of English) performed two speaking experiments, one in Dutch (L1) and one in English (L2). Syntactic complexity was…

Native Speakers' Perceptions of Fluency and Accent in L2 Speech

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pinget, Anne-France; Bosker, Hans Rutger; Quené, Hugo; de Jong, Nivja H.

2014-01-01

Oral fluency and foreign accent distinguish L2 from L1 speech production. In language testing practices, both fluency and accent are usually assessed by raters. This study investigates what exactly native raters of fluency and accent take into account when judging L2. Our aim is to explore the relationship between objectively measured temporal,…

Portraits of the L2 User. Second Language Acquisition.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cook, Vivian, Ed.

This collection of papers treats second language users in their own right rather than as failed native speakers, reflecting a new shift within the field of second language acquisition research. The 13 papers are: (1) "Background to the L2 User" (Vivian Cook); (2) "Lexical Representation and Lexical Processing in the L2 User"…

Verbal Inflectional Morphology in L1 and L2 Spanish: A Frequency Effects Study Examining Storage versus Composition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bowden, Harriet Wood; Gelfand, Matthew P.; Sanz, Cristina; Ullman, Michael T.

2010-01-01

This study examines the storage versus composition of Spanish inflected verbal forms in first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers of Spanish. L2 participants were selected to have mid-to-advanced proficiency, high classroom experience, and low immersion experience, typical of medium-to-advanced foreign language learners. Participants…

When Alphabets Collide: Alphabetic First-Language Speakers' Approach to Speech Production in an Alphabetic Second Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Vokic, Gabriela

2011-01-01

This study analysed the extent to which literate native speakers of a language with a phonemic alphabetic orthography rely on their first language (L1) orthography during second language (L2) speech production of a language that has a morphophonemic alphabetic orthography. The production of the English flapping rule by 15 adult native speakers of…

Writer L1/L2 Status and Asynchronous Online Writing Center Feedback: Consultant Response Patterns

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Weirick, Joshua; Davis, Tracy; Lawson, Daniel

2017-01-01

This case study examines the differences in comments offered by asynchronous online writing center consultants to L1 and L2 speakers and examines the potential disconnects in consultant perceptions of their practice. The researchers collected and coded sample papers and interviewed participants to contextualize data from the quantitative portion…

Can Bilinguals See It Coming? Word Anticipation in L2 Sentence Reading

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Foucart, Alice; Martin, Clara D.; Moreno, Eva M.; Costa, Albert

2014-01-01

Why is it more difficult to comprehend a 2nd (L2) than a 1st language (L1)? In the present article we investigate whether difficulties during L2 sentence comprehension come from differences in the way L1 and L2 speakers anticipate upcoming words. We recorded the brain activity (event-related potentials) of Spanish monolinguals, French-Spanish late…

Second Language Acquisition of Variable Structures in Spanish by Portuguese Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Geeslin, Kimberly L.; Guijarro-Fuentes, Pedro

2006-01-01

This study provides a model for examining the second language (L2) acquisition of structures where the first language (L1) and (L2) are similar, and where native speaker (NS) use varies. Research on the copula contrast in Spanish ("ser" and "estar" mean "to be") has shown that an assessment of learner choice cannot rely on an error analysis…

Shared Features of L2 Writing: Intergroup Homogeneity and Text Classification

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Crossley, Scott A.; McNamara, Danielle S.

2011-01-01

This study investigates intergroup homogeneity within high intermediate and advanced L2 writers of English from Czech, Finnish, German, and Spanish first language backgrounds. A variety of linguistic features related to lexical sophistication, syntactic complexity, and cohesion were used to compare texts written by L1 speakers of English to L2…

The Role of Interaction in Native Speaker Comprehension of Nonnative Speaker Speech.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Polio, Charlene; Gass, Susan M.

1998-01-01

Because interaction gives language learners an opportunity to modify their speech upon a signal of noncomprehension, it should also have a positive effect on native speakers' (NS) comprehension of nonnative speakers (NNS). This study shows that interaction does help NSs comprehend NNSs, contrasting the claims of an earlier study that found no…

Affective processing in bilingual speakers: disembodied cognition?

PubMed

Pavlenko, Aneta

2012-01-01

A recent study by Keysar, Hayakawa, and An (2012) suggests that "thinking in a foreign language" may reduce decision biases because a foreign language provides a greater emotional distance than a native tongue. The possibility of such "disembodied" cognition is of great interest for theories of affect and cognition and for many other areas of psychological theory and practice, from clinical and forensic psychology to marketing, but first this claim needs to be properly evaluated. The purpose of this review is to examine the findings of clinical, introspective, cognitive, psychophysiological, and neuroimaging studies of affective processing in bilingual speakers in order to identify converging patterns of results, to evaluate the claim about "disembodied cognition," and to outline directions for future inquiry. The findings to date reveal two interrelated processing effects. First-language (L1) advantage refers to increased automaticity of affective processing in the L1 and heightened electrodermal reactivity to L1 emotion-laden words. Second-language (L2) advantage refers to decreased automaticity of affective processing in the L2, which reduces interference effects and lowers electrodermal reactivity to negative emotional stimuli. The differences in L1 and L2 affective processing suggest that in some bilingual speakers, in particular late bilinguals and foreign language users, respective languages may be differentially embodied, with the later learned language processed semantically but not affectively. This difference accounts for the reduction of framing biases in L2 processing in the study by Keysar et al. (2012). The follow-up discussion identifies the limits of the findings to date in terms of participant populations, levels of processing, and types of stimuli, puts forth alternative explanations of the documented effects, and articulates predictions to be tested in future research.

Floating Numeral Quantifiers as an Unaccusative Diagnostic in Native, Heritage, and L2 Japanese Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fukuda, Shin

2017-01-01

This study investigates the knowledge of unaccusativity in Japanese native, heritage, and second/foreign language speakers with respect to licensing of floating numeral quantifiers (FNQs) by unaccusative and unergative subjects (the "FNQ diagnostic"). Two acceptability judgment experiments were conducted to examine (i) whether and how…

How Cognitive Load Influences Speakers' Choice of Referring Expressions.

PubMed

Vogels, Jorrig; Krahmer, Emiel; Maes, Alfons

2015-08-01

We report on two experiments investigating the effect of an increased cognitive load for speakers on the choice of referring expressions. Speakers produced story continuations to addressees, in which they referred to characters that were either salient or non-salient in the discourse. In Experiment 1, referents that were salient for the speaker were non-salient for the addressee, and vice versa. In Experiment 2, all discourse information was shared between speaker and addressee. Cognitive load was manipulated by the presence or absence of a secondary task for the speaker. The results show that speakers under load are more likely to produce pronouns, at least when referring to less salient referents. We take this finding as evidence that speakers under load have more difficulties taking discourse salience into account, resulting in the use of expressions that are more economical for themselves. © 2014 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

2. View to northeast showing quarters and outbuildings, L to ...

Library of Congress Historic Buildings Survey, Historic Engineering Record, Historic Landscapes Survey

2. View to northeast showing quarters and outbuildings, L to R: Service Building (HABS No. VA-1287-D), Medical Officer's Quarters C (in background), Garage (HABS No. VA-1287-F), and Medical Officer's Quarters B - Portsmouth Naval Hospital, Medical Officer's Quarters C, West side Williamson Drive, 400 feet South of Rixey Drive, Portsmouth, Portsmouth, VA

The influence of lexical characteristics and talker accent on the recognition of English words by speakers of Japanese.

PubMed

Yoneyama, Kiyoko; Munson, Benjamin

2017-02-01

Whether or not the influence of listeners' language proficiency on L2 speech recognition was affected by the structure of the lexicon was examined. This specific experiment examined the effect of word frequency (WF) and phonological neighborhood density (PND) on word recognition in native speakers of English and second-language (L2) speakers of English whose first language was Japanese. The stimuli included English words produced by a native speaker of English and English words produced by a native speaker of Japanese (i.e., with Japanese-accented English). The experiment was inspired by the finding of Imai, Flege, and Walley [(2005). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 117, 896-907] that the influence of talker accent on speech intelligibility for L2 learners of English whose L1 is Spanish varies as a function of words' PND. In the currently study, significant interactions between stimulus accentedness and listener group on the accuracy and speed of spoken word recognition were found, as were significant effects of PND and WF on word-recognition accuracy. However, no significant three-way interaction among stimulus talker, listener group, and PND on either measure was found. Results are discussed in light of recent findings on cross-linguistic differences in the nature of the effects of PND on L2 phonological and lexical processing.

Processing Modifier-Head Agreement in L1 and L2 Finnish: An Eye-Tracking Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Vainio, Seppo; Pajunen, Anneli; Hyönä, Jukka

2016-01-01

This study investigated the effect of first language (L1) on the reading of modifier-head case agreement in second language (L2) Finnish by native Russian and Chinese speakers. Russian is similar to Finnish in that both languages use case endings to mark grammatical roles, whereas such markings are absent in Chinese. The critical nouns were…

Lexical access in a bilingual speaker with dementia: Changes over time.

PubMed

Lind, Marianne; Simonsen, Hanne Gram; Ribu, Ingeborg Sophie Bjønness; Svendsen, Bente Ailin; Svennevig, Jan; de Bot, Kees

2018-01-01

In this article, we explore the naming skills of a bilingual English-Norwegian speaker diagnosed with Primary Progressive Aphasia, in each of his languages across three different speech contexts: confrontation naming, semi-spontaneous narrative (picture description), and conversation, and at two points in time: 12 and 30 months post diagnosis, respectively. The results are discussed in light of two main theories of lexical retrieval in healthy, elderly speakers: the Transmission Deficit Hypothesis and the Inhibitory Deficit Theory. Our data show that, consistent with the participant's premorbid use of and proficiency in the two languages, his performance in his L2 is lower than in his L1, but this difference diminishes as the disease progresses. This is the case across the three speech contexts; however, the difference is smaller in the narrative task, where his performance is very low in both languages already at the first measurement point. Despite his word finding problems, he is able to take active part in conversation, particularly in his L1 and more so at the first measurement point. In addition to the task effect, we find effects of word class, frequency, and cognateness on his naming skills. His performance seems to support the Transmission Deficit Hypothesis. By combining different tools and methods of analysis, we get a more comprehensive picture of the impact of the dementia on the speaker's languages from an intra-individual as well as an inter-individual perspective, which may be useful in research as well as in clinical practice.

Comparison of singer's formant, speaker's ring, and LTA spectrum among classical singers and untrained normal speakers.

PubMed

Oliveira Barrichelo, V M; Heuer, R J; Dean, C M; Sataloff, R T

2001-09-01

Many studies have described and analyzed the singer's formant. A similar phenomenon produced by trained speakers led some authors to examine the speaker's ring. If we consider these phenomena as resonance effects associated with vocal tract adjustments and training, can we hypothesize that trained singers can carry over their singing formant ability into speech, also obtaining a speaker's ring? Can we find similar differences for energy distribution in continuous speech? Forty classically trained singers and forty untrained normal speakers performed an all-voiced reading task and produced a sample of a sustained spoken vowel /a/. The singers were also requested to perform a sustained sung vowel /a/ at a comfortable pitch. The reading was analyzed by the long-term average spectrum (LTAS) method. The sustained vowels were analyzed through power spectrum analysis. The data suggest that singers show more energy concentration in the singer's formant/speaker's ring region in both sung and spoken vowels. The singers' spoken vowel energy in the speaker's ring area was found to be significantly larger than that of the untrained speakers. The LTAS showed similar findings suggesting that those differences also occur in continuous speech. This finding supports the value of further research on the effect of singing training on the resonance of the speaking voice.

The Acquisition of the Korean Honorific Affix "(u)si" by Advanced L2 Learners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mueller, Jeansue; Jiang, Nan

2013-01-01

An experiment investigated adult language learners' ability to develop fully integrated cognitive representations of a difficult second language (L2) morphosyntactic feature: the Korean honorific verbal affix "(u)si." Native speaker (NS) and nonnative speaker (NNS) latencies during a word-by-word self-paced reading comprehension task…

L2 Chinese: Grammatical Development and Processing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mai, Ziyin

2016-01-01

Two recent books (Jiang, 2014, "Advances in Chinese as a second language"; Wang, 2013, "Grammatical development of Chinese among non-native speakers") provide new resources for exploring the role of processing in acquiring Chinese as a second language (L2). This review article summarizes, assesses and compares some of the…

"Siamo Vicini, No?": Negotiating Commonality for Rapport Building in Italian L1-L2 Online Text Chat

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tudini, Vincenza; Strambi, Antonella

2017-01-01

Focusing specifically on the negotiation of commonality, this study explores rapport building (Spencer-Oatey, 2000) in online intercultural text chat, where Australian students of Italian interact with L1 Italian speakers. Although the initial purpose of the examined chat exchanges is to facilitate L2 acquisition, analysis of transcripts indicates…

The Development of L2 Oral Language Skills in Two L1 Groups: A 7-Year Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Derwing, Tracey M.; Munro, Murray J.

2013-01-01

Researching the longitudinal development of second language (L2) learners is essential to understanding influences on their success. This 7-year study of oral skills in adult immigrant learners of English as a second language evaluated comprehensibility, fluency, and accentedness in first-language (L1) Mandarin and Slavic language speakers. The…

Is He Floating across or Crossing Afloat? Cross-Influence of L1 and L2 in Spanish-English Bilingual Adults

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hohenstein, Jill; Eisenberg, Ann; Naigles, Letitia

2006-01-01

Research has begun to address the question of transfer of language usage patterns beyond the idea that people's native language (L1) can influence the way they produce a second language (L2). This study investigated bidirectional transfer, of both lexical and grammatical features, in adult speakers of English and Spanish who varied in age of L2…

Learner Variables Important for Success in L2 Listening Comprehension in French Immersion Classrooms

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Vandergrift, Larry; Baker, Susan C.

2018-01-01

Listening comprehension, which is relatively straightforward for native language (L1) speakers, is often frustrating for second language (L2) learners. Listening comprehension is important to L2 acquisition, but little is known about the variables that influence the development of L2 listening skills. The goal of this study was to determine which…

When EFL Teachers Perform L2 and L1 in the Classroom, What Happens to Their Sense of Self?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Forman, Ross

2015-01-01

We often hear from speakers of L2 that they "feel different" when communicating through the medium of an additional language. While there has been much exploration of L2-­mediated identity development in naturalistic settings, there is very little conducted within the instructed learning environment of EFL. The present study explores how…

Spanish Native-Speaker Perception of Accentedness in Learner Speech

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Moranski, Kara

2012-01-01

Building upon current research in native-speaker (NS) perception of L2 learner phonology (Zielinski, 2008; Derwing & Munro, 2009), the present investigation analyzed multiple dimensions of NS speech perception in order to achieve a more complete understanding of the specific linguistic elements and attitudinal variables that contribute to…

Acquisition of L2 Vowel Duration in Japanese by Native English Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Okuno, Tomoko

2013-01-01

Research has demonstrated that focused perceptual training facilitates L2 learners' segmental perception and spoken word identification. Hardison (2003) and Motohashi-Saigo and Hardison (2009) found benefits of visual cues in the training for acquisition of L2 contrasts. The present study examined factors affecting perception and production…

When speaker identity is unavoidable: Neural processing of speaker identity cues in natural speech.

PubMed

Tuninetti, Alba; Chládková, Kateřina; Peter, Varghese; Schiller, Niels O; Escudero, Paola

2017-11-01

Speech sound acoustic properties vary largely across speakers and accents. When perceiving speech, adult listeners normally disregard non-linguistic variation caused by speaker or accent differences, in order to comprehend the linguistic message, e.g. to correctly identify a speech sound or a word. Here we tested whether the process of normalizing speaker and accent differences, facilitating the recognition of linguistic information, is found at the level of neural processing, and whether it is modulated by the listeners' native language. In a multi-deviant oddball paradigm, native and nonnative speakers of Dutch were exposed to naturally-produced Dutch vowels varying in speaker, sex, accent, and phoneme identity. Unexpectedly, the analysis of mismatch negativity (MMN) amplitudes elicited by each type of change shows a large degree of early perceptual sensitivity to non-linguistic cues. This finding on perception of naturally-produced stimuli contrasts with previous studies examining the perception of synthetic stimuli wherein adult listeners automatically disregard acoustic cues to speaker identity. The present finding bears relevance to speech normalization theories, suggesting that at an unattended level of processing, listeners are indeed sensitive to changes in fundamental frequency in natural speech tokens. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Handling Discourse: Gestures, Reference Tracking, and Communication Strategies in Early L2

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gullberg, Marianne

2006-01-01

The production of cohesive discourse, especially maintained reference, poses problems for early second language L2 speakers. This paper considers a communicative account of overexplicit L2 discourse by focusing on the interdependence between spoken and gestural cohesion, the latter being expressed by anchoring of referents in gesture space.…

The Relationship between Receptive and Expressive Subskills of Academic L2 Proficiency in Nonnative Speakers of English: A Multigroup Approach

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pae, Hye K.; Greenberg, Daphne

2014-01-01

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between receptive and expressive language skills characterized by the performance of nonnative speakers (NNSs) of English in the academic context. Test scores of 585 adult NNSs were selected from Form 2 of the Pearson Test of English Academic's field-test database. A correlated…

The Storage and Processing of Morphologically Complex Words in L2 Spanish

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Foote, Rebecca

2017-01-01

Research with native speakers indicates that, during word recognition, regularly inflected words undergo parsing that segments them into stems and affixes. In contrast, studies with learners suggest that this parsing may not take place in L2. This study's research questions are: Do L2 Spanish learners store and process regularly inflected,…

Cross-Linguistic Influence in L3 Phonological Acquisition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gut, Ulrike

2010-01-01

This study investigates possible sources and directions of cross-linguistic influence on vowel reduction and speech rhythm produced by four trilingual speakers with different L1s in their L2 (German or English) and L3 (English or German). It was shown that, compared to native speakers, the speakers produced distinct differences in these…

Processing Subject-Object Ambiguities in the L2: A Self-Paced Reading Study with German L2 Learners of Dutch

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Havik, Else; Roberts, Leah; van Hout, Roeland; Schreuder, Robert; Haverkort, Marco

2009-01-01

The results of two self-paced reading experiments are reported, which investigated the online processing of subject-object ambiguities in Dutch relative clause constructions like "Dat is de vrouw die de meisjes heeft/hebben gezien" by German advanced second language (L2) learners of Dutch. Native speakers of both Dutch and German have been shown…

L2 vs. L3 Initial State: A Comparative Study of the Acquisition of French DPs by Vietnamese Monolinguals and Cantonese-English Bilinguals

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Leung, Yan-Kit Ingrid

2005-01-01

This paper compares the initial state of second language acquisition (L2A) and third language acquisition (L3A) from the generative linguistics perspective. We examine the acquisition of the Determiner Phrase (DP) by two groups of beginning French learners: an L2 group (native speakers of Vietnamese who do not speak any English) and an L3 group…

Anaphora Resolution and Reanalysis during L2 Sentence Processing: Evidence from the Visual World Paradigm

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cunnings, Ian; Fotiadou, Georgia; Tsimpli, Ianthi

2017-01-01

In a visual world paradigm study, we manipulated gender congruence between a subject pronoun and two antecedents to investigate whether second language (L2) learners with a null subject first language (L1) acquire and process overt subject pronouns in a nonnull subject L2 in a nativelike way. We also investigated whether L2 speakers revise an…

Bayesian model of categorical effects in L1 and L2 speech perception

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kronrod, Yakov

In this dissertation I present a model that captures categorical effects in both first language (L1) and second language (L2) speech perception. In L1 perception, categorical effects range between extremely strong for consonants to nearly continuous perception of vowels. I treat the problem of speech perception as a statistical inference problem and by quantifying categoricity I obtain a unified model of both strong and weak categorical effects. In this optimal inference mechanism, the listener uses their knowledge of categories and the acoustics of the signal to infer the intended productions of the speaker. The model splits up speech variability into meaningful category variance and perceptual noise variance. The ratio of these two variances, which I call Tau, directly correlates with the degree of categorical effects for a given phoneme or continuum. By fitting the model to behavioral data from different phonemes, I show how a single parametric quantitative variation can lead to the different degrees of categorical effects seen in perception experiments with different phonemes. In L2 perception, L1 categories have been shown to exert an effect on how L2 sounds are identified and how well the listener is able to discriminate them. Various models have been developed to relate the state of L1 categories with both the initial and eventual ability to process the L2. These models largely lacked a formalized metric to measure perceptual distance, a means of making a-priori predictions of behavior for a new contrast, and a way of describing non-discrete gradient effects. In the second part of my dissertation, I apply the same computational model that I used to unify L1 categorical effects to examining L2 perception. I show that we can use the model to make the same type of predictions as other SLA models, but also provide a quantitative framework while formalizing all measures of similarity and bias. Further, I show how using this model to consider L2 learners at

English vowel learning by speakers of Mandarin

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Thomson, Ron I.

2005-04-01

One of the most influential models of second language (L2) speech perception and production [Flege, Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience (York, Baltimore, 1995) pp. 233-277] argues that during initial stages of L2 acquisition, perceptual categories sharing the same or nearly the same acoustic space as first language (L1) categories will be processed as members of that L1 category. Previous research has generally been limited to testing these claims on binary L2 contrasts, rather than larger portions of the perceptual space. This study examines the development of 10 English vowel categories by 20 Mandarin L1 learners of English. Imitation of English vowel stimuli by these learners, at 6 data collection points over the course of one year, were recorded. Using a statistical pattern recognition model, these productions were then assessed against native speaker norms. The degree to which the learners' perception/production shifted toward the target English vowels and the degree to which they matched L1 categories in ways predicted by theoretical models are discussed. The results of this experiment suggest that previous claims about perceptual assimilation of L2 categories to L1 categories may be too strong.

On the Role of Linguistic Contextual Factors for Morphosyntactic Stabilization in High-Level L2 French

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bartning, Inge; Lundell, Fanny Forsberg; Hancock, Victorine

2012-01-01

The purpose of this article is to offer contextual linguistic explanations for morphosyntactic deviances (MSDs) in high-level second language (L2) French (30 nonnative speakers vs. 10 native speakers). It is hypothesized that the distribution of formulaic sequences (FSs) and the complexity of information structure will influence the occurrence of…

Compliment Responses: Comparing American Learners of Japanese, Native Japanese Speakers, and American Native English Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tatsumi, Naofumi

2012-01-01

Previous research shows that American learners of Japanese (AJs) tend to differ from native Japanese speakers in their compliment responses (CRs). Yokota (1986) and Shimizu (2009) have reported that AJs tend to respond more negatively than native Japanese speakers. It has also been reported that AJs' CRs tend to lack the use of avoidance or…

"Unomathotholo" or "i-Radio?" Factors Predicting the Use of English Loanwords among L1 isiXhosa--L2 English Bilinguals

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bylund, Emanuel

2014-01-01

This study examines the use of English loanwords in L1 isiXhosa-L2 English bilinguals living in Cape Town, South Africa. The specific aim of the study is to investigate which individual background factors may increase or reduce the presence of English loanwords in a L1 isiXhosa speaker's repertoire. Data on English loanword use and individual…

Speaker Reliability Guides Children's Inductive Inferences about Novel Properties

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kim, Sunae; Kalish, Charles W.; Harris, Paul L.

2012-01-01

Prior work shows that children can make inductive inferences about objects based on their labels rather than their appearance (Gelman, 2003). A separate line of research shows that children's trust in a speaker's label is selective. Children accept labels from a reliable speaker over an unreliable speaker (e.g., Koenig & Harris, 2005). In the…

Speaker normalization for chinese vowel recognition in cochlear implants.

PubMed

Luo, Xin; Fu, Qian-Jie

2005-07-01

Because of the limited spectra-temporal resolution associated with cochlear implants, implant patients often have greater difficulty with multitalker speech recognition. The present study investigated whether multitalker speech recognition can be improved by applying speaker normalization techniques to cochlear implant speech processing. Multitalker Chinese vowel recognition was tested with normal-hearing Chinese-speaking subjects listening to a 4-channel cochlear implant simulation, with and without speaker normalization. For each subject, speaker normalization was referenced to the speaker that produced the best recognition performance under conditions without speaker normalization. To match the remaining speakers to this "optimal" output pattern, the overall frequency range of the analysis filter bank was adjusted for each speaker according to the ratio of the mean third formant frequency values between the specific speaker and the reference speaker. Results showed that speaker normalization provided a small but significant improvement in subjects' overall recognition performance. After speaker normalization, subjects' patterns of recognition performance across speakers changed, demonstrating the potential for speaker-dependent effects with the proposed normalization technique.

The Effects of L2 Experience and Vowel Context on the Perceptual Assimilation of English Fricatives by L2 Thai Learners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kitikanan, Patchanok

2017-01-01

The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of vowel context and language experience in the perceived similarity between L2 English fricatives and Thai sounds. The target English sounds being investigated were the sounds /v, f, w, ?, t?, s, ð, d, z, ?, t??/. These sounds were elicited from four native English speakers in words in onset…

Factors Affecting Grammatical and Lexical Complexity of Long-Term L2 Speakers' Oral Proficiency

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lahmann, Cornelia; Steinkrauss, Rasmus; Schmid, Monika S.

2016-01-01

There remains considerable disagreement about which factors drive second language (L2) ultimate attainment. Age of onset (AO) appears to be a robust factor, lending support to theories of maturational constraints on L2 acquisition. The present study is an investigation of factors that influence grammatical and lexical complexity at the stage of L2…

Effects of Referent Token Variability on L2 Vocabulary Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sommers, Mitchell S.; Barcroft, Joe

2013-01-01

Previous research has demonstrated substantially improved second language (L2) vocabulary learning when spoken word forms are varied using multiple talkers, speaking styles, or speaking rates. In contrast, the present study varied visual representations of referents for target vocabulary. English speakers learned Spanish words in formats of no…

Beyond semantic accuracy: preschoolers evaluate a speaker's reasons.

PubMed

Koenig, Melissa A

2012-01-01

Children's sensitivity to the quality of epistemic reasons and their selective trust in the more reasonable of 2 informants was investigated in 2 experiments. Three-, 4-, and 5-year-old children (N = 90) were presented with speakers who stated different kinds of evidence for what they believed. Experiment 1 showed that children of all age groups appropriately judged looking, reliable testimony, and inference as better reasons for belief than pretense, guessing, and desiring. Experiment 2 showed that 3- and 4-year-old children preferred to seek and accept new information from a speaker who was previously judged to use the "best" way of thinking. The findings demonstrate that children distinguish certain good from bad reasons and prefer to learn from those who showcased good reasoning in the past. © 2012 The Author. Child Development © 2012 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.

Arctic Visiting Speakers Series (AVS)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fox, S. E.; Griswold, J.

2011-12-01

. Hosts must acknowledge the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs and ARCUS in all promotional materials. Host agrees to send ARCUS photographs, fliers, and if possible a video of the main lecture. Host and speaker agree to collect data on the number of attendees in each audience to submit as part of a post-tour evaluation. The grants can generally cover all the expenses of a tour, depending on the location. A maximum of 2,000 will be provided for the travel related expenses of a speaker on a domestic visit. A maxiμm of 2,500 will be provided for the travel related expenses of a speaker on an international visit. Each speaker will receive an honorarium of $300.

Consistency between verbal and non-verbal affective cues: a clue to speaker credibility.

PubMed

Gillis, Randall L; Nilsen, Elizabeth S

2017-06-01

Listeners are exposed to inconsistencies in communication; for example, when speakers' words (i.e. verbal) are discrepant with their demonstrated emotions (i.e. non-verbal). Such inconsistencies introduce ambiguity, which may render a speaker to be a less credible source of information. Two experiments examined whether children make credibility discriminations based on the consistency of speakers' affect cues. In Experiment 1, school-age children (7- to 8-year-olds) preferred to solicit information from consistent speakers (e.g. those who provided a negative statement with negative affect), over novel speakers, to a greater extent than they preferred to solicit information from inconsistent speakers (e.g. those who provided a negative statement with positive affect) over novel speakers. Preschoolers (4- to 5-year-olds) did not demonstrate this preference. Experiment 2 showed that school-age children's ratings of speakers were influenced by speakers' affect consistency when the attribute being judged was related to information acquisition (speakers' believability, "weird" speech), but not general characteristics (speakers' friendliness, likeability). Together, findings suggest that school-age children are sensitive to, and use, the congruency of affect cues to determine whether individuals are credible sources of information.

Interface strategies in monolingual and end-state L2 Spanish grammars are not that different.

PubMed

Parafita Couto, María C; Mueller Gathercole, Virginia C; Stadthagen-González, Hans

2014-01-01

This study explores syntactic, pragmatic, and lexical influences on adherence to SV and VS orders in native and fluent L2 speakers of Spanish. A judgment task examined 20 native monolingual and 20 longstanding L2 bilingual Spanish speakers' acceptance of SV and VS structures. Seventy-six distinct verbs were tested under a combination of syntactic and pragmatic constraints. Our findings challenge the hypothesis that internal interfaces are acquired more easily than external interfaces (Sorace, 2005, 2011; Sorace and Filiaci, 2006; White, 2006). Additional findings are that (a) bilinguals' judgments are less firm overall than monolinguals' (i.e., monolinguals are more likely to give extreme "yes" or "no" judgments) and (b) individual verbs do not necessarily behave as predicted under standard definitions of unaccusatives and unergatives. Correlations of the patterns found in the data with verb frequencies suggest that usage-based accounts of grammatical knowledge could help provide insight into speakers' knowledge of these constructs.

Investigating Executive Working Memory and Phonological Short-Term Memory in Relation to Fluency and Self-Repair Behavior in L2 Speech.

PubMed

Georgiadou, Effrosyni; Roehr-Brackin, Karen

2017-08-01

This paper reports the findings of a study investigating the relationship of executive working memory (WM) and phonological short-term memory (PSTM) to fluency and self-repair behavior during an unrehearsed oral task performed by second language (L2) speakers of English at two levels of proficiency, elementary and lower intermediate. Correlational analyses revealed a negative relationship between executive WM and number of pauses in the lower intermediate L2 speakers. However, no reliable association was found in our sample between executive WM or PSTM and self-repair behavior in terms of either frequency or type of self-repair. Taken together, our findings suggest that while executive WM may enhance performance at the conceptualization and formulation stages of the speech production process, self-repair behavior in L2 speakers may depend on factors other than working memory.

Perception-Production Link in L2 Japanese Vowel Duration: Training with Technology

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Okuno, Tomoko; Hardison, Debra M.

2016-01-01

This study examined factors affecting perception training of vowel duration in L2 Japanese with transfer to production. In a pre-test, training, post-test design, 48 L1 English speakers were assigned to one of three groups: auditory-visual (AV) training using waveform displays, auditory-only (A-only), or no training. Within-group variables were…

Consonant Cluster Acquisition by L2 Thai Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rungruang, Apichai

2017-01-01

Attempts to account for consonant cluster acquisition are always made into two aspects. One is transfer of the first language (L1), and another is markedness effects on the developmental processes in second language acquisition. This study has continued these attempts by finding out how well Thai university students were able to perceive English…

Speaker Invariance for Phonetic Information: an fMRI Investigation

PubMed Central

Salvata, Caden; Blumstein, Sheila E.; Myers, Emily B.

2012-01-01

The current study explored how listeners map the variable acoustic input onto a common sound structure representation while being able to retain phonetic detail to distinguish among the identity of talkers. An adaptation paradigm was utilized to examine areas which showed an equal neural response (equal release from adaptation) to phonetic change when spoken by the same speaker and when spoken by two different speakers, and insensitivity (failure to show release from adaptation) when the same phonetic input was spoken by a different speaker. Neural areas which showed speaker invariance were located in the anterior portion of the middle superior temporal gyrus bilaterally. These findings provide support for the view that speaker normalization processes allow for the translation of a variable speech input to a common abstract sound structure. That this process appears to occur early in the processing stream, recruiting temporal structures, suggests that this mapping takes place prelexically, before sound structure input is mapped on to lexical representations. PMID:23264714

Unsupervised real-time speaker identification for daily movies

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Li, Ying; Kuo, C.-C. Jay

2002-07-01

The problem of identifying speakers for movie content analysis is addressed in this paper. While most previous work on speaker identification was carried out in a supervised mode using pure audio data, more robust results can be obtained in real-time by integrating knowledge from multiple media sources in an unsupervised mode. In this work, both audio and visual cues will be employed and subsequently combined in a probabilistic framework to identify speakers. Particularly, audio information is used to identify speakers with a maximum likelihood (ML)-based approach while visual information is adopted to distinguish speakers by detecting and recognizing their talking faces based on face detection/recognition and mouth tracking techniques. Moreover, to accommodate for speakers' acoustic variations along time, we update their models on the fly by adapting to their newly contributed speech data. Encouraging results have been achieved through extensive experiments, which shows a promising future of the proposed audiovisual-based unsupervised speaker identification system.

Implicit Prosody and Cue-based Retrieval: L1 and L2 Agreement and Comprehension during Reading

PubMed Central

Pratt, Elizabeth; Fernández, Eva M.

2016-01-01

This project focuses on structural and prosodic effects during reading, examining their influence on agreement processing and comprehension in native English (L1) and Spanish–English bilingual (L2) speakers. We consolidate research from several distinct areas of inquiry—cognitive processing, reading fluency, and L1/L2 processing—in order to support the integration of prosody with a cue-based retrieval mechanism for subject-verb agreement. To explore this proposal, the experimental design manipulated text presentation to influence implicit prosody, using sentences designed to induce subject-verb agreement attraction errors. Materials included simple and complex relative clauses with head nouns and verbs that were either matched or mismatched for number. Participants read items in one of three presentation formats (whole sentence, word-by-word, or phrase-by-phrase), rated each item for grammaticality, and responded to a comprehension probe. Results indicated that while overall, message comprehension was prioritized over subject-verb agreement computation, presentation format differentially affected both measures in the L1 and L2 groups. For the L1 participants, facilitating the projection of phrasal prosody onto text (phrase-by-phrase presentation) enhanced performance in agreement processing, while disrupting prosodic projection via word-by-word presentation decreased comprehension accuracy. For the L2 participants, however, phrase-by-phrase presentation was not significantly beneficial for agreement processing, and additionally resulted in lower comprehension accuracy. These differences point to a significant role of prosodic phrasing during agreement processing in both L1 and L2 speakers, additionally suggesting that it may contribute to a cue-based retrieval agreement model, either acting as a cue directly, or otherwise scaffolding the retrieval process. The discussion and results presented provide support both for a cue-based retrieval mechanism in

Implicit Prosody and Cue-based Retrieval: L1 and L2 Agreement and Comprehension during Reading.

PubMed

Pratt, Elizabeth; Fernández, Eva M

2016-01-01

This project focuses on structural and prosodic effects during reading, examining their influence on agreement processing and comprehension in native English (L1) and Spanish-English bilingual (L2) speakers. We consolidate research from several distinct areas of inquiry-cognitive processing, reading fluency, and L1/L2 processing-in order to support the integration of prosody with a cue-based retrieval mechanism for subject-verb agreement. To explore this proposal, the experimental design manipulated text presentation to influence implicit prosody, using sentences designed to induce subject-verb agreement attraction errors. Materials included simple and complex relative clauses with head nouns and verbs that were either matched or mismatched for number. Participants read items in one of three presentation formats (whole sentence, word-by-word, or phrase-by-phrase), rated each item for grammaticality, and responded to a comprehension probe. Results indicated that while overall, message comprehension was prioritized over subject-verb agreement computation, presentation format differentially affected both measures in the L1 and L2 groups. For the L1 participants, facilitating the projection of phrasal prosody onto text (phrase-by-phrase presentation) enhanced performance in agreement processing, while disrupting prosodic projection via word-by-word presentation decreased comprehension accuracy. For the L2 participants, however, phrase-by-phrase presentation was not significantly beneficial for agreement processing, and additionally resulted in lower comprehension accuracy. These differences point to a significant role of prosodic phrasing during agreement processing in both L1 and L2 speakers, additionally suggesting that it may contribute to a cue-based retrieval agreement model, either acting as a cue directly, or otherwise scaffolding the retrieval process. The discussion and results presented provide support both for a cue-based retrieval mechanism in agreement

The 2016 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation

DTIC Science & Technology

2017-08-20

The 2016 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation Seyed Omid Sadjadi1,∗, Timothée Kheyrkhah1,†, Audrey Tong1, Craig Greenberg1, Douglas Reynolds2, Elliot...recent in an ongoing series of speaker recognition evaluations (SRE) to foster research in ro- bust text-independent speaker recognition, as well as...online evaluation platform, a fixed training data condition, more variability in test segment duration (uni- formly distributed between 10s and 60s

Does language shape thought? Mandarin and English speakers' conceptions of time.

PubMed

Boroditsky, L

2001-08-01

Does the language you speak affect how you think about the world? This question is taken up in three experiments. English and Mandarin talk about time differently--English predominantly talks about time as if it were horizontal, while Mandarin also commonly describes time as vertical. This difference between the two languages is reflected in the way their speakers think about time. In one study, Mandarin speakers tended to think about time vertically even when they were thinking for English (Mandarin speakers were faster to confirm that March comes earlier than April if they had just seen a vertical array of objects than if they had just seen a horizontal array, and the reverse was true for English speakers). Another study showed that the extent to which Mandarin-English bilinguals think about time vertically is related to how old they were when they first began to learn English. In another experiment native English speakers were taught to talk about time using vertical spatial terms in a way similar to Mandarin. On a subsequent test, this group of English speakers showed the same bias to think about time vertically as was observed with Mandarin speakers. It is concluded that (1) language is a powerful tool in shaping thought about abstract domains and (2) one's native language plays an important role in shaping habitual thought (e.g., how one tends to think about time) but does not entirely determine one's thinking in the strong Whorfian sense. Copyright 2001 Academic Press.

Understanding speaker attitudes from prosody by adults with Parkinson's disease.

PubMed

Monetta, Laura; Cheang, Henry S; Pell, Marc D

2008-09-01

The ability to interpret vocal (prosodic) cues during social interactions can be disrupted by Parkinson's disease, with notable effects on how emotions are understood from speech. This study investigated whether PD patients who have emotional prosody deficits exhibit further difficulties decoding the attitude of a speaker from prosody. Vocally inflected but semantically nonsensical 'pseudo-utterances' were presented to listener groups with and without PD in two separate rating tasks. Task I required participants to rate how confident a speaker sounded from their voice and Task 2 required listeners to rate how polite the speaker sounded for a comparable set of pseudo-utterances. The results showed that PD patients were significantly less able than HC participants to use prosodic cues to differentiate intended levels of speaker confidence in speech, although the patients could accurately detect the politelimpolite attitude of the speaker from prosody in most cases. Our data suggest that many PD patients fail to use vocal cues to effectively infer a speaker's emotions as well as certain attitudes in speech such as confidence, consistent with the idea that the basal ganglia play a role in the meaningful processing of prosodic sequences in spoken language (Pell & Leonard, 2003).

Modelling Errors in Automatic Speech Recognition for Dysarthric Speakers

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Caballero Morales, Santiago Omar; Cox, Stephen J.

2009-12-01

Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder characterized by weakness, paralysis, or poor coordination of the muscles responsible for speech. Although automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have been developed for disordered speech, factors such as low intelligibility and limited phonemic repertoire decrease speech recognition accuracy, making conventional speaker adaptation algorithms perform poorly on dysarthric speakers. In this work, rather than adapting the acoustic models, we model the errors made by the speaker and attempt to correct them. For this task, two techniques have been developed: (1) a set of "metamodels" that incorporate a model of the speaker's phonetic confusion matrix into the ASR process; (2) a cascade of weighted finite-state transducers at the confusion matrix, word, and language levels. Both techniques attempt to correct the errors made at the phonetic level and make use of a language model to find the best estimate of the correct word sequence. Our experiments show that both techniques outperform standard adaptation techniques.

Speakers of Different Languages Process the Visual World Differently

PubMed Central

Chabal, Sarah; Marian, Viorica

2015-01-01

Language and vision are highly interactive. Here we show that people activate language when they perceive the visual world, and that this language information impacts how speakers of different languages focus their attention. For example, when searching for an item (e.g., clock) in the same visual display, English and Spanish speakers look at different objects. Whereas English speakers searching for the clock also look at a cloud, Spanish speakers searching for the clock also look at a gift, because the Spanish names for gift (regalo) and clock (reloj) overlap phonologically. These different looking patterns emerge despite an absence of direct linguistic input, showing that language is automatically activated by visual scene processing. We conclude that the varying linguistic information available to speakers of different languages affects visual perception, leading to differences in how the visual world is processed. PMID:26030171

The influence of language deprivation in early childhood on L2 processing: An ERP comparison of deaf native signers and deaf signers with a delayed language acquisition.

PubMed

Skotara, Nils; Salden, Uta; Kügow, Monique; Hänel-Faulhaber, Barbara; Röder, Brigitte

2012-05-03

To examine which language function depends on early experience, the present study compared deaf native signers, deaf non-native signers and hearing German native speakers while processing German sentences. The participants watched simple written sentences while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. At the end of each sentence they were asked to judge whether the sentence was correct or not. Two types of violations were introduced in the middle of the sentence: a semantically implausible noun or a violation of subject-verb number agreement. The results showed a similar ERP pattern after semantic violations (an N400 followed by a positivity) in all three groups. After syntactic violations, native German speakers and native signers of German sign language (DGS) with German as second language (L2) showed a left anterior negativity (LAN) followed by a P600, whereas no LAN but a negativity over the right hemisphere instead was found in deaf participants with a delayed onset of first language (L1) acquisition. The P600 of this group had a smaller amplitude and a different scalp distribution as compared to German native speakers. The results of the present study suggest that language deprivation in early childhood alters the cerebral organization of syntactic language processing mechanisms for L2. Semantic language processing instead was unaffected.

L2 Gender Facilitation and Inhibition in Spoken Word Recognition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Behney, Jennifer N.

2011-01-01

This dissertation investigates the role of grammatical gender facilitation and inhibition in second language (L2) learners' spoken word recognition. Native speakers of languages that have grammatical gender are sensitive to gender marking when hearing and recognizing a word. Gender facilitation refers to when a given noun that is preceded by an…

Faithful Imitator, Legitimate Speaker, Playful Creator and Dialogical Communicator: Shift in English Learners' Identity Prototypes

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gao, Yihong

2014-01-01

This paper attempts to conceptualize identity prototypes regarding model L2 learners/users of English over the past 50 years, as embedded in research discourses. For a long time, the ideal learner was a "faithful imitator" whose L2 use and cultural conduct were strictly modeled on the native speaker (NS). With postcolonial changes around…

Mediated Vocabulary in Native Speaker-Learner Interactions during an Oral Portfolio Activity

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tocaimaza-Hatch, C. Cecilia

2016-01-01

This project investigated vocabulary learning from a sociocultural perspective--in particular, the way in which lexical knowledge was mediated in Spanish second language (L2) learners' and native speakers' (NSs') interactions. Nine students who were enrolled in an advanced conversation course completed an oral portfolio assignment consisting of…

The Immediate and Chronic Influence of Spatio-Temporal Metaphors on the Mental Representations of Time in English, Mandarin, and Mandarin-English Speakers

PubMed Central

Lai, Vicky Tzuyin; Boroditsky, Lera

2013-01-01

In this paper we examine whether experience with spatial metaphors for time has an influence on people’s representation of time. In particular we ask whether spatio-temporal metaphors can have both chronic and immediate effects on temporal thinking. In Study 1, we examine the prevalence of ego-moving representations for time in Mandarin speakers, English speakers, and Mandarin-English (ME) bilinguals. As predicted by observations in linguistic analyses, we find that Mandarin speakers are less likely to take an ego-moving perspective than are English speakers. Further, we find that ME bilinguals tested in English are less likely to take an ego-moving perspective than are English monolinguals (an effect of L1 on meaning-making in L2), and also that ME bilinguals tested in Mandarin are more likely to take an ego-moving perspective than are Mandarin monolinguals (an effect of L2 on meaning-making in L1). These findings demonstrate that habits of metaphor use in one language can influence temporal reasoning in another language, suggesting the metaphors can have a chronic effect on patterns in thought. In Study 2 we test Mandarin speakers using either horizontal or vertical metaphors in the immediate context of the task. We find that Mandarin speakers are more likely to construct front-back representations of time when understanding front-back metaphors, and more likely to construct up-down representations of time when understanding up-down metaphors. These findings demonstrate that spatio-temporal metaphors can also have an immediate influence on temporal reasoning. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that the metaphors we use to talk about time have both immediate and long-term consequences for how we conceptualize and reason about this fundamental domain of experience. PMID:23630505

Orthographic Influence on the Phonological Development of L2 Learners of Korean

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lee, Sooyeon

2012-01-01

This dissertation examines the influence of L2 orthographic representation on the phonological development of American English speakers learning Korean, addressing specifically the syllabification and resyllabification of Korean intervocalic obstruents and the intervocalic liquid phoneme. Although Korean and English both employ alphabetic writing…

Structure of the Second Language Mental Lexicon: How Does It Compare to Native Speakers' Lexical Organization?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zareva, Alla

2007-01-01

One of the questions frequently asked in second language (L2) lexical research is how L2 learners' patterns of lexical organization compare to those of native speakers (NSs). A growing body of research addresses this question by using word association (WA) tests. However, little research has been done on the role of language proficiency in the…

Understanding and Overcoming Pragmatic Failure in Intercultural Communication: From Focus on Speakers to Focus on Hearers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Padilla Cruz, Manuel

2013-01-01

For learners to communicate efficiently in the L2, they must avoid pragmatic failure. In many cases, teachers' praxis centres on the learner's performance in the L2 or his role as a speaker, which neglects the importance of his role as interpreter of utterances. Assuming that, as hearers, learners also have a responsibility to avoid…

Speakers of different languages process the visual world differently.

PubMed

Chabal, Sarah; Marian, Viorica

2015-06-01

Language and vision are highly interactive. Here we show that people activate language when they perceive the visual world, and that this language information impacts how speakers of different languages focus their attention. For example, when searching for an item (e.g., clock) in the same visual display, English and Spanish speakers look at different objects. Whereas English speakers searching for the clock also look at a cloud, Spanish speakers searching for the clock also look at a gift, because the Spanish names for gift (regalo) and clock (reloj) overlap phonologically. These different looking patterns emerge despite an absence of direct language input, showing that linguistic information is automatically activated by visual scene processing. We conclude that the varying linguistic information available to speakers of different languages affects visual perception, leading to differences in how the visual world is processed. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Perception of speech rhythm in second language: the case of rhythmically similar L1 and L2

PubMed Central

Ordin, Mikhail; Polyanskaya, Leona

2015-01-01

We investigated the perception of developmental changes in timing patterns that happen in the course of second language (L2) acquisition, provided that the native and the target languages of the learner are rhythmically similar (German and English). It was found that speech rhythm in L2 English produced by German learners becomes increasingly stress-timed as acquisition progresses. This development is captured by the tempo-normalized rhythm measures of durational variability. Advanced learners also deliver speech at a faster rate. However, when native speakers have to classify the timing patterns characteristic of L2 English of German learners at different proficiency levels, they attend to speech rate cues and ignore the differences in speech rhythm. PMID:25859228

Literacy Skill Differences between Adult Native English and Native Spanish Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Herman, Julia; Cote, Nicole Gilbert; Reilly, Lenore; Binder, Katherine S.

2013-01-01

The goal of this study was to compare the literacy skills of adult native English and native Spanish ABE speakers. Participants were 169 native English speakers and 124 native Spanish speakers recruited from five prior research projects. The results showed that the native Spanish speakers were less skilled on morphology and passage comprehension…

Prosodic Cues in Relative Clauses Disambiguation: Bilinguals vs. L2 Learners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Checa-Garcia, Irene

2016-01-01

This study investigates the preferences for attachment of a relative clause (RC) to a complex noun phrase (NP) of the type: NP1 of NP2, in Spanish-English bilinguals and advanced learners of Spanish. Spanish speakers show a moderate preference for attaching the RC to the first NP, while speakers of English prefer the second NP. Subjects were…

Subject-to-Subject Raising and the Syntax of Tense in L2 Spanish: A Full Access Approach

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Campos-Dintrans, Gonzalo; Pires, Acrisio; Rothman, Jason

2014-01-01

This paper investigates the acquisition of syntax in L2 grammars. We tested adult L2 speakers of Spanish (English L1) on the feature specification of T(ense), which is different in English and Spanish in so-called subject-to-subject raising structures. We present experimental results with the verb parecer "to seem/to appear" in different…

Questioning English Standards: Learner Attitudes and L2 Choices in Norway

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rindal, Ulrikke

2014-01-01

This study investigates attitudes towards varieties of English among Norwegian adolescent learners and assesses the role of social evaluation for second language (L2) pronunciation choices by combining a verbal guise test with speaker commentary and reports of language choices. The results suggest that while American English is the most accessible…

Context Effects in the Processing of Phonolexical Ambiguity in L2

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chrabaszcz, Anna; Gor, Kira

2014-01-01

In order to comprehend speech, listeners have to combine low-level phonetic information about the incoming auditory signal with higher-order contextual information to make a lexical selection. This requires stable phonological categories and unambiguous representations of words in the mental lexicon. Unlike native speakers, second language (L2)…

Production and Perception of the English /ae/-/?/ Contrast in Switched-Dominance Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Casillas, Joseph V.; Simonet, Miquel

2016-01-01

This study investigates how fluent second-language (L2) learners of English produce and perceive the /ae/-/?/ vowel contrast of Southwestern American English. Two learner groups are examined: (1) early, proficient English speakers who were raised by Spanish-speaking families but who became dominant in English during childhood and, as adults, lack…

Russian Speakers' L2 Chinese Acquisition of "Wh"-Topicalization at the Syntax-Discourse Interface

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dugarova, Esuna

2014-01-01

In recent second language (L2) research it has been proposed that unlike linguistic phenomena pertaining to internal interfaces, those at external interfaces pose greater difficulty to adult L2 learners and may not be fully acquired. It has further been pointed out that such problematic acquisition at the interface level should not be attributed…

Perception of speaker size and sex of vowel sounds

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Smith, David R. R.; Patterson, Roy D.

2005-04-01

Glottal-pulse rate (GPR) and vocal-tract length (VTL) are both related to speaker size and sex-however, it is unclear how they interact to determine our perception of speaker size and sex. Experiments were designed to measure the relative contribution of GPR and VTL to judgements of speaker size and sex. Vowels were scaled to represent people with different GPRs and VTLs, including many well beyond the normal population values. In a single interval, two response rating paradigm, listeners judged the size (using a 7-point scale) and sex/age of the speaker (man, woman, boy, or girl) of these scaled vowels. Results from the size-rating experiments show that VTL has a much greater influence upon judgements of speaker size than GPR. Results from the sex-categorization experiments show that judgements of speaker sex are influenced about equally by GPR and VTL for vowels with normal GPR and VTL values. For abnormal combinations of GPR and VTL, where low GPRs are combined with short VTLs, VTL has more influence than GPR in sex judgements. [Work supported by the UK MRC (G9901257) and the German Volkswagen Foundation (VWF 1/79 783).

Working with Speakers.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pestel, Ann

1989-01-01

The author discusses working with speakers from business and industry to present career information at the secondary level. Advice for speakers is presented, as well as tips for program coordinators. (CH)

Eventive and Stative Passives in Spanish L2 Acquisition: A Matter of Aspect

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

De Garavito, Joyce Bruhn; Valenzuela, Elena

2008-01-01

This paper reports on an empirical study that examined knowledge of eventive and stative passives in the L2 Spanish grammar of L1 speakers of English. Although the two types of passive exist in English, the difference between them is not signaled in any specific way. In Spanish, in contrast, the distinction is marked by the choice of copula: "ser"…

On the optimization of a mixed speaker array in an enclosed space using the virtual-speaker weighting method

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Peng, Bo; Zheng, Sifa; Liao, Xiangning; Lian, Xiaomin

2018-03-01

In order to achieve sound field reproduction in a wide frequency band, multiple-type speakers are used. The reproduction accuracy is not only affected by the signals sent to the speakers, but also depends on the position and the number of each type of speaker. The method of optimizing a mixed speaker array is investigated in this paper. A virtual-speaker weighting method is proposed to optimize both the position and the number of each type of speaker. In this method, a virtual-speaker model is proposed to quantify the increment of controllability of the speaker array when the speaker number increases. While optimizing a mixed speaker array, the gain of the virtual-speaker transfer function is used to determine the priority orders of the candidate speaker positions, which optimizes the position of each type of speaker. Then the relative gain of the virtual-speaker transfer function is used to determine whether the speakers are redundant, which optimizes the number of each type of speaker. Finally the virtual-speaker weighting method is verified by reproduction experiments of the interior sound field in a passenger car. The results validate that the optimum mixed speaker array can be obtained using the proposed method.

The Exploitation of Subphonemic Acoustic Detail in L2 Speech Segmentation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Shoemaker, Ellenor

2014-01-01

The current study addresses an aspect of second language (L2) phonological acquisition that has received little attention to date--namely, the acquisition of allophonic variation as a word boundary cue. The role of subphonemic variation in the segmentation of speech by native speakers has been indisputably demonstrated; however, the acquisition of…

RTP Speakers Bureau

EPA Pesticide Factsheets

The Research Triangle Park Speakers Bureau page is a free resource that schools, universities, and community groups in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, N.C. area can use to request speakers and find educational resources.

Request a Speaker

Science.gov Websites

. Northern Command Speakers Program The U.S. Northern Command Speaker's Program works to increase face-to -face contact with our public to help build and sustain public understanding of our command missions and

Beyond Semantic Accuracy: Preschoolers Evaluate a Speaker's Reasons

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Koenig, Melissa A.

2012-01-01

Children's sensitivity to the quality of epistemic reasons and their selective trust in the more reasonable of 2 informants was investigated in 2 experiments. Three-, 4-, and 5-year-old children (N = 90) were presented with speakers who stated different kinds of evidence for what they believed. Experiment 1 showed that children of all age groups…

Non-Native Speaker Interaction Management Strategies in a Network-Based Virtual Environment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Peterson, Mark

2008-01-01

This article investigates the dyad-based communication of two groups of non-native speakers (NNSs) of English involved in real time interaction in a type of text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC) tool known as a MOO. The object of this semester long study was to examine the ways in which the subjects managed their L2 interaction during…

Reflecting on Native Speaker Privilege

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Berger, Kathleen

2014-01-01

The issues surrounding native speakers (NSs) and nonnative speakers (NNSs) as teachers (NESTs and NNESTs, respectively) in the field of teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) are a current topic of interest. In many contexts, the native speaker of English is viewed as the model teacher, thus putting the NEST into a position of…

The Achievement of Intersubjectivity through Embodied Completions: A Study of Interactions between First and Second Language Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mori, Junko; Hayashi, Makoto

2006-01-01

This study examines casual interactions between first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers of Japanese, paying special attention to the coordination of vocal and non-vocal resources that are brought to bear on the achievement of intersubjectivity. More specifically, this study investigates a practice of "embodied completion" (Olsher…

Speaker Clustering for a Mixture of Singing and Reading (Preprint)

DTIC Science & Technology

2012-03-01

diarization [2, 3] which answers the ques- tion of ”who spoke when?” is a combination of speaker segmentation and clustering. Although it is possible to...focuses on speaker clustering, the techniques developed here can be applied to speaker diarization . For the remainder of this paper, the term ”speech...and retrieval,” Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 88, 2000. [2] S. Tranter and D. Reynolds, “An overview of automatic speaker diarization systems,” IEEE

Does the Owl Fly out of the Tree or Does the Owl Exit the Tree Flying? How L2 Learners Overcome Their L1 Lexicalization Biases

PubMed Central

Song, Lulu; Pulverman, Rachel; Pepe, Christina; Golinkoff, Roberta Michnick; Hirsh-Pasek, Kathy

2016-01-01

Learning a language is more than learning its vocabulary and grammar. For example, compared to English, Spanish uses many more path verbs such as ascender (‘to move upward’) and salir (‘to go out’), and expresses manner of motion optionally. English, in contrast, has many manner verbs (e.g., run, jog) and expresses path in prepositional phrases (e.g., out of the barn). The way in which a language encodes an event is known as its lexicalization pattern or bias. Using a written sentence elicitation task, we asked whether adult Spanish learners whose L1 was English adopted Spanish lexicalization biases, and what types of L2 exposure facilitated the learning of lexicalization biases. Results showed that advanced, but not intermediate, adult Spanish learners showed a path bias comparable to that found in native speakers of Spanish. Furthermore, study abroad experience is associated with better acquisition of L2 lexicalization biases when describing certain types of events. PMID:27103880

Using eye-tracking to study the on-line processing of case-marking information among intermediate L2 learners of German

PubMed Central

Jackson, Carrie N.; Dussias, Paola E.; Hristova, Adelina

2012-01-01

This study uses eye-tracking to examine the processing of case-marking information in ambiguous subject- and object-first wh-questions in German. The position of the lexical verb was also manipulated via verb tense to investigate whether verb location influences how intermediate L2 learners process L2 sentences. Results show that intermediate L2 German learners were sensitive to case-marking information, exhibiting longer processing times on subject-first than object-first sentences, regardless of verb location. German native speakers exhibited the opposite word order preference, with longer processing times on object-first than subject-first sentences, replicating previous findings. These results are discussed in light of current L2 processing research, highlighting how methodological constraints influence researchers’ abilities to measure the on-line processing of morphosyntactic information among intermediate L2 learners. PMID:23493761

Negotiating Multiple Audiences of L2 Learners on Facebook: Navigating Parallel Realities

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Shafie, Latisha Asmaak; Yaacob, Aizan; Singh, Paramjit Kaur A/P Karpal

2016-01-01

As social network sites have become popular with university students, it is easier to understand how students employ social network sites seamlessly in their academic and personal lives. L2 learners often employ Facebook to improve their English language proficiency by communicating with their native and non-native English speakers. Facebook is…

Developing Conceptual Understanding of Sarcasm in L2 English through Explicit Instruction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kim, Jiyun; Lantolf, James P.

2018-01-01

This article reports on a pedagogical project aimed at helping second language (L2) learners of English develop the ability to detect and appropriately interpret spoken sarcasm. The study used a pre- and posttest procedure to assess the development of learners' ability to both detect sarcasm and impute appropriate speaker intentions and attitudes…

Verification of endocrinological functions at a short distance between parametric speakers and the human body.

PubMed

Lee, Soomin; Katsuura, Tetsuo; Shimomura, Yoshihiro

2011-01-01

In recent years, a new type of speaker called the parametric speaker has been used to generate highly directional sound, and these speakers are now commercially available. In our previous study, we verified that the burden of the parametric speaker was lower than that of the general speaker for endocrine functions. However, nothing has yet been demonstrated about the effects of the shorter distance than 2.6 m between parametric speakers and the human body. Therefore, we investigated the distance effect on endocrinological function and subjective evaluation. Nine male subjects participated in this study. They completed three consecutive sessions: a 20-min quiet period as a baseline, a 30-min mental task period with general speakers or parametric speakers, and a 20-min recovery period. We measured salivary cortisol and chromogranin A (CgA) concentrations. Furthermore, subjects took the Kwansei-gakuin Sleepiness Scale (KSS) test before and after the task and also a sound quality evaluation test after it. Four experiments, one with a speaker condition (general speaker and parametric speaker), the other with a distance condition (0.3 m and 1.0 m), were conducted, respectively, at the same time of day on separate days. We used three-way repeated measures ANOVA (speaker factor × distance factor × time factor) to examine the effects of the parametric speaker. We found that the endocrinological functions were not significantly different between the speaker condition and the distance condition. The results also showed that the physiological burdens increased with progress in time independent of the speaker condition and distance condition.

On how the brain decodes vocal cues about speaker confidence.

PubMed

Jiang, Xiaoming; Pell, Marc D

2015-05-01

In speech communication, listeners must accurately decode vocal cues that refer to the speaker's mental state, such as their confidence or 'feeling of knowing'. However, the time course and neural mechanisms associated with online inferences about speaker confidence are unclear. Here, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the temporal neural dynamics underlying a listener's ability to infer speaker confidence from vocal cues during speech processing. We recorded listeners' real-time brain responses while they evaluated statements wherein the speaker's tone of voice conveyed one of three levels of confidence (confident, close-to-confident, unconfident) or were spoken in a neutral manner. Neural responses time-locked to event onset show that the perceived level of speaker confidence could be differentiated at distinct time points during speech processing: unconfident expressions elicited a weaker P2 than all other expressions of confidence (or neutral-intending utterances), whereas close-to-confident expressions elicited a reduced negative response in the 330-500 msec and 550-740 msec time window. Neutral-intending expressions, which were also perceived as relatively confident, elicited a more delayed, larger sustained positivity than all other expressions in the 980-1270 msec window for this task. These findings provide the first piece of evidence of how quickly the brain responds to vocal cues signifying the extent of a speaker's confidence during online speech comprehension; first, a rough dissociation between unconfident and confident voices occurs as early as 200 msec after speech onset. At a later stage, further differentiation of the exact level of speaker confidence (i.e., close-to-confident, very confident) is evaluated via an inferential system to determine the speaker's meaning under current task settings. These findings extend three-stage models of how vocal emotion cues are processed in speech comprehension (e.g., Schirmer & Kotz, 2006) by

The Use of Articles in L2 English: A Phraseological Perspective

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lesniewska, Justyna

2016-01-01

While it is a well-known fact that speakers of article-less mother tongues, such as Polish, experience problems with articles in English, this study seeks to investigate the problem from a different perspective. Namely, it poses the question of whether the correct use of the article system of the L2 is indeed a purely grammatical task (as it is…

Speaker recognition with temporal cues in acoustic and electric hearing

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Vongphoe, Michael; Zeng, Fan-Gang

2005-08-01

Natural spoken language processing includes not only speech recognition but also identification of the speaker's gender, age, emotional, and social status. Our purpose in this study is to evaluate whether temporal cues are sufficient to support both speech and speaker recognition. Ten cochlear-implant and six normal-hearing subjects were presented with vowel tokens spoken by three men, three women, two boys, and two girls. In one condition, the subject was asked to recognize the vowel. In the other condition, the subject was asked to identify the speaker. Extensive training was provided for the speaker recognition task. Normal-hearing subjects achieved nearly perfect performance in both tasks. Cochlear-implant subjects achieved good performance in vowel recognition but poor performance in speaker recognition. The level of the cochlear implant performance was functionally equivalent to normal performance with eight spectral bands for vowel recognition but only to one band for speaker recognition. These results show a disassociation between speech and speaker recognition with primarily temporal cues, highlighting the limitation of current speech processing strategies in cochlear implants. Several methods, including explicit encoding of fundamental frequency and frequency modulation, are proposed to improve speaker recognition for current cochlear implant users.

L2 Acquisition of Spanish Dative Clitics by English and Dutch Learners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Escobar-Álvarez, M. Ángeles

2017-01-01

This article examines the second language acquisition (SLA) of Spanish dative clitics in clitic doubling (CLD) structures that are closely related to the double object construction (DOC) in English and Dutch. It also addresses the question of how adult English and Dutch speakers learning L2 Spanish in a formal setting develop knowledge and use of…

Brief Report: Relations between Prosodic Performance and Communication and Socialization Ratings in High Functioning Speakers with Autism Spectrum Disorders

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Paul, Rhea; Shriberg, Lawrence D.; McSweeny, Jane; Cicchetti, Domenic; Klin, Ami; Volkmar, Fred

2005-01-01

Shriberg "et al." [Shriberg, L. "et al." (2001). "Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, 44," 1097-1115] described prosody-voice features of 30 high functioning speakers with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) compared to age-matched control speakers. The present study reports additional information on the speakers with ASD, including…

The effects of late acquisition of L2 and the consequences of immigration on L1 for semantic and morpho-syntactic language aspects.

PubMed

Scherag, André; Demuth, Lisa; Rösler, Frank; Neville, Helen J; Röder, Brigitte

2004-10-01

It has been hypothesized that some aspects of a second language (L2) might be learned easier than others if a language is learned late. On the other hand, non-use might result in a loss of language skills in one's native, i.e. one's first language (L1) (language attrition). To study which, if any, aspects of language are affected by either late acquisition or non-use, long-term German immigrants to the US and English native speakers who are long-term immigrants to Germany as well as two additional control groups of native German speakers were tested with an auditory semantic and morpho-syntactic priming paradigm. German adjectives correctly or incorrectly inflected for gender and semantically associated or not associated with the target noun served as primes. Participants made a lexical decision on the target word. All groups of native German speakers gained from semantically and morpho-syntactically congruent primes. Evidence for language attrition was neither found for semantic nor morpho-syntactic priming effects in the German immigrants. In contrast, English native speakers did not gain from a morpho-syntactic congruent prime, whereas semantic priming effects were similar as for the remaining groups. The present data suggest that the full acquisition of at least some syntactic functions may be restricted to limited periods in life while semantic and morpho-syntactic functions seem to be relatively inured to loss due to non-use.

Neural Systems Involved When Attending to a Speaker

PubMed Central

Kamourieh, Salwa; Braga, Rodrigo M.; Leech, Robert; Newbould, Rexford D.; Malhotra, Paresh; Wise, Richard J. S.

2015-01-01

Remembering what a speaker said depends on attention. During conversational speech, the emphasis is on working memory, but listening to a lecture encourages episodic memory encoding. With simultaneous interference from background speech, the need for auditory vigilance increases. We recreated these context-dependent demands on auditory attention in 2 ways. The first was to require participants to attend to one speaker in either the absence or presence of a distracting background speaker. The second was to alter the task demand, requiring either an immediate or delayed recall of the content of the attended speech. Across 2 fMRI studies, common activated regions associated with segregating attended from unattended speech were the right anterior insula and adjacent frontal operculum (aI/FOp), the left planum temporale, and the precuneus. In contrast, activity in a ventral right frontoparietal system was dependent on both the task demand and the presence of a competing speaker. Additional multivariate analyses identified other domain-general frontoparietal systems, where activity increased during attentive listening but was modulated little by the need for speech stream segregation in the presence of 2 speakers. These results make predictions about impairments in attentive listening in different communicative contexts following focal or diffuse brain pathology. PMID:25596592

Proficiency and Working Memory Based Explanations for Nonnative Speakers' Sensitivity to Agreement in Sentence Processing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Coughlin, Caitlin E.; Tremblay, Annie

2013-01-01

This study examines the roles of proficiency and working memory (WM) capacity in second-/foreign-language (L2) learners' processing of agreement morphology. It investigates the processing of grammatical and ungrammatical short- and long-distance number agreement dependencies by native English speakers at two proficiencies in French, and the…

What a speaker's choice of frame reveals: reference points, frame selection, and framing effects.

PubMed

McKenzie, Craig R M; Nelson, Jonathan D

2003-09-01

Framing effects are well established: Listeners' preferences depend on how outcomes are described to them, or framed. Less well understood is what determines how speakers choose frames. Two experiments revealed that reference points systematically influenced speakers' choices between logically equivalent frames. For example, speakers tended to describe a 4-ounce cup filled to the 2-ounce line as half full if it was previously empty but described it as half empty if it was previously full. Similar results were found when speakers could describe the outcome of a medical treatment in terms of either mortality or survival (e.g., 25% die vs. 75% survive). Two additional experiments showed that listeners made accurate inferences about speakers' reference points on the basis of the selected frame (e.g., if a speaker described a cup as half empty, listeners inferred that the cup used to be full). Taken together, the data suggest that frames reliably convey implicit information in addition to their explicit content, which helps explain why framing effects are so robust.

The road to understanding is paved with the speaker's intentions: cues to the speaker's attention and intentions affect pronoun comprehension.

PubMed

Nappa, Rebecca; Arnold, Jennifer E

2014-05-01

A series of experiments explore the effects of attention-directing cues on pronoun resolution, contrasting four specific hypotheses about the interpretation of ambiguous pronouns he and she: (1) it is driven by grammatical rules, (2) it is primarily a function of social processing of the speaker's intention to communicate, (3) it is modulated by the listener's own egocentric attention, and (4) it is primarily a function of learned probabilistic cues. Experiment 1 demonstrates that pronoun interpretation is guided by the well-known N1 (first-mention) bias, which is also modulated by both the speaker's gaze and pointing gestures. Experiment 2 demonstrates that a low-level visual capture cue has no effect on pronoun interpretation, in contrast with the social cue of pointing. Experiment 3 uses a novel intentional cue: the same attention-capture flash as in Experiment 2, but with instructions that the cue is intentionally created by the speaker. This cue does modulate the N1 bias, demonstrating the importance of information about the speaker's intentions to pronoun resolution. Taken in sum, these findings demonstrate that pronoun resolution is a process best categorized as driven by an appreciation of the speaker's communicative intent, which may be subserved by a sensitivity to predictive cues in the environment. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Are Cantonese-Speakers Really Descriptivists? Revisiting Cross-Cultural Semantics

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lam, Barry

2010-01-01

In an article in "Cognition" [Machery, E., Mallon, R., Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2004). "Semantics cross-cultural style." "Cognition, 92", B1-B12] present data which purports to show that East Asian Cantonese-speakers tend to have descriptivist intuitions about the referents of proper names, while Western English-speakers tend to have…

Interpreting Definiteness in a Second Language without Articles: The Case of L2 Russian

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cho, Jacee; Slabakova, Roumyana

2014-01-01

This article investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of two expressions of the semantic feature [definite] in Russian, a language without articles, by English and Korean native speakers. Within the Feature Reassembly approach (Lardiere, 2009), Slabakova (2009) has argued that reassembling features that are represented overtly in the…

The Arctic Visiting Speakers Program

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wiggins, H. V.; Fahnestock, J.

2013-12-01

The Arctic Visiting Speakers Program (AVS) is a program of the Arctic Research Consortium of the U.S. (ARCUS) and funded by the National Science Foundation. AVS provides small grants to researchers and other Arctic experts to travel and share their knowledge in communities where they might not otherwise connect. The program aims to: initiate and encourage arctic science education in communities with little exposure to arctic research; increase collaboration among the arctic research community; nurture communication between arctic researchers and community residents; and foster arctic science education at the local level. Individuals, community organizations, and academic organizations can apply to host a speaker. Speakers cover a wide range of arctic topics and can address a variety of audiences including K-12 students, graduate and undergraduate students, and the general public. Preference is given to tours that reach broad and varied audiences, especially those targeted to underserved populations. Between October 2000 and July 2013, AVS supported 114 tours spanning 9 different countries, including tours in 23 U.S. states. Tours over the past three and a half years have connected Arctic experts with over 6,600 audience members. Post-tour evaluations show that AVS consistently rates high for broadening interest and understanding of arctic issues. AVS provides a case study for how face-to-face interactions between arctic scientists and general audiences can produce high-impact results. Further information can be found at: http://www.arcus.org/arctic-visiting-speakers.

Intoxicated Speech Detection: A Fusion Framework with Speaker-Normalized Hierarchical Functionals and GMM Supervectors

PubMed Central

Bone, Daniel; Li, Ming; Black, Matthew P.; Narayanan, Shrikanth S.

2013-01-01

Segmental and suprasegmental speech signal modulations offer information about paralinguistic content such as affect, age and gender, pathology, and speaker state. Speaker state encompasses medium-term, temporary physiological phenomena influenced by internal or external biochemical actions (e.g., sleepiness, alcohol intoxication). Perceptual and computational research indicates that detecting speaker state from speech is a challenging task. In this paper, we present a system constructed with multiple representations of prosodic and spectral features that provided the best result at the Intoxication Subchallenge of Interspeech 2011 on the Alcohol Language Corpus. We discuss the details of each classifier and show that fusion improves performance. We additionally address the question of how best to construct a speaker state detection system in terms of robust and practical marginalization of associated variability such as through modeling speakers, utterance type, gender, and utterance length. As is the case in human perception, speaker normalization provides significant improvements to our system. We show that a held-out set of baseline (sober) data can be used to achieve comparable gains to other speaker normalization techniques. Our fused frame-level statistic-functional systems, fused GMM systems, and final combined system achieve unweighted average recalls (UARs) of 69.7%, 65.1%, and 68.8%, respectively, on the test set. More consistent numbers compared to development set results occur with matched-prompt training, where the UARs are 70.4%, 66.2%, and 71.4%, respectively. The combined system improves over the Challenge baseline by 5.5% absolute (8.4% relative), also improving upon our previously best result. PMID:24376305

Intonation as an encoder of speaker certainty: information and confirmation yes-no questions in Catalan.

PubMed

Vanrell, Maria del Mar; Mascaró, Ignasi; Torres-Tamarit, Francesc; Prieto, Pilar

2013-06-01

Recent studies in the field of intonational phonology have shown that information-seeking questions can be distinguished from confirmation-seeking questions by prosodic means in a variety of languages (Armstrong, 2010, for Puerto Rican Spanish; Grice & Savino, 1997, for Bari Italian; Kügler, 2003, for Leipzig German; Mata & Santos, 2010, for European Portuguese; Vanrell, Mascaró, Prieto, & Torres-Tamarit, 2010, for Catalan). However, all these studies have relied on production experiments and little is known about the perceptual relevance of these intonational cues. This paper explores whether Majorcan Catalan listeners distinguish information- and confirmation-seeking questions by means of two distinct nuclear falling pitch accents. Three behavioral tasks were conducted with 20 Majorcan Catalan subjects, namely a semantic congruity test, a rating test, and a classical categorical perception identification/discrimination test. The results show that a difference in pitch scaling on the leading H tone of the H+L* nuclear pitch accent is the main cue used by Majorcan Catalan listeners to distinguish confirmation questions from information-seeking questions. Thus, while a iH+L* pitch accent signals an information-seeking question (i.e., the speaker has no expectation about the nature of the answer), the H+L* pitch accent indicates that the speaker is asking about mutually shared information. We argue that these results have implications in representing the distinctions of tonal height in Catalan. The results also support the claim that phonological contrasts in intonation, together with other linguistic strategies, can signal the speakers' beliefs about the certainty of the proposition expressed.

Cost-sensitive learning for emotion robust speaker recognition.

PubMed

Li, Dongdong; Yang, Yingchun; Dai, Weihui

2014-01-01

In the field of information security, voice is one of the most important parts in biometrics. Especially, with the development of voice communication through the Internet or telephone system, huge voice data resources are accessed. In speaker recognition, voiceprint can be applied as the unique password for the user to prove his/her identity. However, speech with various emotions can cause an unacceptably high error rate and aggravate the performance of speaker recognition system. This paper deals with this problem by introducing a cost-sensitive learning technology to reweight the probability of test affective utterances in the pitch envelop level, which can enhance the robustness in emotion-dependent speaker recognition effectively. Based on that technology, a new architecture of recognition system as well as its components is proposed in this paper. The experiment conducted on the Mandarin Affective Speech Corpus shows that an improvement of 8% identification rate over the traditional speaker recognition is achieved.

Cost-Sensitive Learning for Emotion Robust Speaker Recognition

PubMed Central

Li, Dongdong; Yang, Yingchun

2014-01-01

In the field of information security, voice is one of the most important parts in biometrics. Especially, with the development of voice communication through the Internet or telephone system, huge voice data resources are accessed. In speaker recognition, voiceprint can be applied as the unique password for the user to prove his/her identity. However, speech with various emotions can cause an unacceptably high error rate and aggravate the performance of speaker recognition system. This paper deals with this problem by introducing a cost-sensitive learning technology to reweight the probability of test affective utterances in the pitch envelop level, which can enhance the robustness in emotion-dependent speaker recognition effectively. Based on that technology, a new architecture of recognition system as well as its components is proposed in this paper. The experiment conducted on the Mandarin Affective Speech Corpus shows that an improvement of 8% identification rate over the traditional speaker recognition is achieved. PMID:24999492

Using the L1 "Errors" of Native Speakers in the EFL Classroom

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rebuck, Mark

2011-01-01

While it is common for teachers to focus on learners' errors in the EFL classroom, little attention is given to the "errors" that native English speakers make in their mother tongue. This paper reports on a study to assess the reaction of Japanese university students to an activity that primarily required identifying…

Young Children's Sensitivity to Speaker Gender When Learning from Others

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ma, Lili; Woolley, Jacqueline D.

2013-01-01

This research explores whether young children are sensitive to speaker gender when learning novel information from others. Four- and 6-year-olds ("N" = 144) chose between conflicting statements from a male versus a female speaker (Studies 1 and 3) or decided which speaker (male or female) they would ask (Study 2) when learning about the functions…

Grammatical Planning Units during Real-Time Sentence Production in Speakers with Agrammatic Aphasia and Healthy Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lee, Jiyeon; Yoshida, Masaya; Thompson, Cynthia K.

2015-01-01

Purpose: Grammatical encoding (GE) is impaired in agrammatic aphasia; however, the nature of such deficits remains unclear. We examined grammatical planning units during real-time sentence production in speakers with agrammatic aphasia and control speakers, testing two competing models of GE. We queried whether speakers with agrammatic aphasia…

The object of my desire: Five-year-olds rapidly reason about a speaker's desire during referential communication.

PubMed

San Juan, Valerie; Chambers, Craig G; Berman, Jared; Humphry, Chelsea; Graham, Susan A

2017-10-01

Two experiments examined whether 5-year-olds draw inferences about desire outcomes that constrain their online interpretation of an utterance. Children were informed of a speaker's positive (Experiment 1) or negative (Experiment 2) desire to receive a specific toy as a gift before hearing a referentially ambiguous statement ("That's my present") spoken with either a happy or sad voice. After hearing the speaker express a positive desire, children (N=24) showed an implicit (i.e., eye gaze) and explicit ability to predict reference to the desired object when the speaker sounded happy, but they showed only implicit consideration of the alternate object when the speaker sounded sad. After hearing the speaker express a negative desire, children (N=24) used only happy prosodic cues to predict the intended referent of the statement. Taken together, the findings indicate that the efficiency with which 5-year-olds integrate desire reasoning with language processing depends on the emotional valence of the speaker's voice but not on the type of desire representations (i.e., positive vs. negative) that children must reason about online. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Simultaneous Talk--From the Perspective of Floor Management of English and Japanese Speakers.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hayashi, Reiko

1988-01-01

Investigates simultaneous talk in face-to-face conversation using the analytic framework of "floor" proposed by Edelsky (1981). Analysis of taped conversation among speakers of Japanese and among speakers of English shows that, while both groups use simultaneous talk, it is used more frequently by Japanese speakers. A reference list…

Doing Away with the "Native Speaker": A Complex Adaptive Systems Approach to L2 Phonological Attainment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Aslan, Erhan

2017-01-01

Employing the complex adaptive systems (CAS) model, the present case study provides a self-report description of the attitudes, perceptions and experiences of an advanced adult L2 English learner with respect to his L2 phonological attainment. CAS is predicated on the notion that an individual's cognitive processes are intricately related to his…

Hybrid Speaker Recognition Using Universal Acoustic Model

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Nishimura, Jun; Kuroda, Tadahiro

We propose a novel speaker recognition approach using a speaker-independent universal acoustic model (UAM) for sensornet applications. In sensornet applications such as “Business Microscope”, interactions among knowledge workers in an organization can be visualized by sensing face-to-face communication using wearable sensor nodes. In conventional studies, speakers are detected by comparing energy of input speech signals among the nodes. However, there are often synchronization errors among the nodes which degrade the speaker recognition performance. By focusing on property of the speaker's acoustic channel, UAM can provide robustness against the synchronization error. The overall speaker recognition accuracy is improved by combining UAM with the energy-based approach. For 0.1s speech inputs and 4 subjects, speaker recognition accuracy of 94% is achieved at the synchronization error less than 100ms.

Incidental Learning of Gender Agreement in L2

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Denhovska, Nadiia; Serratrice, Ludovica

2017-01-01

Incidental learning of grammar has been an area of interest for many decades; nevertheless, existing research has primarily focused on artificial or semi-artificial languages. The present study examines the incidental acquisition of the grammar of a natural language by exposing adult speakers of an ungendered L1 (English) to the gender agreement…

An Event-Related Potential (ERP) Investigation of Filler-Gap Processing in Native and Second Language Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dallas, Andrea; DeDe, Gayle; Nicol, Janet

2013-01-01

The current study employed a neuro-imaging technique, Event-Related Potentials (ERP), to investigate real-time processing of sentences containing filler-gap dependencies by late-learning speakers of English as a second language (L2) with a Chinese native language background. An individual differences approach was also taken to examine the role of…

"The English Is Not the Same": Challenges in Thesis Writing for Second Language Speakers of English

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Strauss, Pat

2012-01-01

In this article I describe my interaction as an English for academic purposes (EAP) practitioner with a supervisor and her two postgraduate international students, both of whom were second language speakers of English (L2). Because of linguistic and relationship issues the supervisory experience for the parties was challenging and frustrating. I…

Do Native Speakers of North American and Singapore English Differentially Perceive Comprehensibility in Second Language Speech?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Saito, Kazuya; Shintani, Natsuko

2016-01-01

The current study examined the extent to which native speakers of North American and Singapore English differentially perceive the comprehensibility (ease of understanding) of second language (L2) speech. Spontaneous speech samples elicited from 50 Japanese learners of English with various proficiency levels were first rated by 10 Canadian and 10…

Dominant Language Transfer in Spanish Heritage Speakers and Second Language Learners in the Interpretation of Definite Articles

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Montrul, Silvina; Ionin, Tania

2012-01-01

This study investigates dominant language transfer (from English) in adult Spanish second language (L2) learners and Spanish heritage speakers. We focus on contrasting properties of English and Spanish definite articles with respect to generic reference ("Elephants have ivory tusks" vs. "Los elefantes tienen colmillos de marfil") and inalienable…

Experimental study on GMM-based speaker recognition

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ye, Wenxing; Wu, Dapeng; Nucci, Antonio

2010-04-01

Speaker recognition plays a very important role in the field of biometric security. In order to improve the recognition performance, many pattern recognition techniques have be explored in the literature. Among these techniques, the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is proved to be an effective statistic model for speaker recognition and is used in most state-of-the-art speaker recognition systems. The GMM is used to represent the 'voice print' of a speaker through modeling the spectral characteristic of speech signals of the speaker. In this paper, we implement a speaker recognition system, which consists of preprocessing, Mel-Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients (MFCCs) based feature extraction, and GMM based classification. We test our system with TIDIGITS data set (325 speakers) and our own recordings of more than 200 speakers; our system achieves 100% correct recognition rate. Moreover, we also test our system under the scenario that training samples are from one language but test samples are from a different language; our system also achieves 100% correct recognition rate, which indicates that our system is language independent.

Incidental Learning of Gender Agreement in L2.

PubMed

Denhovska, Nadiia; Serratrice, Ludovica

2017-10-01

Incidental learning of grammar has been an area of interest for many decades; nevertheless, existing research has primarily focused on artificial or semi-artificial languages. The present study examines the incidental acquisition of the grammar of a natural language by exposing adult speakers of an ungendered L1 (English) to the gender agreement patterns in Russian (a language that was novel to the learners). Both receptive and productive knowledge and the mediating role of working memory (WM) in learning were measured. Speakers of the ungendered language were able to successfully acquire receptive but not productive grammatical knowledge in a new language under incidental exposure. WM was engaged in production but not in a grammaticality judgment task in the incidental learning condition, indicating cognitive effort during knowledge retrieval.

Congenital amusia in speakers of a tone language: association with lexical tone agnosia.

PubMed

Nan, Yun; Sun, Yanan; Peretz, Isabelle

2010-09-01

Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder that affects the processing of musical pitch in speakers of non-tonal languages like English and French. We assessed whether this musical disorder exists among speakers of Mandarin Chinese who use pitch to alter the meaning of words. Using the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia, we tested 117 healthy young Mandarin speakers with no self-declared musical problems and 22 individuals who reported musical difficulties and scored two standard deviations below the mean obtained by the Mandarin speakers without amusia. These 22 amusic individuals showed a similar pattern of musical impairment as did amusic speakers of non-tonal languages, by exhibiting a more pronounced deficit in melody than in rhythm processing. Furthermore, nearly half the tested amusics had impairments in the discrimination and identification of Mandarin lexical tones. Six showed marked impairments, displaying what could be called lexical tone agnosia, but had normal tone production. Our results show that speakers of tone languages such as Mandarin may experience musical pitch disorder despite early exposure to speech-relevant pitch contrasts. The observed association between the musical disorder and lexical tone difficulty indicates that the pitch disorder as defining congenital amusia is not specific to music or culture but is rather general in nature.

Race in Conflict with Heritage: "Black" Heritage Language Speaker of Japanese

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Doerr, Neriko Musha; Kumagai, Yuri

2014-01-01

"Heritage language speaker" is a relatively new term to denote minority language speakers who grew up in a household where the language was used or those who have a family, ancestral, or racial connection to the minority language. In research on heritage language speakers, overlap between these 2 definitions is often assumed--that is,…

Infant sensitivity to speaker and language in learning a second label.

PubMed

Bhagwat, Jui; Casasola, Marianella

2014-02-01

Two experiments examined when monolingual, English-learning 19-month-old infants learn a second object label. Two experimenters sat together. One labeled a novel object with one novel label, whereas the other labeled the same object with a different label in either the same or a different language. Infants were tested on their comprehension of each label immediately following its presentation. Infants mapped the first label at above chance levels, but they did so with the second label only when requested by the speaker who provided it (Experiment 1) or when the second experimenter labeled the object in a different language (Experiment 2). These results show that 19-month-olds learn second object labels but do not readily generalize them across speakers of the same language. The results highlight how speaker and language spoken guide infants' acceptance of second labels, supporting sociopragmatic views of word learning. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Accounting for the listener: comparing the production of contrastive intonation in typically-developing speakers and speakers with autism.

PubMed

Kaland, Constantijn; Swerts, Marc; Krahmer, Emiel

2013-09-01

The present research investigates what drives the prosodic marking of contrastive information. For example, a typically developing speaker of a Germanic language like Dutch generally refers to a pink car as a "PINK car" (accented words in capitals) when a previously mentioned car was red. The main question addressed in this paper is whether contrastive intonation is produced with respect to the speaker's or (also) the listener's perspective on the preceding discourse. Furthermore, this research investigates the production of contrastive intonation by typically developing speakers and speakers with autism. The latter group is investigated because people with autism are argued to have difficulties accounting for another person's mental state and exhibit difficulties in the production and perception of accentuation and pitch range. To this end, utterances with contrastive intonation are elicited from both groups and analyzed in terms of function and form of prosody using production and perception measures. Contrary to expectations, typically developing speakers and speakers with autism produce functionally similar contrastive intonation as both groups account for both their own and their listener's perspective. However, typically developing speakers use a larger pitch range and are perceived as speaking more dynamically than speakers with autism, suggesting differences in their use of prosodic form.

Influence of syllable structure on L2 auditory word learning.

PubMed

Hamada, Megumi; Goya, Hideki

2015-04-01

This study investigated the role of syllable structure in L2 auditory word learning. Based on research on cross-linguistic variation of speech perception and lexical memory, it was hypothesized that Japanese L1 learners of English would learn English words with an open-syllable structure without consonant clusters better than words with a closed-syllable structure and consonant clusters. Two groups of college students (Japanese group, N = 22; and native speakers of English, N = 21) learned paired English pseudowords and pictures. The pseudoword types differed in terms of the syllable structure and consonant clusters (congruent vs. incongruent) and the position of consonant clusters (coda vs. onset). Recall accuracy was higher for the pseudowords in the congruent type and the pseudowords with the coda-consonant clusters. The syllable structure effect was obtained from both participant groups, disconfirming the hypothesized cross-linguistic influence on L2 auditory word learning.

Speaker Identity Supports Phonetic Category Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mani, Nivedita; Schneider, Signe

2013-01-01

Visual cues from the speaker's face, such as the discriminable mouth movements used to produce speech sounds, improve discrimination of these sounds by adults. The speaker's face, however, provides more information than just the mouth movements used to produce speech--it also provides a visual indexical cue of the identity of the speaker. The…

Assessing the Impact of Short-Term Study Abroad on L2 Learners' Attitudes towards Spanish

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Artamonova, Tatiana

2017-01-01

Language attitudes, a multifaceted construct, can be broadly defined as evaluative views of a language and other relevant entities, including its speakers and associated cultures. Language attitudes are influential in second language (L2) acquisition as they relate to language learning motivation and achievement, perseverance in language study,…

Revisiting speech rate and utterance length manipulations in stuttering speakers.

PubMed

Blomgren, Michael; Goberman, Alexander M

2008-01-01

The goal of this study was to evaluate stuttering frequency across a multidimensional (2x2) hierarchy of speech performance tasks. Specifically, this study examined the interaction between changes in length of utterance and levels of speech rate stability. Forty-four adult male speakers participated in the study (22 stuttering speakers and 22 non-stuttering speakers). Participants were audio and video recorded while producing a spontaneous speech task and four different experimental speaking tasks. The four experimental speaking tasks involved reading a list of 45 words and a list 45 phrases two times each. One reading of each list involved speaking at a steady habitual rate (habitual rate tasks) and another reading involved producing each list at a variable speaking rate (variable rate tasks). For the variable rate tasks, participants were directed to produce words or phrases at randomly ordered slow, habitual, and fast rates. The stuttering speakers exhibited significantly more stuttering on the variable rate tasks than on the habitual rate tasks. In addition, the stuttering speakers exhibited significantly more stuttering on the first word of the phrase length tasks compared to the single word tasks. Overall, the results indicated that varying levels of both utterance length and temporal complexity function to modulate stuttering frequency in adult stuttering speakers. Discussion focuses on issues of speech performance according to stuttering severity and possible clinical implications. The reader will learn about and be able to: (1) describe the mediating effects of length of utterance and speech rate on the frequency of stuttering in stuttering speakers; (2) understand the rationale behind multidimensional skill performance matrices; and (3) describe possible applications of motor skill performance matrices to stuttering therapy.

Multimodal Speaker Diarization.

PubMed

Noulas, A; Englebienne, G; Krose, B J A

2012-01-01

We present a novel probabilistic framework that fuses information coming from the audio and video modality to perform speaker diarization. The proposed framework is a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) that is an extension of a factorial Hidden Markov Model (fHMM) and models the people appearing in an audiovisual recording as multimodal entities that generate observations in the audio stream, the video stream, and the joint audiovisual space. The framework is very robust to different contexts, makes no assumptions about the location of the recording equipment, and does not require labeled training data as it acquires the model parameters using the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. We apply the proposed model to two meeting videos and a news broadcast video, all of which come from publicly available data sets. The results acquired in speaker diarization are in favor of the proposed multimodal framework, which outperforms the single modality analysis results and improves over the state-of-the-art audio-based speaker diarization.

Vowel reduction across tasks for male speakers of American English.

PubMed

Kuo, Christina; Weismer, Gary

2016-07-01

This study examined acoustic variation of vowels within speakers across speech tasks. The overarching goal of the study was to understand within-speaker variation as one index of the range of normal speech motor behavior for American English vowels. Ten male speakers of American English performed four speech tasks including citation form sentence reading with a clear-speech style (clear-speech), citation form sentence reading (citation), passage reading (reading), and conversational speech (conversation). Eight monophthong vowels in a variety of consonant contexts were studied. Clear-speech was operationally defined as the reference point for describing variation. Acoustic measures associated with the conventions of vowel targets were obtained and examined. These included temporal midpoint formant frequencies for the first three formants (F1, F2, and F3) and the derived Euclidean distances in the F1-F2 and F2-F3 planes. Results indicated that reduction toward the center of the F1-F2 and F2-F3 planes increased in magnitude across the tasks in the order of clear-speech, citation, reading, and conversation. The cross-task variation was comparable for all speakers despite fine-grained individual differences. The characteristics of systematic within-speaker acoustic variation across tasks have potential implications for the understanding of the mechanisms of speech motor control and motor speech disorders.

Word Naming in the L1 and L2: A Dynamic Perspective on Automatization and the Degree of Semantic Involvement in Naming

PubMed Central

Plat, Rika; Lowie, Wander; de Bot, Kees

2018-01-01

Reaction time data have long been collected in order to gain insight into the underlying mechanisms involved in language processing. Means analyses often attempt to break down what factors relate to what portion of the total reaction time. From a dynamic systems theory perspective or an interaction dominant view of language processing, it is impossible to isolate discrete factors contributing to language processing, since these continually and interactively play a role. Non-linear analyses offer the tools to investigate the underlying process of language use in time, without having to isolate discrete factors. Patterns of variability in reaction time data may disclose the relative contribution of automatic (grapheme-to-phoneme conversion) processing and attention-demanding (semantic) processing. The presence of a fractal structure in the variability of a reaction time series indicates automaticity in the mental structures contributing to a task. A decorrelated pattern of variability will indicate a higher degree of attention-demanding processing. A focus on variability patterns allows us to examine the relative contribution of automatic and attention-demanding processing when a speaker is using the mother tongue (L1) or a second language (L2). A word naming task conducted in the L1 (Dutch) and L2 (English) shows L1 word processing to rely more on automatic spelling-to-sound conversion than L2 word processing. A word naming task with a semantic categorization subtask showed more reliance on attention-demanding semantic processing when using the L2. A comparison to L1 English data shows this was not only due to the amount of language use or language dominance, but also to the difference in orthographic depth between Dutch and English. An important implication of this finding is that when the same task is used to test and compare different languages, one cannot straightforwardly assume the same cognitive sub processes are involved to an equal degree using the same

Word Naming in the L1 and L2: A Dynamic Perspective on Automatization and the Degree of Semantic Involvement in Naming.

PubMed

Plat, Rika; Lowie, Wander; de Bot, Kees

2017-01-01

Reaction time data have long been collected in order to gain insight into the underlying mechanisms involved in language processing. Means analyses often attempt to break down what factors relate to what portion of the total reaction time. From a dynamic systems theory perspective or an interaction dominant view of language processing, it is impossible to isolate discrete factors contributing to language processing, since these continually and interactively play a role. Non-linear analyses offer the tools to investigate the underlying process of language use in time, without having to isolate discrete factors. Patterns of variability in reaction time data may disclose the relative contribution of automatic (grapheme-to-phoneme conversion) processing and attention-demanding (semantic) processing. The presence of a fractal structure in the variability of a reaction time series indicates automaticity in the mental structures contributing to a task. A decorrelated pattern of variability will indicate a higher degree of attention-demanding processing. A focus on variability patterns allows us to examine the relative contribution of automatic and attention-demanding processing when a speaker is using the mother tongue (L1) or a second language (L2). A word naming task conducted in the L1 (Dutch) and L2 (English) shows L1 word processing to rely more on automatic spelling-to-sound conversion than L2 word processing. A word naming task with a semantic categorization subtask showed more reliance on attention-demanding semantic processing when using the L2. A comparison to L1 English data shows this was not only due to the amount of language use or language dominance, but also to the difference in orthographic depth between Dutch and English. An important implication of this finding is that when the same task is used to test and compare different languages, one cannot straightforwardly assume the same cognitive sub processes are involved to an equal degree using the same

Anxiety in speakers who persist and recover from stuttering.

PubMed

Davis, Stephen; Shisca, Daniella; Howell, Peter

2007-01-01

The study was designed to see whether young children and adolescents who persist in their stutter (N=18) show differences in trait and/or state anxiety compared with people who recover from their stutter (N=17) and fluent control speakers (N=19). A fluent control group, a group of speakers who have been documented as stuttering in the past but do not stutter now and a group of speakers (also with a documented history of stuttering) who persist in their stuttering participated, all aged 10-17 years. The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children was administered. There were no differences between persistent, recovered and control groups with regard to trait anxiety. The persistent group had higher state anxiety than controls and the recovered group for three out of four speaking situations. The findings are interpreted as showing that anxiety levels in certain affective states appear to be associated with the speaking problem. A reader should be able to appreciate the difference between state and trait anxiety understand views about how the role anxiety has on stuttering has changed over time appreciate different views about how anxiety affects speakers who persist and recover from stuttering see why longitudinal work is needed to study these issues.

Using Stimulated Recall to Investigate Native Speaker Perceptions in Native-Nonnative Speaker Interaction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Polio, Charlene; Gass, Susan; Chapin, Laura

2006-01-01

Implicit negative feedback has been shown to facilitate SLA, and the extent to which such feedback is given is related to a variety of task and interlocutor variables. The background of a native speaker (NS), in terms of amount of experience in interactions with nonnative speakers (NNSs), has been shown to affect the quantity of implicit negative…

Recovery from First-Language Transfer: The Second Language Acquisition of English Double Objects by Korean Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Oh, Eunjeong

2010-01-01

Previous studies on second language (L2) acquisition of English dative alternation by Korean speakers (Oh and Zubizarreta, 2003, 2006a, 2006b) have shown that the acquisition of English benefactive double object (DO) (e.g. "John baked Mary a cake") lags behind that of its counterpart goal double object (e.g. "John sent Mary the letter"). This…

English Speakers Attend More Strongly than Spanish Speakers to Manner of Motion when Classifying Novel Objects and Events

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kersten, Alan W.; Meissner, Christian A.; Lechuga, Julia; Schwartz, Bennett L.; Albrechtsen, Justin S.; Iglesias, Adam

2010-01-01

Three experiments provide evidence that the conceptualization of moving objects and events is influenced by one's native language, consistent with linguistic relativity theory. Monolingual English speakers and bilingual Spanish/English speakers tested in an English-speaking context performed better than monolingual Spanish speakers and bilingual…

Using Listener Judgments to Investigate Linguistic Influences on L2 Comprehensibility and Accentedness: A Validation and Generalization Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Saito, Kazuya; Trofimovich, Pavel; Isaacs, Talia

2017-01-01

The current study investigated linguistic influences on comprehensibility (ease of understanding) and accentedness (linguistic nativelikeness) in second language (L2) learners' extemporaneous speech. Target materials included picture narratives from 40 native French speakers of English from different proficiency levels. The narratives were…

Revisiting Speech Rate and Utterance Length Manipulations in Stuttering Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Blomgren, Michael; Goberman, Alexander M.

2008-01-01

The goal of this study was to evaluate stuttering frequency across a multidimensional (2 x 2) hierarchy of speech performance tasks. Specifically, this study examined the interaction between changes in length of utterance and levels of speech rate stability. Forty-four adult male speakers participated in the study (22 stuttering speakers and 22…

Long short-term memory for speaker generalization in supervised speech separation

PubMed Central

Chen, Jitong; Wang, DeLiang

2017-01-01

Speech separation can be formulated as learning to estimate a time-frequency mask from acoustic features extracted from noisy speech. For supervised speech separation, generalization to unseen noises and unseen speakers is a critical issue. Although deep neural networks (DNNs) have been successful in noise-independent speech separation, DNNs are limited in modeling a large number of speakers. To improve speaker generalization, a separation model based on long short-term memory (LSTM) is proposed, which naturally accounts for temporal dynamics of speech. Systematic evaluation shows that the proposed model substantially outperforms a DNN-based model on unseen speakers and unseen noises in terms of objective speech intelligibility. Analyzing LSTM internal representations reveals that LSTM captures long-term speech contexts. It is also found that the LSTM model is more advantageous for low-latency speech separation and it, without future frames, performs better than the DNN model with future frames. The proposed model represents an effective approach for speaker- and noise-independent speech separation. PMID:28679261

Infants' understanding of false labeling events: the referential roles of words and the speakers who use them.

PubMed

Koenig, Melissa A; Echols, Catharine H

2003-04-01

The four studies reported here examine whether 16-month-old infants' responses to true and false utterances interact with their knowledge of human agents. In Study 1, infants heard repeated instances either of true or false labeling of common objects; labels came from an active human speaker seated next to the infant. In Study 2, infants experienced the same stimuli and procedure; however, we replaced the human speaker of Study 1 with an audio speaker in the same location. In Study 3, labels came from a hidden audio speaker. In Study 4, a human speaker labeled the objects while facing away from them. In Study 1, infants looked significantly longer to the human agent when she falsely labeled than when she truthfully labeled the objects. Infants did not show a similar pattern of attention for the audio speaker of Study 2, the silent human of Study 3 or the facing-backward speaker of Study 4. In fact, infants who experienced truthful labeling looked significantly longer to the facing-backward labeler of Study 4 than to true labelers of the other three contexts. Additionally, infants were more likely to correct false labels when produced by the human labeler of Study 1 than in any of the other contexts. These findings suggest, first, that infants are developing a critical conception of other human speakers as truthful communicators, and second, that infants understand that human speakers may provide uniquely useful information when a word fails to match its referent. These findings are consistent with the view that infants can recognize differences in knowledge and that such differences can be based on differences in the availability of perceptual experience.

The Effect of Noise on Relationships Between Speech Intelligibility and Self-Reported Communication Measures in Tracheoesophageal Speakers.

PubMed

Eadie, Tanya L; Otero, Devon Sawin; Bolt, Susan; Kapsner-Smith, Mara; Sullivan, Jessica R

2016-08-01

The purpose of this study was to examine how sentence intelligibility relates to self-reported communication in tracheoesophageal speakers when speech intelligibility is measured in quiet and noise. Twenty-four tracheoesophageal speakers who were at least 1 year postlaryngectomy provided audio recordings of 5 sentences from the Sentence Intelligibility Test. Speakers also completed self-reported measures of communication-the Voice Handicap Index-10 and the Communicative Participation Item Bank short form. Speech recordings were presented to 2 groups of inexperienced listeners who heard sentences in quiet or noise. Listeners transcribed the sentences to yield speech intelligibility scores. Very weak relationships were found between intelligibility in quiet and measures of voice handicap and communicative participation. Slightly stronger, but still weak and nonsignificant, relationships were observed between measures of intelligibility in noise and both self-reported measures. However, 12 speakers who were more than 65% intelligible in noise showed strong and statistically significant relationships with both self-reported measures (R2 = .76-.79). Speech intelligibility in quiet is a weak predictor of self-reported communication measures in tracheoesophageal speakers. Speech intelligibility in noise may be a better metric of self-reported communicative function for speakers who demonstrate higher speech intelligibility in noise.

The Speaker Gender Gap at Critical Care Conferences.

PubMed

Mehta, Sangeeta; Rose, Louise; Cook, Deborah; Herridge, Margaret; Owais, Sawayra; Metaxa, Victoria

2018-06-01

To review women's participation as faculty at five critical care conferences over 7 years. Retrospective analysis of five scientific programs to identify the proportion of females and each speaker's profession based on conference conveners, program documents, or internet research. Three international (European Society of Intensive Care Medicine, International Symposium on Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine, Society of Critical Care Medicine) and two national (Critical Care Canada Forum, U.K. Intensive Care Society State of the Art Meeting) annual critical care conferences held between 2010 and 2016. Female faculty speakers. None. Male speakers outnumbered female speakers at all five conferences, in all 7 years. Overall, women represented 5-31% of speakers, and female physicians represented 5-26% of speakers. Nursing and allied health professional faculty represented 0-25% of speakers; in general, more than 50% of allied health professionals were women. Over the 7 years, Society of Critical Care Medicine had the highest representation of female (27% overall) and nursing/allied health professional (16-25%) speakers; notably, male physicians substantially outnumbered female physicians in all years (62-70% vs 10-19%, respectively). Women's representation on conference program committees ranged from 0% to 40%, with Society of Critical Care Medicine having the highest representation of women (26-40%). The female proportions of speakers, physician speakers, and program committee members increased significantly over time at the Society of Critical Care Medicine and U.K. Intensive Care Society State of the Art Meeting conferences (p < 0.05), but there was no temporal change at the other three conferences. There is a speaker gender gap at critical care conferences, with male faculty outnumbering female faculty. This gap is more marked among physician speakers than those speakers representing nursing and allied health professionals. Several organizational strategies can

Discourse Markers in Italian as L2 in Face to Face vs. Computer Mediated Settings

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

De Marco, Anna; Leone, Paola

2013-01-01

This pilot study aims to highlight a) differences in pragmatic function and distribution of discourse markers (DMs) in computer mediated and face to face (FtF) settings and b) any correlation of DM uses and language competence. The data have been collected by video-recording and analysing three speakers of Italian L2 (language level competence:…

Intonation contrast in Cantonese speakers with hypokinetic dysarthria associated with Parkinson's disease.

PubMed

Ma, Joan K-Y; Whitehill, Tara L; So, Susanne Y-S

2010-08-01

Speech produced by individuals with hypokinetic dysarthria associated with Parkinson's disease (PD) is characterized by a number of features including impaired speech prosody. The purpose of this study was to investigate intonation contrasts produced by this group of speakers. Speech materials with a question-statement contrast were collected from 14 Cantonese speakers with PD. Twenty listeners then classified the productions as either questions or statements. Acoustic analyses of F0, duration, and intensity were conducted to determine which acoustic cues distinguished the production of questions from statements, and which cues appeared to be exploited by listeners in identifying intonational contrasts. The results show that listeners identified statements with a high degree of accuracy, but the accuracy of question identification ranged from 0.56% to 96% across the 14 speakers. The speakers with PD used similar acoustic cues as nondysarthric Cantonese speakers to mark the question-statement contrast, although the contrasts were not observed in all speakers. Listeners mainly used F0 cues at the final syllable for intonation identification. These data contribute to the researchers' understanding of intonation marking in speakers with PD, with specific application to the production and perception of intonation in a lexical tone language.

D- and L-[123I]-2-I-phenylalanine show a long tumour retention compared with D- and L-[123I]-2-I-tyrosine in R1M rhabdomyosarcoma tumour-bearing Wag/Rij rats.

PubMed

Bauwens, Matthias; Lahoutte, Tony; Kersemans, Ken; Caveliers, Vicky; Bossuyt, Axel; Mertens, John

2007-07-01

The aim of this study was the comparison of the tumour uptake and the long-term retention of [(123)I]-2-I-L-phenylalanine and [(123)I]-2-I-D-phenylalanine with those of [(123)I]-2-I-L-tyrosine and [(123)I]-2-I-D-tyrosine in R1M rhabdomyosarcoma tumour-bearing rats. The biodistribution of the radioactivity as a function of time in R1M tumour-bearing rats was measured by planar gamma camera imaging (dynamic and static). If dissection was applied, the activity in the tumours and tissues of interest was measured by gamma counting. [(123)I]-2-iodo-L-phenylalanine, [(123)I]-2-iodo-D-phenylalaine, [(123)I]-2-I-L-tyrosine showed a considerable tumour uptake reaching a maximum between 10 and 30 min. At 30 min p.i. the differential uptake ratio values of this uptake were, respectively, 2.1, 2.3, 2.5 and 1.7. The activity in the tumour was shown to be related to a tumour cell uptake and not to an increased blood pool activity. All the tracers showed a clearance from the blood to the bladder without renal retention. At longer times both L- and D- [(123)I]-2-I-tyrosine were cleared for a large part from the tumours and the body. [(123)I]-2-I-L-Phe and [(123)I]-2-I-D-Phe showed a considerable and equal retention in the tumours: as compared with 0.5 h, 91% at 24 h and 80% at 48 h. This was related to the longer retention of activity in the blood pool noticed for these compounds (81% at 24 h and 65% at 48 h). The tumour-to-background ratio increased with 25% at those longer times. At short times all the tracers were taken up to a considerable extent in the tumours. In the R1M-bearing Wag/Rij rat model only [(123)I]-2-I-L-phenylalanine and [(123)I]-2-I-D-phenylalanine showed an especially high retention at long times without any significant difference between the enantiomers. Copyright 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

L2 Learners' Assessments of Accentedness, Fluency, and Comprehensibility of Native and Nonnative German Speech

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

O'Brien, Mary Grantham

2014-01-01

In early stages of classroom language learning, many adult second language (L2) learners communicate primarily with one another, yet we know little about which speech stream characteristics learners tune into or the extent to which they understand this lingua franca communication. In the current study, 25 native English speakers learning German as…

How Do Speakers Avoid Ambiguous Linguistic Expressions?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ferreira, V.S.; Slevc, L.R.; Rogers, E.S.

2005-01-01

Three experiments assessed how speakers avoid linguistically and nonlinguistically ambiguous expressions. Speakers described target objects (a flying mammal, bat) in contexts including foil objects that caused linguistic (a baseball bat) and nonlinguistic (a larger flying mammal) ambiguity. Speakers sometimes avoided linguistic-ambiguity, and they…

Speaker diarization system on the 2007 NIST rich transcription meeting recognition evaluation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sun, Hanwu; Nwe, Tin Lay; Koh, Eugene Chin Wei; Bin, Ma; Li, Haizhou

2007-09-01

This paper presents a speaker diarization system developed at the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) for NIST Rich Transcription 2007 (RT-07) evaluation task. We describe in details our primary approaches for the speaker diarization on the Multiple Distant Microphones (MDM) conditions in conference room scenario. Our proposed system consists of six modules: 1). Least-mean squared (NLMS) adaptive filter for the speaker direction estimate via Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA), 2). An initial speaker clustering via two-stage TDOA histogram distribution quantization approach, 3). Multiple microphone speaker data alignment via GCC-PHAT Time Delay Estimate (TDE) among all the distant microphone channel signals, 4). A speaker clustering algorithm based on GMM modeling approach, 5). Non-speech removal via speech/non-speech verification mechanism and, 6). Silence removal via "Double-Layer Windowing"(DLW) method. We achieves error rate of 31.02% on the 2006 Spring (RT-06s) MDM evaluation task and a competitive overall error rate of 15.32% for the NIST Rich Transcription 2007 (RT-07) MDM evaluation task.

Continuing Medical Education Speakers with High Evaluation Scores Use more Image-based Slides.

PubMed

Ferguson, Ian; Phillips, Andrew W; Lin, Michelle

2017-01-01

Although continuing medical education (CME) presentations are common across health professions, it is unknown whether slide design is independently associated with audience evaluations of the speaker. Based on the conceptual framework of Mayer's theory of multimedia learning, this study aimed to determine whether image use and text density in presentation slides are associated with overall speaker evaluations. This retrospective analysis of six sequential CME conferences (two annual emergency medicine conferences over a three-year period) used a mixed linear regression model to assess whether post-conference speaker evaluations were associated with image fraction (percentage of image-based slides per presentation) and text density (number of words per slide). A total of 105 unique lectures were given by 49 faculty members, and 1,222 evaluations (70.1% response rate) were available for analysis. On average, 47.4% (SD=25.36) of slides had at least one educationally-relevant image (image fraction). Image fraction significantly predicted overall higher evaluation scores [F(1, 100.676)=6.158, p=0.015] in the mixed linear regression model. The mean (SD) text density was 25.61 (8.14) words/slide but was not a significant predictor [F(1, 86.293)=0.55, p=0.815]. Of note, the individual speaker [χ 2 (1)=2.952, p=0.003] and speaker seniority [F(3, 59.713)=4.083, p=0.011] significantly predicted higher scores. This is the first published study to date assessing the linkage between slide design and CME speaker evaluations by an audience of practicing clinicians. The incorporation of images was associated with higher evaluation scores, in alignment with Mayer's theory of multimedia learning. Contrary to this theory, however, text density showed no significant association, suggesting that these scores may be multifactorial. Professional development efforts should focus on teaching best practices in both slide design and presentation skills.

Speech serial control in healthy speakers and speakers with hypokinetic or ataxic dysarthria: effects of sequence length and practice

PubMed Central

Reilly, Kevin J.; Spencer, Kristie A.

2013-01-01

The current study investigated the processes responsible for selection of sounds and syllables during production of speech sequences in 10 adults with hypokinetic dysarthria from Parkinson’s disease, five adults with ataxic dysarthria, and 14 healthy control speakers. Speech production data from a choice reaction time task were analyzed to evaluate the effects of sequence length and practice on speech sound sequencing. Speakers produced sequences that were between one and five syllables in length over five experimental runs of 60 trials each. In contrast to the healthy speakers, speakers with hypokinetic dysarthria demonstrated exaggerated sequence length effects for both inter-syllable intervals (ISIs) and speech error rates. Conversely, speakers with ataxic dysarthria failed to demonstrate a sequence length effect on ISIs and were also the only group that did not exhibit practice-related changes in ISIs and speech error rates over the five experimental runs. The exaggerated sequence length effects in the hypokinetic speakers with Parkinson’s disease are consistent with an impairment of action selection during speech sequence production. The absent length effects observed in the speakers with ataxic dysarthria is consistent with previous findings that indicate a limited capacity to buffer speech sequences in advance of their execution. In addition, the lack of practice effects in these speakers suggests that learning-related improvements in the production rate and accuracy of speech sequences involves processing by structures of the cerebellum. Together, the current findings inform models of serial control for speech in healthy speakers and support the notion that sequencing deficits contribute to speech symptoms in speakers with hypokinetic or ataxic dysarthria. In addition, these findings indicate that speech sequencing is differentially impaired in hypokinetic and ataxic dysarthria. PMID:24137121

Audiovisual perceptual learning with multiple speakers.

PubMed

Mitchel, Aaron D; Gerfen, Chip; Weiss, Daniel J

2016-05-01

One challenge for speech perception is between-speaker variability in the acoustic parameters of speech. For example, the same phoneme (e.g. the vowel in "cat") may have substantially different acoustic properties when produced by two different speakers and yet the listener must be able to interpret these disparate stimuli as equivalent. Perceptual tuning, the use of contextual information to adjust phonemic representations, may be one mechanism that helps listeners overcome obstacles they face due to this variability during speech perception. Here we test whether visual contextual cues to speaker identity may facilitate the formation and maintenance of distributional representations for individual speakers, allowing listeners to adjust phoneme boundaries in a speaker-specific manner. We familiarized participants to an audiovisual continuum between /aba/ and /ada/. During familiarization, the "b-face" mouthed /aba/ when an ambiguous token was played, while the "D-face" mouthed /ada/. At test, the same ambiguous token was more likely to be identified as /aba/ when paired with a stilled image of the "b-face" than with an image of the "D-face." This was not the case in the control condition when the two faces were paired equally with the ambiguous token. Together, these results suggest that listeners may form speaker-specific phonemic representations using facial identity cues.

The Use of Native Speaker Norms in Critical Period Hypothesis Research

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Andringa, Sible

2014-01-01

In critical period hypothesis (CPH) research, native speaker (NS) norm groups have often been used to determine whether nonnative speakers (NNSs) were able to score within the NS range of scores. One goal of this article is to investigate what NS samples were used in previous CPH research. The literature review shows that NS control groups tend to…

Are Cantonese-speakers really descriptivists? Revisiting cross-cultural semantics.

PubMed

Lam, Barry

2010-05-01

In an article in Cognition [Machery, E., Mallon, R., Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2004). Semantics cross-cultural style. Cognition, 92, B1-B12] present data which purports to show that East Asian Cantonese-speakers tend to have descriptivist intuitions about the referents of proper names, while Western English-speakers tend to have causal-historical intuitions about proper names. Machery et al. take this finding to support the view that some intuitions, the universality of which they claim is central to philosophical theories, vary according to cultural background. Machery et al. conclude from their findings that the philosophical methodology of consulting intuitions about hypothetical cases is flawed vis a vis the goal of determining truths about some philosophical domains like philosophical semantics. In the following study, three new vignettes in English were given to Western native English-speakers, and Cantonese translations were given to native Cantonese-speaking immigrants from a Cantonese community in Southern California. For all three vignettes, questions were given to elicit intuitions about the referent of a proper name and the truth-value of an uttered sentence containing a proper name. The results from this study reveal that East Asian Cantonese-speakers do not differ from Western English-speakers in ways that support Machery et al.'s conclusions. This new data concerning the intuitions of Cantonese-speakers raises questions about whether cross-cultural variation in answers to questions on certain vignettes reveal genuine differences in intuitions, or whether such differences stem from non-intuitional differences, such as differences in linguistic competence. Copyright 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Mental Lexicon, Working Memory and L2 (English) Vocabulary in Polish Students with and without Dyslexia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lockiewicz, Marta; Jaskulska, Martyna

2015-01-01

The aim of our study was to examine the relationship between access to the mental lexicon, working memory and knowledge of English (L2) vocabulary. Analyses were undertaken amongst monolingual speakers of Polish (26 with dyslexia, 24 without) who studied English as a second language as part of their compulsory educational programme at school. We…

Factor analysis of auto-associative neural networks with application in speaker verification.

PubMed

Garimella, Sri; Hermansky, Hynek

2013-04-01

Auto-associative neural network (AANN) is a fully connected feed-forward neural network, trained to reconstruct its input at its output through a hidden compression layer, which has fewer numbers of nodes than the dimensionality of input. AANNs are used to model speakers in speaker verification, where a speaker-specific AANN model is obtained by adapting (or retraining) the universal background model (UBM) AANN, an AANN trained on multiple held out speakers, using corresponding speaker data. When the amount of speaker data is limited, this adaptation procedure may lead to overfitting as all the parameters of UBM-AANN are adapted. In this paper, we introduce and develop the factor analysis theory of AANNs to alleviate this problem. We hypothesize that only the weight matrix connecting the last nonlinear hidden layer and the output layer is speaker-specific, and further restrict it to a common low-dimensional subspace during adaptation. The subspace is learned using large amounts of development data, and is held fixed during adaptation. Thus, only the coordinates in a subspace, also known as i-vector, need to be estimated using speaker-specific data. The update equations are derived for learning both the common low-dimensional subspace and the i-vectors corresponding to speakers in the subspace. The resultant i-vector representation is used as a feature for the probabilistic linear discriminant analysis model. The proposed system shows promising results on the NIST-08 speaker recognition evaluation (SRE), and yields a 23% relative improvement in equal error rate over the previously proposed weighted least squares-based subspace AANNs system. The experiments on NIST-10 SRE confirm that these improvements are consistent and generalize across datasets.

Learning Words from Speakers with False Beliefs

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Papafragou, Anna; Fairchild, Sarah; Cohen, Matthew L.; Friedberg, Carlyn

2017-01-01

During communication, hearers try to infer the speaker's intentions to be able to understand what the speaker means. Nevertheless, whether (and how early) preschoolers track their interlocutors' mental states is still a matter of debate. Furthermore, there is disagreement about how children's ability to consult a speaker's belief in communicative…

Embodied Communication: Speakers' Gestures Affect Listeners' Actions

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cook, Susan Wagner; Tanenhaus, Michael K.

2009-01-01

We explored how speakers and listeners use hand gestures as a source of perceptual-motor information during naturalistic communication. After solving the Tower of Hanoi task either with real objects or on a computer, speakers explained the task to listeners. Speakers' hand gestures, but not their speech, reflected properties of the particular…

Noise Reduction with Microphone Arrays for Speaker Identification

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Cohen, Z

Reducing acoustic noise in audio recordings is an ongoing problem that plagues many applications. This noise is hard to reduce because of interfering sources and non-stationary behavior of the overall background noise. Many single channel noise reduction algorithms exist but are limited in that the more the noise is reduced; the more the signal of interest is distorted due to the fact that the signal and noise overlap in frequency. Specifically acoustic background noise causes problems in the area of speaker identification. Recording a speaker in the presence of acoustic noise ultimately limits the performance and confidence of speaker identificationmore » algorithms. In situations where it is impossible to control the environment where the speech sample is taken, noise reduction filtering algorithms need to be developed to clean the recorded speech of background noise. Because single channel noise reduction algorithms would distort the speech signal, the overall challenge of this project was to see if spatial information provided by microphone arrays could be exploited to aid in speaker identification. The goals are: (1) Test the feasibility of using microphone arrays to reduce background noise in speech recordings; (2) Characterize and compare different multichannel noise reduction algorithms; (3) Provide recommendations for using these multichannel algorithms; and (4) Ultimately answer the question - Can the use of microphone arrays aid in speaker identification?« less

Compound nouns in spoken language production by speakers with aphasia compared to neurologically healthy speakers: an exploratory study.

PubMed

Eiesland, Eli Anne; Lind, Marianne

2012-03-01

Compounds are words that are made up of at least two other words (lexemes), featuring lexical and syntactic characteristics and thus particularly interesting for the study of language processing. Most studies of compounds and language processing have been based on data from experimental single word production and comprehension tasks. To enhance the ecological validity of morphological processing research, data from other contexts, such as discourse production, need to be considered. This study investigates the production of nominal compounds in semi-spontaneous spoken texts by a group of speakers with fluent types of aphasia compared to a group of neurologically healthy speakers. The speakers with aphasia produce significantly fewer nominal compound types in their texts than the non-aphasic speakers, and the compounds they produce exhibit fewer different types of semantic relations than the compounds produced by the non-aphasic speakers. The results are discussed in relation to theories of language processing.

Nonnative Speakers' Perceptions of English "Nonlexical" Intonation Signals.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Luthy, Melvin J.

1983-01-01

Native English speakers' and foreign students' perceptions of 14 English intonation signals, recorded free of verbal context, show foreign students may be misinterpreting or missing much information communicated with nonlexical signals. (Author/MSE)

What's Learned Together Stays Together: Speakers' Choice of Referring Expression Reflects Shared Experience

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gorman, Kristen S.; Gegg-Harrison, Whitney; Marsh, Chelsea R.; Tanenhaus, Michael K.

2013-01-01

When referring to named objects, speakers can choose either a name ("mbira") or a description ("that gourd-like instrument with metal strips"); whether the name provides useful information depends on whether the speaker's knowledge of the name is shared with the addressee. But, how do speakers determine what is shared? In 2…

Speaker Linking and Applications using Non-Parametric Hashing Methods

DTIC Science & Technology

2016-09-08

clustering method based on hashing—canopy- clustering . We apply this method to a large corpus of speaker recordings, demonstrate performance tradeoffs...and compare to other hash- ing methods. Index Terms: speaker recognition, clustering , hashing, locality sensitive hashing. 1. Introduction We assume...speaker in our corpus. Second, given a QBE method, how can we perform speaker clustering —each clustering should be a single speaker, and a cluster should

The Development of Complexity, Accuracy and Fluency in L2 Written Production through Informal Participation in Online Activities

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kusyk, Meryl

2017-01-01

Research into the online informal learning of English (OILE) examines how nonnative speakers of English may develop L2 skills through participation in leisure activities on the Internet in the target language. Such activities include, e.g., watching television series, films, or videos, interacting on Facebook, reading articles, or listening to…

The Influence of Orthography on the Production of Alphabetic, Second-Language Allophones by Speakers of a Non-Alphabetic Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Han, Jeong-Im; Kim, Joo-Yeon

2017-01-01

This study investigated the influence of orthographic information on the production of allophones in a second language (L2). Two proficiency levels of native Mandarin speakers learned novel Korean words with potential variants of /h/ based on auditory stimuli, and then they were provided various types of spellings for the variants, including the…

Taking It Down: Notetaking Practices of L1 and L2 Students.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Clerehan, Rosemary

1995-01-01

This study examined notes taken by 29 undergraduate native and non-native speakers of English during a lecture on commercial law. It found that native speakers took more detailed notes and more accurately recorded the hierarchical structure and principal elements of the lecture than non-native speakers. (48 references) (MDM)

Evaluation of speaker de-identification based on voice gender and age conversion

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Přibil, Jiří; Přibilová, Anna; Matoušek, Jindřich

2018-03-01

Two basic tasks are covered in this paper. The first one consists in the design and practical testing of a new method for voice de-identification that changes the apparent age and/or gender of a speaker by multi-segmental frequency scale transformation combined with prosody modification. The second task is aimed at verification of applicability of a classifier based on Gaussian mixture models (GMM) to detect the original Czech and Slovak speakers after applied voice deidentification. The performed experiments confirm functionality of the developed gender and age conversion for all selected types of de-identification which can be objectively evaluated by the GMM-based open-set classifier. The original speaker detection accuracy was compared also for sentences uttered by German and English speakers showing language independence of the proposed method.

Blue-green color categorization in Mandarin-English speakers.

PubMed

Wuerger, Sophie; Xiao, Kaida; Mylonas, Dimitris; Huang, Qingmei; Karatzas, Dimosthenis; Hird, Emily; Paramei, Galina

2012-02-01

Observers are faster to detect a target among a set of distracters if the targets and distracters come from different color categories. This cross-boundary advantage seems to be limited to the right visual field, which is consistent with the dominance of the left hemisphere for language processing [Gilbert et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 103, 489 (2006)]. Here we study whether a similar visual field advantage is found in the color identification task in speakers of Mandarin, a language that uses a logographic system. Forty late Mandarin-English bilinguals performed a blue-green color categorization task, in a blocked design, in their first language (L1: Mandarin) or second language (L2: English). Eleven color singletons ranging from blue to green were presented for 160 ms, randomly in the left visual field (LVF) or right visual field (RVF). Color boundary and reaction times (RTs) at the color boundary were estimated in L1 and L2, for both visual fields. We found that the color boundary did not differ between the languages; RTs at the color boundary, however, were on average more than 100 ms shorter in the English compared to the Mandarin sessions, but only when the stimuli were presented in the RVF. The finding may be explained by the script nature of the two languages: Mandarin logographic characters are analyzed visuospatially in the right hemisphere, which conceivably facilitates identification of color presented to the LVF. © 2012 Optical Society of America

Spanish as a Second Language when L1 Is Quechua: Endangered Languages and the SLA Researcher

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kalt, Susan E.

2012-01-01

Spanish is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. Quechua is the largest indigenous language family to constitute the first language (L1) of second language (L2) Spanish speakers. Despite sheer number of speakers and typologically interesting contrasts, Quechua-Spanish second language acquisition is a nearly untapped research area,…

Shhh… I Need Quiet! Children's Understanding of American, British, and Japanese-accented English Speakers.

PubMed

Bent, Tessa; Holt, Rachael Frush

2018-02-01

Children's ability to understand speakers with a wide range of dialects and accents is essential for efficient language development and communication in a global society. Here, the impact of regional dialect and foreign-accent variability on children's speech understanding was evaluated in both quiet and noisy conditions. Five- to seven-year-old children ( n = 90) and adults ( n = 96) repeated sentences produced by three speakers with different accents-American English, British English, and Japanese-accented English-in quiet or noisy conditions. Adults had no difficulty understanding any speaker in quiet conditions. Their performance declined for the nonnative speaker with a moderate amount of noise; their performance only substantially declined for the British English speaker (i.e., below 93% correct) when their understanding of the American English speaker was also impeded. In contrast, although children showed accurate word recognition for the American and British English speakers in quiet conditions, they had difficulty understanding the nonnative speaker even under ideal listening conditions. With a moderate amount of noise, their perception of British English speech declined substantially and their ability to understand the nonnative speaker was particularly poor. These results suggest that although school-aged children can understand unfamiliar native dialects under ideal listening conditions, their ability to recognize words in these dialects may be highly susceptible to the influence of environmental degradation. Fully adult-like word identification for speakers with unfamiliar accents and dialects may exhibit a protracted developmental trajectory.

Native and Non-Native Speakers' Brain Responses to Filled Indirect Object Gaps

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jessen, Anna; Festman, Julia; Boxell, Oliver; Felser, Claudia

2017-01-01

We examined native and non-native English speakers' processing of indirect object "wh"-dependencies using a filled-gap paradigm while recording event-related potentials (ERPs). The non-native group was comprised of native German-speaking, proficient non-native speakers of English. Both participant groups showed evidence of linking…

The Wor(l)d is a Collage: Multi-Performance by Chinese Heritage Language Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

He, Agnes Weiyun

2013-01-01

This study examines the simultaneous use of English and Chinese by speakers of Chinese as a heritage language (CHL). It focuses on spontaneous, dynamic, and high-density mixing of the two languages within the smallest building block of a speaking turn: the turn constructional unit (TCU). Drawing upon data from different age and proficiency groups,…

Dynamic Assessment of Elicited Imitation: A Case Analysis of an Advanced L2 English Speaker

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

van Compernolle, Rémi A.; Zhang, Haomin

2014-01-01

The focus of this paper is on the design, administration, and scoring of a dynamically administered elicited imitation test of L2 English morphology. Drawing on Vygotskian sociocultural psychology, particularly the concepts of zone of proximal development and dynamic assessment, we argue that support provided during the elicited imitation test…

Speaker Segmentation and Clustering Using Gender Information

DTIC Science & Technology

2006-02-01

used in the first stages of segmentation forder information in the clustering of the opposite-gender speaker diarization of news broadcasts. files, the...AFRL-HE-WP-TP-2006-0026 AIR FORCE RESEARCH LABORATORY Speaker Segmentation and Clustering Using Gender Information Brian M. Ore General Dynamics...COVERED (From - To) February 2006 ProceedinLgs 4. TITLE AND SUBTITLE 5a. CONTRACT NUMBER Speaker Segmentation and Clustering Using Gender Information 5b

Magnetic Fluids Deliver Better Speaker Sound Quality

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

2015-01-01

In the 1960s, Glenn Research Center developed a magnetized fluid to draw rocket fuel into spacecraft engines while in space. Sony has incorporated the technology into its line of slim speakers by using the fluid as a liquid stand-in for the speaker's dampers, which prevent the speaker from blowing out while adding stability. The fluid helps to deliver more volume and hi-fidelity sound while reducing distortion.

EFL Teachers' Responses to L2 Writing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chang, Yuh-Fang

This study investigated differences in the product and process of evaluating second language compositions by Taiwanese speakers of English. It examined whether such factors as language background (native English speaker versus native Chinese speaker), academic discipline, and educational background affected raters' scoring outcomes; whether rating…

Objective eye-gaze behaviour during face-to-face communication with proficient alaryngeal speakers: a preliminary study.

PubMed

Evitts, Paul; Gallop, Robert

2011-01-01

There is a large body of research demonstrating the impact of visual information on speaker intelligibility in both normal and disordered speaker populations. However, there is minimal information on which specific visual features listeners find salient during conversational discourse. To investigate listeners' eye-gaze behaviour during face-to-face conversation with normal, laryngeal and proficient alaryngeal speakers. Sixty participants individually participated in a 10-min conversation with one of four speakers (typical laryngeal, tracheoesophageal, oesophageal, electrolaryngeal; 15 participants randomly assigned to one mode of speech). All speakers were > 85% intelligible and were judged to be 'proficient' by two certified speech-language pathologists. Participants were fitted with a head-mounted eye-gaze tracking device (Mobile Eye, ASL) that calculated the region of interest and mean duration of eye-gaze. Self-reported gaze behaviour was also obtained following the conversation using a 10 cm visual analogue scale. While listening, participants viewed the lower facial region of the oesophageal speaker more than the normal or tracheoesophageal speaker. Results of non-hierarchical cluster analyses showed that while listening, the pattern of eye-gaze was predominantly directed at the lower face of the oesophageal and electrolaryngeal speaker and more evenly dispersed among the background, lower face, and eyes of the normal and tracheoesophageal speakers. Finally, results show a low correlation between self-reported eye-gaze behaviour and objective regions of interest data. Overall, results suggest similar eye-gaze behaviour when healthy controls converse with normal and tracheoesophageal speakers and that participants had significantly different eye-gaze patterns when conversing with an oesophageal speaker. Results are discussed in terms of existing eye-gaze data and its potential implications on auditory-visual speech perception. © 2011 Royal College of Speech

Left hemisphere lateralization for lexical and acoustic pitch processing in Cantonese speakers as revealed by mismatch negativity.

PubMed

Gu, Feng; Zhang, Caicai; Hu, Axu; Zhao, Guoping

2013-12-01

For nontonal language speakers, speech processing is lateralized to the left hemisphere and musical processing is lateralized to the right hemisphere (i.e., function-dependent brain asymmetry). On the other hand, acoustic temporal processing is lateralized to the left hemisphere and spectral/pitch processing is lateralized to the right hemisphere (i.e., acoustic-dependent brain asymmetry). In this study, we examine whether the hemispheric lateralization of lexical pitch and acoustic pitch processing in tonal language speakers is consistent with the patterns of function- and acoustic-dependent brain asymmetry in nontonal language speakers. Pitch contrast in both speech stimuli (syllable /ji/ in Experiment 1) and nonspeech stimuli (harmonic tone in Experiment 1; pure tone in Experiment 2) was presented to native Cantonese speakers in passive oddball paradigms. We found that the mismatch negativity (MMN) elicited by lexical pitch contrast was lateralized to the left hemisphere, which is consistent with the pattern of function-dependent brain asymmetry (i.e., left hemisphere lateralization for speech processing) in nontonal language speakers. However, the MMN elicited by acoustic pitch contrast was also left hemisphere lateralized (harmonic tone in Experiment 1) or showed a tendency for left hemisphere lateralization (pure tone in Experiment 2), which is inconsistent with the pattern of acoustic-dependent brain asymmetry (i.e., right hemisphere lateralization for acoustic pitch processing) in nontonal language speakers. The consistent pattern of function-dependent brain asymmetry and the inconsistent pattern of acoustic-dependent brain asymmetry between tonal and nontonal language speakers can be explained by the hypothesis that the acoustic-dependent brain asymmetry is the consequence of a carryover effect from function-dependent brain asymmetry. Potential evolutionary implication of this hypothesis is discussed. © 2013.

International Student Speaker Programs: "Someone from Another World."

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wilson, Angene

This study surveyed members of the Association of International Educators and community volunteers to find out how international student speaker programs actually work. An international student speaker program provides speakers (from the university foreign student population) for community organizations and schools. The results of the survey (49…

The Influence of Orthography on the Production of Alphabetic, Second-Language Allophones by Speakers of a Non-alphabetic Language.

PubMed

Han, Jeong-Im; Kim, Joo-Yeon

2017-08-01

This study investigated the influence of orthographic information on the production of allophones in a second language (L2). Two proficiency levels of native Mandarin speakers learned novel Korean words with potential variants of /h/ based on auditory stimuli, and then they were provided various types of spellings for the variants, including the letters for [[Formula: see text

Visuomotor Tracking Ability of Young Adult Speakers.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Moon, Jerald B.; And Others

1993-01-01

Twenty-five normal young adult speakers tracked sinusoidal and unpredictable target signals using lower lip and jaw movement and fundamental frequency modulation. Tracking accuracy varied as a function of target frequency and articulator used to track. Results show the potential of visuomotor tracking tasks in the assessment of speech articulatory…

Speech Breathing in Speakers Who Use an Electrolarynx

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bohnenkamp, Todd A.; Stowell, Talena; Hesse, Joy; Wright, Simon

2010-01-01

Speakers who use an electrolarynx following a total laryngectomy no longer require pulmonary support for speech. Subsequently, chest wall movements may be affected; however, chest wall movements in these speakers are not well defined. The purpose of this investigation was to evaluate speech breathing in speakers who use an electrolarynx during…

The interaction of glottal-pulse rate and vocal-tract length in judgements of speaker size, sex, and age

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Smith, David R. R.; Patterson, Roy D.

2005-11-01

Glottal-pulse rate (GPR) and vocal-tract length (VTL) are related to the size, sex, and age of the speaker but it is not clear how the two factors combine to influence our perception of speaker size, sex, and age. This paper describes experiments designed to measure the effect of the interaction of GPR and VTL upon judgements of speaker size, sex, and age. Vowels were scaled to represent people with a wide range of GPRs and VTLs, including many well beyond the normal range of the population, and listeners were asked to judge the size and sex/age of the speaker. The judgements of speaker size show that VTL has a strong influence upon perceived speaker size. The results for the sex and age categorization (man, woman, boy, or girl) show that, for vowels with GPR and VTL values in the normal range, judgements of speaker sex and age are influenced about equally by GPR and VTL. For vowels with abnormal combinations of low GPRs and short VTLs, the VTL information appears to decide the sex/age judgement.

Intonation and gender perception: applications for transgender speakers.

PubMed

Hancock, Adrienne; Colton, Lindsey; Douglas, Fiacre

2014-03-01

Intonation is commonly addressed in voice and communication feminization therapy, yet empirical evidence of gender differences for intonation is scarce and rarely do studies examine how it relates to gender perception of transgender speakers. This study examined intonation of 12 males, 12 females, six female-to-male, and 14 male-to-female transgender speakers describing a Norman Rockwell image. Several intonation measures were compared between biological gender groups, between perceived gender groups, and between male-to-female (MTF) speakers who were perceived as male, female, or ambiguous gender. Speakers with a larger percentage of utterances with upward intonation and a larger utterance semitone range were perceived as female by listeners, despite no significant differences between the actual intonation of the four gender groups. MTF speakers who do not pass as female appear to use less upward and more downward intonations than female and passing MTF speakers. Intonation has potential for use in transgender communication therapy because it can influence perception to some degree. Copyright © 2014 The Voice Foundation. Published by Mosby, Inc. All rights reserved.

Perception of English palatal codas by Korean speakers of English

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yeon, Sang-Hee

2003-04-01

This study aimed at looking at perception of English palatal codas by Korean speakers of English to determine if perception problems are the source of production problems. In particular, first, this study looked at the possible first language effect on the perception of English palatal codas. Second, a possible perceptual source of vowel epenthesis after English palatal codas was investigated. In addition, individual factors, such as length of residence, TOEFL score, gender and academic status, were compared to determine if those affected the varying degree of the perception accuracy. Eleven adult Korean speakers of English as well as three native speakers of English participated in the study. Three sets of a perception test including identification of minimally different English pseudo- or real words were carried out. The results showed that, first, the Korean speakers perceived the English codas significantly worse than the Americans. Second, the study supported the idea that Koreans perceived an extra /i/ after the final affricates due to final release. Finally, none of the individual factors explained the varying degree of the perceptional accuracy. In particular, TOEFL scores and the perception test scores did not have any statistically significant association.

Accent Attribution in Speakers with Foreign Accent Syndrome

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Verhoeven, Jo; De Pauw, Guy; Pettinato, Michele; Hirson, Allen; Van Borsel, John; Marien, Peter

2013-01-01

Purpose: The main aim of this experiment was to investigate the perception of Foreign Accent Syndrome in comparison to speakers with an authentic foreign accent. Method: Three groups of listeners attributed accents to conversational speech samples of 5 FAS speakers which were embedded amongst those of 5 speakers with a real foreign accent and 5…

Speaker Introductions at Internal Medicine Grand Rounds: Forms of Address Reveal Gender Bias.

PubMed

Files, Julia A; Mayer, Anita P; Ko, Marcia G; Friedrich, Patricia; Jenkins, Marjorie; Bryan, Michael J; Vegunta, Suneela; Wittich, Christopher M; Lyle, Melissa A; Melikian, Ryan; Duston, Trevor; Chang, Yu-Hui H; Hayes, Sharonne N

2017-05-01

Gender bias has been identified as one of the drivers of gender disparity in academic medicine. Bias may be reinforced by gender subordinating language or differential use of formality in forms of address. Professional titles may influence the perceived expertise and authority of the referenced individual. The objective of this study is to examine how professional titles were used in the same and mixed-gender speaker introductions at Internal Medicine Grand Rounds (IMGR). A retrospective observational study of video-archived speaker introductions at consecutive IMGR was conducted at two different locations (Arizona, Minnesota) of an academic medical center. Introducers and speakers at IMGR were physician and scientist peers holding MD, PhD, or MD/PhD degrees. The primary outcome was whether or not a speaker's professional title was used during the first form of address during speaker introductions at IMGR. As secondary outcomes, we evaluated whether or not the speakers professional title was used in any form of address during the introduction. Three hundred twenty-one forms of address were analyzed. Female introducers were more likely to use professional titles when introducing any speaker during the first form of address compared with male introducers (96.2% [102/106] vs. 65.6% [141/215]; p < 0.001). Female dyads utilized formal titles during the first form of address 97.8% (45/46) compared with male dyads who utilized a formal title 72.4% (110/152) of the time (p = 0.007). In mixed-gender dyads, where the introducer was female and speaker male, formal titles were used 95.0% (57/60) of the time. Male introducers of female speakers utilized professional titles 49.2% (31/63) of the time (p < 0.001). In this study, women introduced by men at IMGR were less likely to be addressed by professional title than were men introduced by men. Differential formality in speaker introductions may amplify isolation, marginalization, and professional discomfiture

Proficiency in English sentence stress production by Cantonese speakers who speak English as a second language (ESL).

PubMed

Ng, Manwa L; Chen, Yang

2011-12-01

The present study examined English sentence stress produced by native Cantonese speakers who were speaking English as a second language (ESL). Cantonese ESL speakers' proficiency in English stress production as perceived by English-speaking listeners was also studied. Acoustical parameters associated with sentence stress including fundamental frequency (F0), vowel duration, and intensity were measured from the English sentences produced by 40 Cantonese ESL speakers. Data were compared with those obtained from 40 native speakers of American English. The speech samples were also judged by eight native listeners who were native speakers of American English for placement, degree, and naturalness of stress. Results showed that Cantonese ESL speakers were able to use F0, vowel duration, and intensity to differentiate sentence stress patterns. Yet, both female and male Cantonese ESL speakers exhibited consistently higher F0 in stressed words than English speakers. Overall, Cantonese ESL speakers were found to be proficient in using duration and intensity to signal sentence stress, in a way comparable with English speakers. In addition, F0 and intensity were found to correlate closely with perceptual judgement and the degree of stress with the naturalness of stress.

A Jesuit Approach to Campus Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Herbeck, Dale A.

2007-01-01

In this article, the author examines the newly revised speakers policy in Boston College. The revised policy, defended by administrators as being consistent with past practice, differs in two important respects from the speakers policy it replaced. Lest the scope of this unfortunate policy be exaggerated, it is important to note that the policy…

L2-Proficiency-Dependent Laterality Shift in Structural Connectivity of Brain Language Pathways.

PubMed

Xiang, Huadong; van Leeuwen, Tessa Marije; Dediu, Dan; Roberts, Leah; Norris, David G; Hagoort, Peter

2015-08-01

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and a longitudinal language learning approach were applied to investigate the relationship between the achieved second language (L2) proficiency during L2 learning and the reorganization of structural connectivity between core language areas. Language proficiency tests and DTI scans were obtained from German students before and after they completed an intensive 6-week course of the Dutch language. In the initial learning stage, with increasing L2 proficiency, the hemispheric dominance of the Brodmann area (BA) 6-temporal pathway (mainly along the arcuate fasciculus) shifted from the left to the right hemisphere. With further increased proficiency, however, lateralization dominance was again found in the left BA6-temporal pathway. This result is consistent with reports in the literature that imply a stronger involvement of the right hemisphere in L2 processing especially for less proficient L2 speakers. This is the first time that an L2 proficiency-dependent laterality shift in the structural connectivity of language pathways during L2 acquisition has been observed to shift from left to right and back to left hemisphere dominance with increasing L2 proficiency. The authors additionally find that changes in fractional anisotropy values after the course are related to the time elapsed between the two scans. The results suggest that structural connectivity in (at least part of) the perisylvian language network may be subject to fast dynamic changes following language learning.

Voice Handicap Index in Persian Speakers with Various Severities of Hearing Loss.

PubMed

Aghadoost, Ozra; Moradi, Negin; Dabirmoghaddam, Payman; Aghadoost, Alireza; Naderifar, Ehsan; Dehbokri, Siavash Mohammadi

2016-01-01

The purpose of this study was to assess and compare the total score and subscale scores of the Voice Handicap Index (VHI) in speakers with and without hearing loss. A further aim was to determine if a correlation exists between severities of hearing loss with total scores and VHI subscale scores. In this cross-sectional, descriptive analytical study, 100 participants, divided in 2 groups of participants with and without hearing loss, were studied. Background information was gathered by interview, and VHI questionnaires were filled in by all participants. For all variables, including mean total score and VHI subscale scores, there was a considerable difference in speakers with and without hearing loss (p < 0.05). The correlation between severity of hearing loss with total score and VHI subscale scores was significant. Speakers with hearing loss were found to have higher mean VHI scores than speakers with normal hearing. This indicates a high voice handicap related to voice in speakers with hearing loss. In addition, increased severity of hearing loss leads to more severe voice handicap. This finding emphasizes the need for a multilateral assessment and treatment of voice disorders in speakers with hearing loss. © 2017 S. Karger AG, Basel.

Robust speaker's location detection in a vehicle environment using GMM models.

PubMed

Hu, Jwu-Sheng; Cheng, Chieh-Cheng; Liu, Wei-Han

2006-04-01

Abstract-Human-computer interaction (HCI) using speech communication is becoming increasingly important, especially in driving where safety is the primary concern. Knowing the speaker's location (i.e., speaker localization) not only improves the enhancement results of a corrupted signal, but also provides assistance to speaker identification. Since conventional speech localization algorithms suffer from the uncertainties of environmental complexity and noise, as well as from the microphone mismatch problem, they are frequently not robust in practice. Without a high reliability, the acceptance of speech-based HCI would never be realized. This work presents a novel speaker's location detection method and demonstrates high accuracy within a vehicle cabinet using a single linear microphone array. The proposed approach utilize Gaussian mixture models (GMM) to model the distributions of the phase differences among the microphones caused by the complex characteristic of room acoustic and microphone mismatch. The model can be applied both in near-field and far-field situations in a noisy environment. The individual Gaussian component of a GMM represents some general location-dependent but content and speaker-independent phase difference distributions. Moreover, the scheme performs well not only in nonline-of-sight cases, but also when the speakers are aligned toward the microphone array but at difference distances from it. This strong performance can be achieved by exploiting the fact that the phase difference distributions at different locations are distinguishable in the environment of a car. The experimental results also show that the proposed method outperforms the conventional multiple signal classification method (MUSIC) technique at various SNRs.

The speakers' bureau system: a form of peer selling.

PubMed

Reid, Lynette; Herder, Matthew

2013-01-01

In the speakers' bureau system, physicians are recruited and trained by pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device companies to deliver information about products to other physicians, in exchange for a fee. Using publicly available disclosures, we assessed the thesis that speakers' bureau involvement is not a feature of academic medicine in Canada, by estimating the prevalence of participation in speakers' bureaus among Canadian faculty in one medical specialty, cardiology. We analyzed the relevant features of an actual contract made public by the physician addressee and applied the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) guidelines on physician-industry relations to participation in a speakers' bureau. We argue that speakers' bureau participation constitutes a form of peer selling that should be understood to contravene the prohibition on product endorsement in the CMA Code of Ethics. Academic medical institutions, in conjunction with regulatory colleges, should continue and strengthen their policies to address participation in speakers' bureaus.

Speaker and Observer Perceptions of Physical Tension during Stuttering.

PubMed

Tichenor, Seth; Leslie, Paula; Shaiman, Susan; Yaruss, J Scott

2017-01-01

Speech-language pathologists routinely assess physical tension during evaluation of those who stutter. If speakers experience tension that is not visible to clinicians, then judgments of severity may be inaccurate. This study addressed this potential discrepancy by comparing judgments of tension by people who stutter and expert clinicians to determine if clinicians could accurately identify the speakers' experience of physical tension. Ten adults who stutter were audio-video recorded in two speaking samples. Two board-certified specialists in fluency evaluated the samples using the Stuttering Severity Instrument-4 and a checklist adapted for this study. Speakers rated their tension using the same forms, and then discussed their experiences in a qualitative interview so that themes related to physical tension could be identified. The degree of tension reported by speakers was higher than that observed by specialists. Tension in parts of the body that were less visible to the observer (chest, abdomen, throat) was reported more by speakers than by specialists. The thematic analysis revealed that speakers' experience of tension changes over time and that these changes may be related to speakers' acceptance of stuttering. The lack of agreement between speaker and specialist perceptions of tension suggests that using self-reports is a necessary component for supporting the accurate diagnosis of tension in stuttering. © 2018 S. Karger AG, Basel.

Statistical Evaluation of Biometric Evidence in Forensic Automatic Speaker Recognition

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Drygajlo, Andrzej

Forensic speaker recognition is the process of determining if a specific individual (suspected speaker) is the source of a questioned voice recording (trace). This paper aims at presenting forensic automatic speaker recognition (FASR) methods that provide a coherent way of quantifying and presenting recorded voice as biometric evidence. In such methods, the biometric evidence consists of the quantified degree of similarity between speaker-dependent features extracted from the trace and speaker-dependent features extracted from recorded speech of a suspect. The interpretation of recorded voice as evidence in the forensic context presents particular challenges, including within-speaker (within-source) variability and between-speakers (between-sources) variability. Consequently, FASR methods must provide a statistical evaluation which gives the court an indication of the strength of the evidence given the estimated within-source and between-sources variabilities. This paper reports on the first ENFSI evaluation campaign through a fake case, organized by the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI), as an example, where an automatic method using the Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) and the Bayesian interpretation (BI) framework were implemented for the forensic speaker recognition task.

Does the speaker's voice quality influence children's performance on a language comprehension test?

PubMed

Lyberg-Åhlander, Viveka; Haake, Magnus; Brännström, Jonas; Schötz, Susanne; Sahlén, Birgitta

2015-02-01

A small number of studies have explored children's perception of speakers' voice quality and its possible influence on language comprehension. The aim of this explorative study was to investigate the relationship between the examiner's voice quality, the child's performance on a digital version of a language comprehension test, the Test for Reception of Grammar (TROG-2), and two measures of cognitive functioning. The participants were (n = 86) mainstreamed 8-year old children with typical language development. Two groups of children (n = 41/45) were presented with the TROG-2 through recordings of one female speaker: one group was presented with a typical voice and the other with a simulated dysphonic voice. Significant associations were found between executive functioning and language comprehension. The results also showed that children listening to the dysphonic voice achieved significantly lower scores for more difficult sentences ("the man but not the horse jumps") and used more self-corrections on simpler sentences ("the girl is sitting"). Findings suggest that a dysphonic speaker's voice may force the child to allocate capacity to the processing of the voice signal at the expense of comprehension. The findings have implications for clinical and research settings where standardized language tests are used.

Evaluation of Speakers with Foreign-Accented Speech in Japan: The Effect of Accent Produced by English Native Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tsurutani, Chiharu

2012-01-01

Foreign-accented speakers are generally regarded as less educated, less reliable and less interesting than native speakers and tend to be associated with cultural stereotypes of their country of origin. This discrimination against foreign accents has, however, been discussed mainly using accented English in English-speaking countries. This study…

Effects of Language Background on Gaze Behavior: A Crosslinguistic Comparison Between Korean and German Speakers

PubMed Central

Goller, Florian; Lee, Donghoon; Ansorge, Ulrich; Choi, Soonja

2017-01-01

Languages differ in how they categorize spatial relations: While German differentiates between containment (in) and support (auf) with distinct spatial words—(a) den Kuli IN die Kappe stecken (”put pen in cap”); (b) die Kappe AUF den Kuli stecken (”put cap on pen”)—Korean uses a single spatial word (kkita) collapsing (a) and (b) into one semantic category, particularly when the spatial enclosure is tight-fit. Korean uses a different word (i.e., netha) for loose-fits (e.g., apple in bowl). We tested whether these differences influence the attention of the speaker. In a crosslinguistic study, we compared native German speakers with native Korean speakers. Participants rated the similarity of two successive video clips of several scenes where two objects were joined or nested (either in a tight or loose manner). The rating data show that Korean speakers base their rating of similarity more on tight- versus loose-fit, whereas German speakers base their rating more on containment versus support (in vs. auf). Throughout the experiment, we also measured the participants’ eye movements. Korean speakers looked equally long at the moving Figure object and at the stationary Ground object, whereas German speakers were more biased to look at the Ground object. Additionally, Korean speakers also looked more at the region where the two objects touched than did German speakers. We discuss our data in the light of crosslinguistic semantics and the extent of their influence on spatial cognition and perception. PMID:29362644

Inferring speaker attributes in adductor spasmodic dysphonia: ratings from unfamiliar listeners.

PubMed

Isetti, Derek; Xuereb, Linnea; Eadie, Tanya L

2014-05-01

To determine whether unfamiliar listeners' perceptions of speakers with adductor spasmodic dysphonia (ADSD) differ from control speakers on the parameters of relative age, confidence, tearfulness, and vocal effort and are related to speaker-rated vocal effort or voice-specific quality of life. Twenty speakers with ADSD (including 6 speakers with ADSD plus tremor) and 20 age- and sex-matched controls provided speech recordings, completed a voice-specific quality-of-life instrument (Voice Handicap Index; Jacobson et al., 1997), and rated their own vocal effort. Twenty listeners evaluated speech samples for relative age, confidence, tearfulness, and vocal effort using rating scales. Listeners judged speakers with ADSD as sounding significantly older, less confident, more tearful, and more effortful than control speakers (p < .01). Increased vocal effort was strongly associated with decreased speaker confidence (rs = .88-.89) and sounding more tearful (rs = .83-.85). Self-rated speaker effort was moderately related (rs = .45-.52) to listener impressions. Listeners' perceptions of confidence and tearfulness were also moderately associated with higher Voice Handicap Index scores (rs = .65-.70). Unfamiliar listeners judge speakers with ADSD more negatively than control speakers, with judgments extending beyond typical clinical measures. The results have implications for counseling and understanding the psychosocial effects of ADSD.

The association between tobacco, alcohol, and drug use, stress, and depression among uninsured free clinic patients: U.S.-born English speakers, non-U.S.-born English speakers, and Spanish speakers.

PubMed

Kamimura, Akiko; Ashby, Jeanie; Tabler, Jennifer; Nourian, Maziar M; Trinh, Ha Ngoc; Chen, Jason; Reel, Justine J

2017-01-01

The abuse of substances is a significant public health issue. Perceived stress and depression have been found to be related to the abuse of substances. The purpose of this study is to examine the prevalence of substance use (i.e., alcohol problems, smoking, and drug use) and the association between substance use, perceived stress, and depression among free clinic patients. Patients completed a self-administered survey in 2015 (N = 504). The overall prevalence of substance use among free clinic patients was not high compared to the U.S. general population. U.S.-born English speakers reported a higher prevalence rate of tobacco smoking and drug use than did non-U.S.-born English speakers and Spanish speakers. Alcohol problems and smoking were significantly related to higher levels of perceived stress and depression. Substance use prevention and education should be included in general health education programs. U.S.-born English speakers would need additional attention. Mental health intervention would be essential to prevention and intervention.

Optimization of multilayer neural network parameters for speaker recognition

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tovarek, Jaromir; Partila, Pavol; Rozhon, Jan; Voznak, Miroslav; Skapa, Jan; Uhrin, Dominik; Chmelikova, Zdenka

2016-05-01

This article discusses the impact of multilayer neural network parameters for speaker identification. The main task of speaker identification is to find a specific person in the known set of speakers. It means that the voice of an unknown speaker (wanted person) belongs to a group of reference speakers from the voice database. One of the requests was to develop the text-independent system, which means to classify wanted person regardless of content and language. Multilayer neural network has been used for speaker identification in this research. Artificial neural network (ANN) needs to set parameters like activation function of neurons, steepness of activation functions, learning rate, the maximum number of iterations and a number of neurons in the hidden and output layers. ANN accuracy and validation time are directly influenced by the parameter settings. Different roles require different settings. Identification accuracy and ANN validation time were evaluated with the same input data but different parameter settings. The goal was to find parameters for the neural network with the highest precision and shortest validation time. Input data of neural networks are a Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC). These parameters describe the properties of the vocal tract. Audio samples were recorded for all speakers in a laboratory environment. Training, testing and validation data set were split into 70, 15 and 15 %. The result of the research described in this article is different parameter setting for the multilayer neural network for four speakers.

A language-familiarity effect for speaker discrimination without comprehension.

PubMed

Fleming, David; Giordano, Bruno L; Caldara, Roberto; Belin, Pascal

2014-09-23

The influence of language familiarity upon speaker identification is well established, to such an extent that it has been argued that "Human voice recognition depends on language ability" [Perrachione TK, Del Tufo SN, Gabrieli JDE (2011) Science 333(6042):595]. However, 7-mo-old infants discriminate speakers of their mother tongue better than they do foreign speakers [Johnson EK, Westrek E, Nazzi T, Cutler A (2011) Dev Sci 14(5):1002-1011] despite their limited speech comprehension abilities, suggesting that speaker discrimination may rely on familiarity with the sound structure of one's native language rather than the ability to comprehend speech. To test this hypothesis, we asked Chinese and English adult participants to rate speaker dissimilarity in pairs of sentences in English or Mandarin that were first time-reversed to render them unintelligible. Even in these conditions a language-familiarity effect was observed: Both Chinese and English listeners rated pairs of native-language speakers as more dissimilar than foreign-language speakers, despite their inability to understand the material. Our data indicate that the language familiarity effect is not based on comprehension but rather on familiarity with the phonology of one's native language. This effect may stem from a mechanism analogous to the "other-race" effect in face recognition.

``The perceptual bases of speaker identity'' revisited

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Voiers, William D.

2003-10-01

A series of experiments begun 40 years ago [W. D. Voiers, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 36, 1065-1073 (1964)] was concerned with identifying the perceived voice traits (PVTs) on which human recognition of voices depends. It culminated with the development of a voice taxonomy based on 20 PVTs and a set of highly reliable rating scales for classifying voices with respect to those PVTs. The development of a perceptual voice taxonomy was motivated by the need for a practical method of evaluating speaker recognizability in voice communication systems. The Diagnostic Speaker Recognition Test (DSRT) evaluates the effects of systems on speaker recognizability as reflected in changes in the inter-listener reliability of voice ratings on the 20 PVTs. The DSRT thus provides a qualitative, as well as quantitative, evaluation of the effects of a system on speaker recognizability. A fringe benefit of this project is PVT rating data for a sample of 680 voices. [Work partially supported by USAFRL.

Speaker verification using committee neural networks.

PubMed

Reddy, Narender P; Buch, Ojas A

2003-10-01

Security is a major problem in web based access or remote access to data bases. In the present study, the technique of committee neural networks was developed for speech based speaker verification. Speech data from the designated speaker and several imposters were obtained. Several parameters were extracted in the time and frequency domains, and fed to neural networks. Several neural networks were trained and the five best performing networks were recruited into the committee. The committee decision was based on majority voting of the member networks. The committee opinion was evaluated with further testing data. The committee correctly identified the designated speaker in (50 out of 50) 100% of the cases and rejected imposters in (150 out of 150) 100% of the cases. The committee decision was not unanimous in majority of the cases tested.

Investigating Executive Working Memory and Phonological Short-Term Memory in Relation to Fluency and Self-Repair Behavior in L2 Speech

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Georgiadou, Effrosyni; Roehr-Brackin, Karen

2017-01-01

This paper reports the findings of a study investigating the relationship of executive working memory (WM) and phonological short-term memory (PSTM) to fluency and self-repair behavior during an unrehearsed oral task performed by second language (L2) speakers of English at two levels of proficiency, elementary and lower intermediate. Correlational…

Combining Behavioral and ERP Methodologies to Investigate the Differences Between McGurk Effects Demonstrated by Cantonese and Mandarin Speakers.

PubMed

Zhang, Juan; Meng, Yaxuan; McBride, Catherine; Fan, Xitao; Yuan, Zhen

2018-01-01

The present study investigated the impact of Chinese dialects on McGurk effect using behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) methodologies. Specifically, intra-language comparison of McGurk effect was conducted between Mandarin and Cantonese speakers. The behavioral results showed that Cantonese speakers exhibited a stronger McGurk effect in audiovisual speech perception compared to Mandarin speakers, although both groups performed equally in the auditory and visual conditions. ERP results revealed that Cantonese speakers were more sensitive to visual cues than Mandarin speakers, though this was not the case for the auditory cues. Taken together, the current findings suggest that the McGurk effect generated by Chinese speakers is mainly influenced by segmental phonology during audiovisual speech integration.

The Role of Oral Language Skills in Reading and Listening Comprehension of Text: A Comparison of Monolingual (L1) and Bilingual (L2) Speakers of English Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Babayigit, Selma

2014-01-01

The study examined the role of oral language skills in reading comprehension and listening comprehension levels of 125 monolingual (L1) and bilingual (L2) English-speaking learners (M = 121.5 months, SD = 4.65) in England. All testing was conducted in English. The L1 learners outperformed their L2 peers on the measures of oral language and text…

Guest Speakers in School-Based Sexuality Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McRee, Annie-Laurie; Madsen, Nikki; Eisenberg, Marla E.

2014-01-01

This study, using data from a statewide survey (n = 332), examined teachers' practices regarding the inclusion of guest speakers to cover sexuality content. More than half of teachers (58%) included guest speakers. In multivariate analyses, teachers who taught high school, had professional preparation in health education, or who received…

The Communication of Public Speaking Anxiety: Perceptions of Asian and American Speakers.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Martini, Marianne; And Others

1992-01-01

Finds that U.S. audiences perceive Asian speakers to have more speech anxiety than U.S. speakers, even though Asian speakers do not self-report higher anxiety levels. Confirms that speech state anxiety is not communicated effectively between speakers and audiences for Asian or U.S. speakers. (SR)

Communicating with the crowd: speakers use abstract messages when addressing larger audiences.

PubMed

Joshi, Priyanka D; Wakslak, Cheryl J

2014-02-01

Audience characteristics often shape communicators' message framing. Drawing from construal level theory, we suggest that when speaking to many individuals, communicators frame messages in terms of superordinate characteristics that focus attention on the essence of the message. On the other hand, when communicating with a single individual, communicators increasingly describe events and actions in terms of their concrete details. Using different communication tasks and measures of construal, we show that speakers communicating with many individuals, compared with 1 person, describe events more abstractly (Study 1), describe themselves as more trait-like (Study 2), and use more desirability-related persuasive messages (Study 3). Furthermore, speakers' motivation to communicate with their audience moderates their tendency to frame messages based on audience size (Studies 3 and 4). This audience-size abstraction effect is eliminated when a large audience is described as homogeneous, suggesting that people use abstract construal strategically in order to connect across a disparate group of individuals (Study 5). Finally, we show that participants' experienced fluency in communication is influenced by the match between message abstraction and audience size (Study 6).

Discrimination of speaker sex and size when glottal-pulse rate and vocal-tract length are controlled.

PubMed

Smith, David R R; Walters, Thomas C; Patterson, Roy D

2007-12-01

A recent study [Smith and Patterson, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 118, 3177-3186 (2005)] demonstrated that both the glottal-pulse rate (GPR) and the vocal-tract length (VTL) of vowel sounds have a large effect on the perceived sex and age (or size) of a speaker. The vowels for all of the "different" speakers in that study were synthesized from recordings of the sustained vowels of one, adult male speaker. This paper presents a follow-up study in which a range of vowels were synthesized from recordings of four different speakers--an adult man, an adult woman, a young boy, and a young girl--to determine whether the sex and age of the original speaker would have an effect upon listeners' judgments of whether a vowel was spoken by a man, woman, boy, or girl, after they were equated for GPR and VTL. The sustained vowels of the four speakers were scaled to produce the same combinations of GPR and VTL, which covered the entire range normally encountered in every day life. The results show that listeners readily distinguish children from adults based on their sustained vowels but that they struggle to distinguish the sex of the speaker.

Quality of "Glottal" Stops in Tracheoesophageal Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

van Rossum, M. A.; van As-Brooks, C. J.; Hilgers, F. J. M.; Roozen, M.

2009-01-01

Glottal stops are conveyed by an abrupt constriction at the level of the glottis. Tracheoesophageal (TE) speakers are known to have poor control over the new voice source (neoglottis), and this might influence the production of "glottal" stops. This study investigated how TE speakers realized "glottal" stops in abutting words…

Modeling Speaker Proficiency, Comprehensibility, and Perceived Competence in a Language Use Domain

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schmidgall, Jonathan Edgar

2013-01-01

Research suggests that listener perceptions of a speaker's oral language use, or a speaker's "comprehensibility," may be influenced by a variety of speaker-, listener-, and context-related factors. Primary speaker factors include aspects of the speaker's proficiency in the target language such as pronunciation and…

Assimilation of L2 vowels to L1 phonemes governs L2 learning in adulthood: a behavioral and ERP study

PubMed Central

Grimaldi, Mirko; Sisinni, Bianca; Gili Fivela, Barbara; Invitto, Sara; Resta, Donatella; Alku, Paavo; Brattico, Elvira

2014-01-01

According to the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM), articulatory similarity/dissimilarity between sounds of the second language (L2) and the native language (L1) governs L2 learnability in adulthood and predicts L2 sound perception by naïve listeners. We performed behavioral and neurophysiological experiments on two groups of university students at the first and fifth years of the English language curriculum and on a group of naïve listeners. Categorization and discrimination tests, as well as the mismatch negativity (MMN) brain response to L2 sound changes, showed that the discriminatory capabilities of the students did not significantly differ from those of the naïve subjects. In line with the PAM model, we extend the findings of previous behavioral studies showing that, at the neural level, classroom instruction in adulthood relies on assimilation of L2 vowels to L1 phoneme categories and does not trigger improvement in L2 phonetic discrimination. Implications for L2 classroom teaching practices are discussed. PMID:24860470

Speaker and Accent Variation Are Handled Differently: Evidence in Native and Non-Native Listeners

PubMed Central

Kriengwatana, Buddhamas; Terry, Josephine; Chládková, Kateřina; Escudero, Paola

2016-01-01

Listeners are able to cope with between-speaker variability in speech that stems from anatomical sources (i.e. individual and sex differences in vocal tract size) and sociolinguistic sources (i.e. accents). We hypothesized that listeners adapt to these two types of variation differently because prior work indicates that adapting to speaker/sex variability may occur pre-lexically while adapting to accent variability may require learning from attention to explicit cues (i.e. feedback). In Experiment 1, we tested our hypothesis by training native Dutch listeners and Australian-English (AusE) listeners without any experience with Dutch or Flemish to discriminate between the Dutch vowels /I/ and /ε/ from a single speaker. We then tested their ability to classify /I/ and /ε/ vowels of a novel Dutch speaker (i.e. speaker or sex change only), or vowels of a novel Flemish speaker (i.e. speaker or sex change plus accent change). We found that both Dutch and AusE listeners could successfully categorize vowels if the change involved a speaker/sex change, but not if the change involved an accent change. When AusE listeners were given feedback on their categorization responses to the novel speaker in Experiment 2, they were able to successfully categorize vowels involving an accent change. These results suggest that adapting to accents may be a two-step process, whereby the first step involves adapting to speaker differences at a pre-lexical level, and the second step involves adapting to accent differences at a contextual level, where listeners have access to word meaning or are given feedback that allows them to appropriately adjust their perceptual category boundaries. PMID:27309889

Blinded by taboo words in L1 but not L2.

PubMed

Colbeck, Katie L; Bowers, Jeffrey S

2012-04-01

The present study compares the emotionality of English taboo words in native English speakers and native Chinese speakers who learned English as a second language. Neutral and taboo/sexual words were included in a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) task as to-be-ignored distracters in a short- and long-lag condition. Compared with neutral distracters, taboo/sexual distracters impaired the performance in the short-lag condition only. Of critical note, however, is that the performance of Chinese speakers was less impaired by taboo/sexual distracters. This supports the view that a first language is more emotional than a second language, even when words are processed quickly and automatically. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

Analysis of VOT in Turkish Speakers with Aphasia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kopkalli-Yavuz, Handan; Mavis, Ilknur; Akyildiz, Didem

2011-01-01

Studies investigating voicing onset time (VOT) production by speakers with aphasia have shown that nonfluent aphasics show a deficit in the articulatory programming of speech sounds based on the range of VOT values produced by aphasic individuals. If the VOT value lies between the normal range of VOT for the voiced and voiceless categories, then…

Combining Behavioral and ERP Methodologies to Investigate the Differences Between McGurk Effects Demonstrated by Cantonese and Mandarin Speakers

PubMed Central

Zhang, Juan; Meng, Yaxuan; McBride, Catherine; Fan, Xitao; Yuan, Zhen

2018-01-01

The present study investigated the impact of Chinese dialects on McGurk effect using behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) methodologies. Specifically, intra-language comparison of McGurk effect was conducted between Mandarin and Cantonese speakers. The behavioral results showed that Cantonese speakers exhibited a stronger McGurk effect in audiovisual speech perception compared to Mandarin speakers, although both groups performed equally in the auditory and visual conditions. ERP results revealed that Cantonese speakers were more sensitive to visual cues than Mandarin speakers, though this was not the case for the auditory cues. Taken together, the current findings suggest that the McGurk effect generated by Chinese speakers is mainly influenced by segmental phonology during audiovisual speech integration. PMID:29780312

Electrophysiology of subject-verb agreement mediated by speakers' gender.

PubMed

Hanulíková, Adriana; Carreiras, Manuel

2015-01-01

An important property of speech is that it explicitly conveys features of a speaker's identity such as age or gender. This event-related potential (ERP) study examined the effects of social information provided by a speaker's gender, i.e., the conceptual representation of gender, on subject-verb agreement. Despite numerous studies on agreement, little is known about syntactic computations generated by speaker characteristics extracted from the acoustic signal. Slovak is well suited to investigate this issue because it is a morphologically rich language in which agreement involves features for number, case, and gender. Grammaticality of a sentence can be evaluated by checking a speaker's gender as conveyed by his/her voice. We examined how conceptual information about speaker gender, which is not syntactic but rather social and pragmatic in nature, is interpreted for the computation of agreement patterns. ERP responses to verbs disagreeing with the speaker's gender (e.g., a sentence including a masculine verbal inflection spoken by a female person 'the neighbors were upset because I (∗)stoleMASC plums') elicited a larger early posterior negativity compared to correct sentences. When the agreement was purely syntactic and did not depend on the speaker's gender, a disagreement between a formally marked subject and the verb inflection (e.g., the womanFEM (∗)stoleMASC plums) resulted in a larger P600 preceded by a larger anterior negativity compared to the control sentences. This result is in line with proposals according to which the recruitment of non-syntactic information such as the gender of the speaker results in N400-like effects, while formally marked syntactic features lead to structural integration as reflected in a LAN/P600 complex.

Musical Sophistication and the Effect of Complexity on Auditory Discrimination in Finnish Speakers.

PubMed

Dawson, Caitlin; Aalto, Daniel; Šimko, Juraj; Vainio, Martti; Tervaniemi, Mari

2017-01-01

Musical experiences and native language are both known to affect auditory processing. The present work aims to disentangle the influences of native language phonology and musicality on behavioral and subcortical sound feature processing in a population of musically diverse Finnish speakers as well as to investigate the specificity of enhancement from musical training. Finnish speakers are highly sensitive to duration cues since in Finnish, vowel and consonant duration determine word meaning. Using a correlational approach with a set of behavioral sound feature discrimination tasks, brainstem recordings, and a musical sophistication questionnaire, we find no evidence for an association between musical sophistication and more precise duration processing in Finnish speakers either in the auditory brainstem response or in behavioral tasks, but they do show an enhanced pitch discrimination compared to Finnish speakers with less musical experience and show greater duration modulation in a complex task. These results are consistent with a ceiling effect set for certain sound features which corresponds to the phonology of the native language, leaving an opportunity for music experience-based enhancement of sound features not explicitly encoded in the language (such as pitch, which is not explicitly encoded in Finnish). Finally, the pattern of duration modulation in more musically sophisticated Finnish speakers suggests integrated feature processing for greater efficiency in a real world musical situation. These results have implications for research into the specificity of plasticity in the auditory system as well as to the effects of interaction of specific language features with musical experiences.

Musical Sophistication and the Effect of Complexity on Auditory Discrimination in Finnish Speakers

PubMed Central

Dawson, Caitlin; Aalto, Daniel; Šimko, Juraj; Vainio, Martti; Tervaniemi, Mari

2017-01-01

Musical experiences and native language are both known to affect auditory processing. The present work aims to disentangle the influences of native language phonology and musicality on behavioral and subcortical sound feature processing in a population of musically diverse Finnish speakers as well as to investigate the specificity of enhancement from musical training. Finnish speakers are highly sensitive to duration cues since in Finnish, vowel and consonant duration determine word meaning. Using a correlational approach with a set of behavioral sound feature discrimination tasks, brainstem recordings, and a musical sophistication questionnaire, we find no evidence for an association between musical sophistication and more precise duration processing in Finnish speakers either in the auditory brainstem response or in behavioral tasks, but they do show an enhanced pitch discrimination compared to Finnish speakers with less musical experience and show greater duration modulation in a complex task. These results are consistent with a ceiling effect set for certain sound features which corresponds to the phonology of the native language, leaving an opportunity for music experience-based enhancement of sound features not explicitly encoded in the language (such as pitch, which is not explicitly encoded in Finnish). Finally, the pattern of duration modulation in more musically sophisticated Finnish speakers suggests integrated feature processing for greater efficiency in a real world musical situation. These results have implications for research into the specificity of plasticity in the auditory system as well as to the effects of interaction of specific language features with musical experiences. PMID:28450829

Input-based structure-specific proficiency predicts the neural mechanism of adult L2 syntactic processing.

PubMed

Deng, Taiping; Zhou, Huixia; Bi, Hong-Yan; Chen, Baoguo

2015-06-12

This study used Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to explore the role of input-based structure-specific proficiency in L2 syntactic processing, using English subject-verb agreement structures as the stimuli. A pre-test/trainings/post-test paradigm of experimental and control groups was employed, and Chinese speakers who learned English as a second language (L2) participated in the experiment. At pre-test, no ERP component related to the subject-verb agreement structures violations was observed in either group. At training session, the experimental group learned the subject-verb agreement structures, while the control group learned other syntactic structures. After two continuously intensive input trainings, at post-test, a significant P600 component related to the subject-verb agreement structures violations was elicited in the experimental group, but not in the control group. These findings suggest that input training improves structure-specific proficiency, which is reflected in the neural mechanism of L2 syntactic processing. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Physiological Indices of Bilingualism: Oral-Motor Coordination and Speech Rate in Bengali-English Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chakraborty, Rahul; Goffman, Lisa; Smith, Anne

2008-01-01

Purpose: To examine how age of immersion and proficiency in a 2nd language influence speech movement variability and speaking rate in both a 1st language and a 2nd language. Method: A group of 21 Bengali-English bilingual speakers participated. Lip and jaw movements were recorded. For all 21 speakers, lip movement variability was assessed based on…

Revisiting the role of language in spatial cognition: Categorical perception of spatial relations in English and Korean speakers.

PubMed

Holmes, Kevin J; Moty, Kelsey; Regier, Terry

2017-12-01

The spatial relation of support has been regarded as universally privileged in nonlinguistic cognition and immune to the influence of language. English, but not Korean, obligatorily distinguishes support from nonsupport via basic spatial terms. Despite this linguistic difference, previous research suggests that English and Korean speakers show comparable nonlinguistic sensitivity to the support/nonsupport distinction. Here, using a paradigm previously found to elicit cross-language differences in color discrimination, we provide evidence for a difference in sensitivity to support/nonsupport between native English speakers and native Korean speakers who were late English learners and tested in a context that privileged Korean. Whereas the former group showed categorical perception (CP) when discriminating spatial scenes capturing the support/nonsupport distinction, the latter did not. An additional group of native Korean speakers-relatively early English learners tested in an English-salient context-patterned with the native English speakers in showing CP for support/nonsupport. These findings suggest that obligatory marking of support/nonsupport in one's native language can affect nonlinguistic sensitivity to this distinction, contra earlier findings, but that such sensitivity may also depend on aspects of language background and the immediate linguistic context.

Fifty years of progress in speech and speaker recognition

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Furui, Sadaoki

2004-10-01

Speech and speaker recognition technology has made very significant progress in the past 50 years. The progress can be summarized by the following changes: (1) from template matching to corpus-base statistical modeling, e.g., HMM and n-grams, (2) from filter bank/spectral resonance to Cepstral features (Cepstrum + DCepstrum + DDCepstrum), (3) from heuristic time-normalization to DTW/DP matching, (4) from gdistanceh-based to likelihood-based methods, (5) from maximum likelihood to discriminative approach, e.g., MCE/GPD and MMI, (6) from isolated word to continuous speech recognition, (7) from small vocabulary to large vocabulary recognition, (8) from context-independent units to context-dependent units for recognition, (9) from clean speech to noisy/telephone speech recognition, (10) from single speaker to speaker-independent/adaptive recognition, (11) from monologue to dialogue/conversation recognition, (12) from read speech to spontaneous speech recognition, (13) from recognition to understanding, (14) from single-modality (audio signal only) to multi-modal (audio/visual) speech recognition, (15) from hardware recognizer to software recognizer, and (16) from no commercial application to many practical commercial applications. Most of these advances have taken place in both the fields of speech recognition and speaker recognition. The majority of technological changes have been directed toward the purpose of increasing robustness of recognition, including many other additional important techniques not noted above.

The Use of Epistemic Markers as a Means of Hedging and Boosting in the Discourse of L1 and L2 Speakers of Modern Greek: A Corpus-Based Study in Informal Letter-Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Efstathiadi, Lia

2010-01-01

The paper investigates the semantic area of Epistemic Modality in Modern Greek, by means of a corpus-based research. A comparative, quantitative study was performed between written corpora (informal letter-writing) of non-native informants with various language backgrounds and Greek native speakers. A number of epistemic markers were selected for…

Can you hear my age? Influences of speech rate and speech spontaneity on estimation of speaker age

PubMed Central

Skoog Waller, Sara; Eriksson, Mårten; Sörqvist, Patrik

2015-01-01

Cognitive hearing science is mainly about the study of how cognitive factors contribute to speech comprehension, but cognitive factors also partake in speech processing to infer non-linguistic information from speech signals, such as the intentions of the talker and the speaker’s age. Here, we report two experiments on age estimation by “naïve” listeners. The aim was to study how speech rate influences estimation of speaker age by comparing the speakers’ natural speech rate with increased or decreased speech rate. In Experiment 1, listeners were presented with audio samples of read speech from three different speaker age groups (young, middle aged, and old adults). They estimated the speakers as younger when speech rate was faster than normal and as older when speech rate was slower than normal. This speech rate effect was slightly greater in magnitude for older (60–65 years) speakers in comparison with younger (20–25 years) speakers, suggesting that speech rate may gain greater importance as a perceptual age cue with increased speaker age. This pattern was more pronounced in Experiment 2, in which listeners estimated age from spontaneous speech. Faster speech rate was associated with lower age estimates, but only for older and middle aged (40–45 years) speakers. Taken together, speakers of all age groups were estimated as older when speech rate decreased, except for the youngest speakers in Experiment 2. The absence of a linear speech rate effect in estimates of younger speakers, for spontaneous speech, implies that listeners use different age estimation strategies or cues (possibly vocabulary) depending on the age of the speaker and the spontaneity of the speech. Potential implications for forensic investigations and other applied domains are discussed. PMID:26236259

Perception of a non-native speech contrast: Voiced and voiceless stops as perceived by Tamil speakers

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tur, Sylwia

2004-05-01

The effect of linguistic experience plays a significant role in how speech sounds are perceived. The findings of many studies imply that the perception of non-native contrasts depends on their status in the native language of the listener. Tamil is a language with a single voicing category. All stop consonants in Tamil are phonemically voiceless, though allophonic voicing has been observed in spoken Tamil. The present study examined how native Tamil speakers and English controls perceived voiced and voiceless bilabial, alveolar, and velar stops in English. Voice onset time (VOT) was manipulated for editing of naturally produced stimuli with increasingly longer continuum. Perceptual data was collected from 16 Tamil and 16 English speakers. Experiment 1 was an AX task in which subjects responded same or different to 162 pairs of stimuli. Experiment 2 was a forced choice ID task in which subjects identified 99 individually presented stimuli as pa, ta, ka or ba, da, ga. Experiments show statistically significant differences between Tamil and English speakers in their perception of English stop consonants. Results of the study imply that the allophonic status of voiced stops in Tamil does not aid the Tamil speakers in perceiving phonemically voiced stops in English.

Development of a speaker discrimination test for cochlear implant users based on the Oldenburg Logatome corpus.

PubMed

Mühler, Roland; Ziese, Michael; Rostalski, Dorothea

2009-01-01

The purpose of the study was to develop a speaker discrimination test for cochlear implant (CI) users. The speech material was drawn from the Oldenburg Logatome (OLLO) corpus, which contains 150 different logatomes read by 40 German and 10 French native speakers. The prototype test battery included 120 logatome pairs spoken by 5 male and 5 female speakers with balanced representations of the conditions 'same speaker' and 'different speaker'. Ten adult normal-hearing listeners and 12 adult postlingually deafened CI users were included in a study to evaluate the suitability of the test. The mean speaker discrimination score for the CI users was 67.3% correct and for the normal-hearing listeners 92.2% correct. A significant influence of voice gender and fundamental frequency difference on the speaker discrimination score was found in CI users as well as in normal-hearing listeners. Since the test results of the CI users were significantly above chance level and no ceiling effect was observed, we conclude that subsets of the OLLO corpus are very well suited to speaker discrimination experiments in CI users. Copyright 2008 S. Karger AG, Basel.

Speaker information affects false recognition of unstudied lexical-semantic associates.

PubMed

Luthra, Sahil; Fox, Neal P; Blumstein, Sheila E

2018-05-01

Recognition of and memory for a spoken word can be facilitated by a prior presentation of that word spoken by the same talker. However, it is less clear whether this speaker congruency advantage generalizes to facilitate recognition of unheard related words. The present investigation employed a false memory paradigm to examine whether information about a speaker's identity in items heard by listeners could influence the recognition of novel items (critical intruders) phonologically or semantically related to the studied items. In Experiment 1, false recognition of semantically associated critical intruders was sensitive to speaker information, though only when subjects attended to talker identity during encoding. Results from Experiment 2 also provide some evidence that talker information affects the false recognition of critical intruders. Taken together, the present findings indicate that indexical information is able to contact the lexical-semantic network to affect the processing of unheard words.

Content-specific coordination of listeners' to speakers' EEG during communication.

PubMed

Kuhlen, Anna K; Allefeld, Carsten; Haynes, John-Dylan

2012-01-01

Cognitive neuroscience has recently begun to extend its focus from the isolated individual mind to two or more individuals coordinating with each other. In this study we uncover a coordination of neural activity between the ongoing electroencephalogram (EEG) of two people-a person speaking and a person listening. The EEG of one set of twelve participants ("speakers") was recorded while they were narrating short stories. The EEG of another set of twelve participants ("listeners") was recorded while watching audiovisual recordings of these stories. Specifically, listeners watched the superimposed videos of two speakers simultaneously and were instructed to attend either to one or the other speaker. This allowed us to isolate neural coordination due to processing the communicated content from the effects of sensory input. We find several neural signatures of communication: First, the EEG is more similar among listeners attending to the same speaker than among listeners attending to different speakers, indicating that listeners' EEG reflects content-specific information. Secondly, listeners' EEG activity correlates with the attended speakers' EEG, peaking at a time delay of about 12.5 s. This correlation takes place not only between homologous, but also between non-homologous brain areas in speakers and listeners. A semantic analysis of the stories suggests that listeners coordinate with speakers at the level of complex semantic representations, so-called "situation models". With this study we link a coordination of neural activity between individuals directly to verbally communicated information.

Gender parity trends for invited speakers at four prominent virology conference series.

PubMed

Kalejta, Robert F; Palmenberg, Ann C

2017-06-07

Scientific conferences are most beneficial to participants when they showcase significant new experimental developments, accurately summarize the current state of the field, and provide strong opportunities for collaborative networking. A top-notch slate of invited speakers, assembled by conference organizers or committees, is key to achieving these goals. The perceived underrepresentation of female speakers at prominent scientific meetings is currently a popular topic for discussion, but one that often lacks supportive data. We compiled the full rosters of invited speakers over the last 35 years for four prominent international virology conferences, the American Society for Virology Annual Meeting (ASV), the International Herpesvirus Workshop (IHW), the Positive-Strand RNA Virus Symposium (PSR), and the Gordon Research Conference on Viruses & Cells (GRC). The rosters were cross-indexed by unique names, gender, year, and repeat invitations. When plotted as gender-dependent trends over time, all four conferences showed a clear proclivity for male-dominated invited speaker lists. Encouragingly, shifts toward parity are emerging within all units, but at different rates. Not surprisingly, both selection of a larger percentage of first time participants and the presence of a woman on the speaker selection committee correlated with improved parity. Session chair information was also collected for the IHW and GRC. These visible positions also displayed a strong male dominance over time that is eroding slowly. We offer our personal interpretation of these data to aid future organizers achieve improved equity among the limited number of available positions for session moderators and invited speakers. IMPORTANCE Politicians and media members have a tendency to cite anecdotes as conclusions without any supporting data. This happens so frequently now, that a name for it has emerged: fake news. Good science proceeds otherwise. The under representation of women as invited

Gender Parity Trends for Invited Speakers at Four Prominent Virology Conference Series

PubMed Central

Palmenberg, Ann C.

2017-01-01

ABSTRACT Scientific conferences are most beneficial to participants when they showcase significant new experimental developments, accurately summarize the current state of the field, and provide strong opportunities for collaborative networking. A top-notch slate of invited speakers, assembled by conference organizers or committees, is key to achieving these goals. The perceived underrepresentation of female speakers at prominent scientific meetings is currently a popular topic for discussion, but one that often lacks supportive data. We compiled the full rosters of invited speakers over the last 35 years for four prominent international virology conferences, the American Society for Virology Annual Meeting (ASV), the International Herpesvirus Workshop (IHW), the Positive-Strand RNA Virus Symposium (PSR), and the Gordon Research Conference on Viruses & Cells (GRC). The rosters were cross-indexed by unique names, gender, year, and repeat invitations. When plotted as gender-dependent trends over time, all four conferences showed a clear proclivity for male-dominated invited speaker lists. Encouragingly, shifts toward parity are emerging within all units, but at different rates. Not surprisingly, both selection of a larger percentage of first-time participants and the presence of a woman on the speaker selection committee correlated with improved parity. Session chair information was also collected for the IHW and GRC. These visible positions also displayed a strong male dominance over time that is eroding slowly. We offer our personal interpretation of these data to aid future organizers achieve improved equity among the limited number of available positions for session moderators and invited speakers. IMPORTANCE Politicians and media members have a tendency to cite anecdotes as conclusions without any supporting data. This happens so frequently now, that a name for it has emerged: fake news. Good science proceeds otherwise. The underrepresentation of women as

The Influence of the Pinyin and Zhuyin Writing Systems on the Acquisition of Mandarin Word Forms by Native English Speakers

PubMed Central

Hayes-Harb, Rachel; Cheng, Hui-Wen

2016-01-01

The role of written input in second language (L2) phonological and lexical acquisition has received increased attention in recent years. Here we investigated the influence of two factors that may moderate the influence of orthography on L2 word form learning: (i) whether the writing system is shared by the native language and the L2, and (ii) if the writing system is shared, whether the relevant grapheme-phoneme correspondences are also shared. The acquisition of Mandarin via the Pinyin and Zhuyin writing systems provides an ecologically valid opportunity to explore these factors. We first asked whether there is a difference in native English speakers' ability to learn Pinyin and Zhuyin grapheme-phoneme correspondences. In Experiment 1, native English speakers assigned to either Pinyin or Zhuyin groups were exposed to Mandarin words belonging to one of two conditions: in the “congruent” condition, the Pinyin forms are possible English spellings for the auditory words (e.g., < nai> for [nai]); in the “incongruent” condition, the Pinyin forms involve a familiar grapheme representing a novel phoneme (e.g., < xiu> for [ɕiou]). At test, participants were asked to indicate whether auditory and written forms matched; in the crucial trials, the written forms from training (e.g., < xiu>) were paired with possible English pronunciations of the Pinyin written forms (e.g., [ziou]). Experiment 2 was identical to Experiment 1 except that participants additionally saw pictures depicting word meanings during the exposure phase, and at test were asked to match auditory forms with the pictures. In both experiments the Zhuyin group outperformed the Pinyin group due to the Pinyin group's difficulty with “incongruent” items. A third experiment confirmed that the groups did not differ in their ability to perceptually distinguish the relevant Mandarin consonants (e.g., [ɕ]) from the foils (e.g., [z]), suggesting that the findings of Experiments 1 and 2 can be attributed to

Electroglottogram waveform types of untrained speakers.

PubMed

Painter, C

1990-01-01

Electroglottography is a useful, non-invasive technique that can assist in the assessment of vocal fold dysfunction. However, if it is to become a useful clinical tool, there is a need for normative studies of the electroglottogram waveform types that characterize different groups of speakers. This report compares the electroglottogram waveform types characterizing one trained professional voice user phonating in 15 experimental sessions under various fundamental frequencies, intensities and voice qualities with those obtained from 52 untrained non-professional speakers.

When pitch Accents Encode Speaker Commitment: Evidence from French Intonation.

PubMed

Michelas, Amandine; Portes, Cristel; Champagne-Lavau, Maud

2016-06-01

Recent studies on a variety of languages have shown that a speaker's commitment to the propositional content of his or her utterance can be encoded, among other strategies, by pitch accent types. Since prior research mainly relied on lexical-stress languages, our understanding of how speakers of a non-lexical-stress language encode speaker commitment is limited. This paper explores the contribution of the last pitch accent of an intonation phrase to convey speaker commitment in French, a language that has stress at the phrasal level as well as a restricted set of pitch accents. In a production experiment, participants had to produce sentences in two pragmatic contexts: unbiased questions (the speaker had no particular belief with respect to the expected answer) and negatively biased questions (the speaker believed the proposition to be false). Results revealed that negatively biased questions consistently exhibited an additional unaccented F0 peak in the preaccentual syllable (an H+!H* pitch accent) while unbiased questions were often realized with a rising pattern across the accented syllable (an H* pitch accent). These results provide evidence that pitch accent types in French can signal the speaker's belief about the certainty of the proposition expressed in French. It also has implications for the phonological model of French intonation.

Perception of Mandarin Tones: The Effect of L1 Background and Training

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wang, Xinchun

2013-01-01

This study investigates whether native Hmong speakers' first language (L1) lexical tone experience facilitates or interferes with their perception of Mandarin tones and whether training is effective for perceptual learning of second (L2) tones. In Experiment 1, 3 groups of beginning level learners of Mandarin with different L1 prosodic background…

Speaker normalization and adaptation using second-order connectionist networks.

PubMed

Watrous, R L

1993-01-01

A method for speaker normalization and adaption using connectionist networks is developed. A speaker-specific linear transformation of observations of the speech signal is computed using second-order network units. Classification is accomplished by a multilayer feedforward network that operates on the normalized speech data. The network is adapted for a new talker by modifying the transformation parameters while leaving the classifier fixed. This is accomplished by backpropagating classification error through the classifier to the second-order transformation units. This method was evaluated for the classification of ten vowels for 76 speakers using the first two formant values of the Peterson-Barney data. The results suggest that rapid speaker adaptation resulting in high classification accuracy can be accomplished by this method.

Unconscious Motivation. Part I: Implicit Attitudes toward L2 Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Al-Hoorie, Ali H.

2016-01-01

This paper reports the first investigation in the second language acquisition field assessing learners' implicit attitudes using the Implicit Association Test, a computerized reaction-time measure. Examination of the explicit and implicit attitudes of Arab learners of English (N = 365) showed that, particularly for males, implicit attitudes toward…

Recognition of speaker-dependent continuous speech with KEAL

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mercier, G.; Bigorgne, D.; Miclet, L.; Le Guennec, L.; Querre, M.

1989-04-01

A description of the speaker-dependent continuous speech recognition system KEAL is given. An unknown utterance, is recognized by means of the followng procedures: acoustic analysis, phonetic segmentation and identification, word and sentence analysis. The combination of feature-based, speaker-independent coarse phonetic segmentation with speaker-dependent statistical classification techniques is one of the main design features of the acoustic-phonetic decoder. The lexical access component is essentially based on a statistical dynamic programming technique which aims at matching a phonemic lexical entry containing various phonological forms, against a phonetic lattice. Sentence recognition is achieved by use of a context-free grammar and a parsing algorithm derived from Earley's parser. A speaker adaptation module allows some of the system parameters to be adjusted by matching known utterances with their acoustical representation. The task to be performed, described by its vocabulary and its grammar, is given as a parameter of the system. Continuously spoken sentences extracted from a 'pseudo-Logo' language are analyzed and results are presented.

Direct Speaker Gaze Promotes Trust in Truth-Ambiguous Statements.

PubMed

Kreysa, Helene; Kessler, Luise; Schweinberger, Stefan R

2016-01-01

A speaker's gaze behaviour can provide perceivers with a multitude of cues which are relevant for communication, thus constituting an important non-verbal interaction channel. The present study investigated whether direct eye gaze of a speaker affects the likelihood of listeners believing truth-ambiguous statements. Participants were presented with videos in which a speaker produced such statements with either direct or averted gaze. The statements were selected through a rating study to ensure that participants were unlikely to know a-priori whether they were true or not (e.g., "sniffer dogs cannot smell the difference between identical twins"). Participants indicated in a forced-choice task whether or not they believed each statement. We found that participants were more likely to believe statements by a speaker looking at them directly, compared to a speaker with averted gaze. Moreover, when participants disagreed with a statement, they were slower to do so when the statement was uttered with direct (compared to averted) gaze, suggesting that the process of rejecting a statement as untrue may be inhibited when that statement is accompanied by direct gaze.

Bystander capability to activate speaker function for continuous dispatcher assisted CPR in case of suspected cardiac arrest.

PubMed

Steensberg, Alvilda T; Eriksen, Mette M; Andersen, Lars B; Hendriksen, Ole M; Larsen, Heinrich D; Laier, Gunnar H; Thougaard, Thomas

2017-06-01

The European Resuscitation Council Guidelines 2015 recommend bystanders to activate their mobile phone speaker function, if possible, in case of suspected cardiac arrest. This is to facilitate continuous dialogue with the dispatcher including (if required) cardiopulmonary resuscitation instructions. The aim of this study was to measure the bystander capability to activate speaker function in case of suspected cardiac arrest. In 87days, a systematic prospective registration of bystander capability to activate the speaker function, when cardiac arrest was suspected, was performed. For those asked, "can you activate your mobile phone's speaker function", audio recordings were examined and categorized into groups according to the bystanders capability to activate speaker function on their own initiative, without instructions, or with instructions from the emergency medical dispatcher. Time delay was measured, in seconds, for the bystanders without pre-activated speaker function. 42.0% (58) was able to activate the speaker function without instructions, 2.9% (4) with instructions, 18.1% (25) on own initiative and 37.0% (51) were unable to activate the speaker function. The median time to activate speaker function was 19s and 8s, with and without instructions, respectively. Dispatcher assisted cardiopulmonary resuscitation with activated speaker function, in cases of suspected cardiac arrest, allows for continuous dialogue between the emergency medical dispatcher and the bystander. In this study, we found a 63.0% success rate of activating the speaker function in such situations. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The role of linguistic experience in the processing of probabilistic information in production.

PubMed

Gustafson, Erin; Goldrick, Matthew

2018-01-01

Speakers track the probability that a word will occur in a particular context and utilize this information during phonetic processing. For example, content words that have high probability within a discourse tend to be realized with reduced acoustic/articulatory properties. Such probabilistic information may influence L1 and L2 speech processing in distinct ways (reflecting differences in linguistic experience across groups and the overall difficulty of L2 speech processing). To examine this issue, L1 and L2 speakers performed a referential communication task, describing sequences of simple actions. The two groups of speakers showed similar effects of discourse-dependent probabilistic information on production, suggesting that L2 speakers can successfully track discourse-dependent probabilities and use such information to modulate phonetic processing.

Speaker Verification Using SVM

DTIC Science & Technology

2010-11-01

application the required resources are provided by the phone itself. Speaker recognition can be used in many areas, like: • homeland security: airport ... security , strengthening the national borders, in travel documents, visas; • enterprise-wide network security infrastructures; • secure electronic

Prosody in the hands of the speaker

PubMed Central

Guellaï, Bahia; Langus, Alan; Nespor, Marina

2014-01-01

In everyday life, speech is accompanied by gestures. In the present study, two experiments tested the possibility that spontaneous gestures accompanying speech carry prosodic information. Experiment 1 showed that gestures provide prosodic information, as adults are able to perceive the congruency between low-pass filtered—thus unintelligible—speech and the gestures of the speaker. Experiment 2 shows that in the case of ambiguous sentences (i.e., sentences with two alternative meanings depending on their prosody) mismatched prosody and gestures lead participants to choose more often the meaning signaled by gestures. Our results demonstrate that the prosody that characterizes speech is not a modality specific phenomenon: it is also perceived in the spontaneous gestures that accompany speech. We draw the conclusion that spontaneous gestures and speech form a single communication system where the suprasegmental aspects of spoken language are mapped to the motor-programs responsible for the production of both speech sounds and hand gestures. PMID:25071666

An Acoustic Study of Vowels Produced by Alaryngeal Speakers in Taiwan.

PubMed

Liao, Jia-Shiou

2016-11-01

This study investigated the acoustic properties of 6 Taiwan Southern Min vowels produced by 10 laryngeal speakers (LA), 10 speakers with a pneumatic artificial larynx (PA), and 8 esophageal speakers (ES). Each of the 6 monophthongs of Taiwan Southern Min (/i, e, a, ɔ, u, ə/) was represented by a Taiwan Southern Min character and appeared randomly on a list 3 times (6 Taiwan Southern Min characters × 3 repetitions = 18 tokens). Each Taiwan Southern Min character in this study has the same syllable structure, /V/, and all were read with tone 1 (high and level). Acoustic measurements of the 1st formant, 2nd formant, and 3rd formant were taken for each vowel. Then, vowel space areas (VSAs) enclosed by /i, a, u/ were calculated for each group of speakers. The Euclidean distance between vowels in the pairs /i, a/, /i, u/, and /a, u/ was also calculated and compared across the groups. PA and ES have higher 1st or 2nd formant values than LA for each vowel. The distance is significantly shorter between vowels in the corner vowel pairs /i, a/ and /i, u/. PA and ES have a significantly smaller VSA compared with LA. In accordance with previous studies, alaryngeal speakers have higher formant frequency values than LA because they have a shortened vocal tract as a result of their total laryngectomy. Furthermore, the resonance frequencies are inversely related to the length of the vocal tract (on the basis of the assumption of the source filter theory). PA and ES have a smaller VSA and shorter distances between corner vowels compared with LA, which may be related to speech intelligibility. This hypothesis needs further support from future study.

Speaker Recognition Using Real vs. Synthetic Parallel Data for DNN Channel Compensation

DTIC Science & Technology

2016-08-18

Speaker Recognition Using Real vs Synthetic Parallel Data for DNN Channel Compensation Fred Richardson, Michael Brandstein, Jennifer Melot and...de- noising DNNs has been demonstrated for several speech tech- nologies such as ASR and speaker recognition. This paper com- pares the use of real ...AVG and POOL min DCFs). In all cases, the telephone channel per- formance on SRE10 is improved by the denoising DNNs with the real Mixer 1 and 2

Speaker Recognition Using Real vs Synthetic Parallel Data for DNN Channel Compensation

DTIC Science & Technology

2016-09-08

Speaker Recognition Using Real vs Synthetic Parallel Data for DNN Channel Compensation Fred Richardson, Michael Brandstein, Jennifer Melot and...de- noising DNNs has been demonstrated for several speech tech- nologies such as ASR and speaker recognition. This paper com- pares the use of real ...AVG and POOL min DCFs). In all cases, the telephone channel per- formance on SRE10 is improved by the denoising DNNs with the real Mixer 1 and 2

On the same wavelength: predictable language enhances speaker-listener brain-to-brain synchrony in posterior superior temporal gyrus.

PubMed

Dikker, Suzanne; Silbert, Lauren J; Hasson, Uri; Zevin, Jason D

2014-04-30

Recent research has shown that the degree to which speakers and listeners exhibit similar brain activity patterns during human linguistic interaction is correlated with communicative success. Here, we used an intersubject correlation approach in fMRI to test the hypothesis that a listener's ability to predict a speaker's utterance increases such neural coupling between speakers and listeners. Nine subjects listened to recordings of a speaker describing visual scenes that varied in the degree to which they permitted specific linguistic predictions. In line with our hypothesis, the temporal profile of listeners' brain activity was significantly more synchronous with the speaker's brain activity for highly predictive contexts in left posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG), an area previously associated with predictive auditory language processing. In this region, predictability differentially affected the temporal profiles of brain responses in the speaker and listeners respectively, in turn affecting correlated activity between the two: whereas pSTG activation increased with predictability in the speaker, listeners' pSTG activity instead decreased for more predictable sentences. Listeners additionally showed stronger BOLD responses for predictive images before sentence onset, suggesting that highly predictable contexts lead comprehenders to preactivate predicted words.

Sentence Comprehension in Swahili-English Bilingual Agrammatic Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Abuom, Tom O.; Shah, Emmah; Bastiaanse, Roelien

2013-01-01

For this study, sentence comprehension was tested in Swahili-English bilingual agrammatic speakers. The sentences were controlled for four factors: (1) order of the arguments (base vs. derived); (2) embedding (declarative vs. relative sentences); (3) overt use of the relative pronoun "who"; (4) language (English and Swahili). Two…

Somatotype and Body Composition of Normal and Dysphonic Adult Speakers.

PubMed

Franco, Débora; Fragoso, Isabel; Andrea, Mário; Teles, Júlia; Martins, Fernando

2017-01-01

Voice quality provides information about the anatomical characteristics of the speaker. The patterns of somatotype and body composition can provide essential knowledge to characterize the individuality of voice quality. The aim of this study was to verify if there were significant differences in somatotype and body composition between normal and dysphonic speakers. Cross-sectional study. Anthropometric measurements were taken of a sample of 72 adult participants (40 normal speakers and 32 dysphonic speakers) according to International Society for the Advancement of Kinanthropometry standards, which allowed the calculation of endomorphism, mesomorphism, ectomorphism components, body density, body mass index, fat mass, percentage fat, and fat-free mass. Perception and acoustic evaluations as well as nasoendoscopy were used to assign speakers into normal or dysphonic groups. There were no significant differences between normal and dysphonic speakers in the mean somatotype attitudinal distance and somatotype dispersion distance (in spite of marginally significant differences [P < 0.10] in somatotype attitudinal distance and somatotype dispersion distance between groups) and in the mean vector of the somatotype components. Furthermore, no significant differences were found between groups concerning the mean of percentage fat, fat mass, fat-free mass, body density, and body mass index after controlling by sex. The findings suggested no significant differences in the somatotype and body composition variables, between normal and dysphonic speakers. Copyright © 2017 The Voice Foundation. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Content-specific coordination of listeners' to speakers' EEG during communication

PubMed Central

Kuhlen, Anna K.; Allefeld, Carsten; Haynes, John-Dylan

2012-01-01

Cognitive neuroscience has recently begun to extend its focus from the isolated individual mind to two or more individuals coordinating with each other. In this study we uncover a coordination of neural activity between the ongoing electroencephalogram (EEG) of two people—a person speaking and a person listening. The EEG of one set of twelve participants (“speakers”) was recorded while they were narrating short stories. The EEG of another set of twelve participants (“listeners”) was recorded while watching audiovisual recordings of these stories. Specifically, listeners watched the superimposed videos of two speakers simultaneously and were instructed to attend either to one or the other speaker. This allowed us to isolate neural coordination due to processing the communicated content from the effects of sensory input. We find several neural signatures of communication: First, the EEG is more similar among listeners attending to the same speaker than among listeners attending to different speakers, indicating that listeners' EEG reflects content-specific information. Secondly, listeners' EEG activity correlates with the attended speakers' EEG, peaking at a time delay of about 12.5 s. This correlation takes place not only between homologous, but also between non-homologous brain areas in speakers and listeners. A semantic analysis of the stories suggests that listeners coordinate with speakers at the level of complex semantic representations, so-called “situation models”. With this study we link a coordination of neural activity between individuals directly to verbally communicated information. PMID:23060770

English and Thai Speakers' Perception of Mandarin Tones

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Li, Ying

2016-01-01

Language learners' language experience is predicted to display a significant effect on their accurate perception of foreign language sounds (Flege, 1995). At the superasegmental level, there is still a debate regarding whether tone language speakers are better able to perceive foreign lexical tones than non-tone language speakers (i.e Lee et al.,…

Respiratory Control in Stuttering Speakers: Evidence from Respiratory High-Frequency Oscillations.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Denny, Margaret; Smith, Anne

2000-01-01

This study examined whether stuttering speakers (N=10) differed from fluent speakers in relations between the neural control systems for speech and life support. It concluded that in some stuttering speakers the relations between respiratory controllers are atypical, but that high participation by the high frequency oscillation-producing circuitry…

Early testimonial learning: monitoring speech acts and speakers.

PubMed

Stephens, Elizabeth; Suarez, Sarah; Koenig, Melissa

2015-01-01

Testimony provides children with a rich source of knowledge about the world and the people in it. However, testimony is not guaranteed to be veridical, and speakers vary greatly in both knowledge and intent. In this chapter, we argue that children encounter two primary types of conflicts when learning from speakers: conflicts of knowledge and conflicts of interest. We review recent research on children's selective trust in testimony and propose two distinct mechanisms supporting early epistemic vigilance in response to the conflicts associated with speakers. The first section of the chapter focuses on the mechanism of coherence checking, which occurs during the process of message comprehension and facilitates children's comparison of information communicated through testimony to their prior knowledge, alerting them to inaccurate, inconsistent, irrational, and implausible messages. The second section focuses on source-monitoring processes. When children lack relevant prior knowledge with which to evaluate testimonial messages, they monitor speakers themselves for evidence of competence and morality, attending to cues such as confidence, consensus, access to information, prosocial and antisocial behavior, and group membership. © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Discriminative analysis of lip motion features for speaker identification and speech-reading.

PubMed

Cetingül, H Ertan; Yemez, Yücel; Erzin, Engin; Tekalp, A Murat

2006-10-01

There have been several studies that jointly use audio, lip intensity, and lip geometry information for speaker identification and speech-reading applications. This paper proposes using explicit lip motion information, instead of or in addition to lip intensity and/or geometry information, for speaker identification and speech-reading within a unified feature selection and discrimination analysis framework, and addresses two important issues: 1) Is using explicit lip motion information useful, and, 2) if so, what are the best lip motion features for these two applications? The best lip motion features for speaker identification are considered to be those that result in the highest discrimination of individual speakers in a population, whereas for speech-reading, the best features are those providing the highest phoneme/word/phrase recognition rate. Several lip motion feature candidates have been considered including dense motion features within a bounding box about the lip, lip contour motion features, and combination of these with lip shape features. Furthermore, a novel two-stage, spatial, and temporal discrimination analysis is introduced to select the best lip motion features for speaker identification and speech-reading applications. Experimental results using an hidden-Markov-model-based recognition system indicate that using explicit lip motion information provides additional performance gains in both applications, and lip motion features prove more valuable in the case of speech-reading application.

Speaking Japanese in Japan: Issues for English Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stephens, Meredith

2010-01-01

Due to the global momentum of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), Anglophones may perceive that there is less urgency for them to learn other languages than for speakers of other languages to learn English. The monolingual expectations of English speakers are evidenced not only in Anglophone countries but also abroad. This study reports on the…

Increased vocal intensity due to the Lombard effect in speakers with Parkinson's disease: simultaneous laryngeal and respiratory strategies.

PubMed

Stathopoulos, Elaine T; Huber, Jessica E; Richardson, Kelly; Kamphaus, Jennifer; DeCicco, Devan; Darling, Meghan; Fulcher, Katrina; Sussman, Joan E

2014-01-01

The objective of the present study was to investigate whether speakers with hypophonia, secondary to Parkinson's disease (PD), would increases their vocal intensity when speaking in a noisy environment (Lombard effect). The other objective was to examine the underlying laryngeal and respiratory strategies used to increase vocal intensity. Thirty-three participants with PD were included for study. Each participant was fitted with the SpeechVive™ device that played multi-talker babble noise into one ear during speech. Using acoustic, aerodynamic and respiratory kinematic techniques, the simultaneous laryngeal and respiratory mechanisms used to regulate vocal intensity were examined. Significant group results showed that most speakers with PD (26/33) were successful at increasing their vocal intensity when speaking in the condition of multi-talker babble noise. They were able to support their increased vocal intensity and subglottal pressure with combined strategies from both the laryngeal and respiratory mechanisms. Individual speaker analysis indicated that the particular laryngeal and respiratory interactions differed among speakers. The SpeechVive™ device elicited higher vocal intensities from patients with PD. Speakers used different combinations of laryngeal and respiratory physiologic mechanisms to increase vocal intensity, thus suggesting that disease process does not uniformly affect the speech subsystems. Readers will be able to: (1) identify speech characteristics of people with Parkinson's disease (PD), (2) identify typical respiratory strategies for increasing sound pressure level (SPL), (3) identify typical laryngeal strategies for increasing SPL, (4) define the Lombard effect. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Native-Speakerism and the Complexity of Personal Experience: A Duoethnographic Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lowe, Robert J.; Kiczkowiak, Marek

2016-01-01

This paper presents a duoethnographic study into the effects of native-speakerism on the professional lives of two English language teachers, one "native", and one "non-native speaker" of English. The goal of the study was to build on and extend existing research on the topic of native-speakerism by investigating, through…

The Role of Orthotactic Probability in Incidental and Intentional Vocabulary Acquisition L1 and L2

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bordag, Denisa; Kirschenbaum, Amit; Rogahn, Maria; Tschirner, Erwin

2017-01-01

Four experiments were conducted to examine the role of orthotactic probability, i.e. the sequential letter probability, in the early stages of vocabulary acquisition by adult native speakers and advanced learners of German. The results show different effects for orthographic probability in incidental and intentional vocabulary acquisition: Whereas…

Speaker Recognition Through NLP and CWT Modeling

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Brown-VanHoozer, S.A.; Kercel, S.W.; Tucker, R.W.

The objective of this research is to develop a system capable of identifying speakers on wiretaps from a large database (>500 speakers) with a short search time duration (<30 seconds), and with better than 90% accuracy. Much previous research in speaker recognition has led to algorithms that produced encouraging preliminary results, but were overwhelmed when applied to populations of more than a dozen or so different speakers. The authors are investigating a solution to the "large population" problem by seeking two completely different kinds of characterizing features. These features are he techniques of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and the continuous waveletmore » transform (CWT). NLP extracts precise neurological, verbal and non-verbal information, and assimilates the information into useful patterns. These patterns are based on specific cues demonstrated by each individual, and provide ways of determining congruency between verbal and non-verbal cues. The primary NLP modalities are characterized through word spotting (or verbal predicates cues, e.g., see, sound, feel, etc.) while the secondary modalities would be characterized through the speech transcription used by the individual. This has the practical effect of reducing the size of the search space, and greatly speeding up the process of identifying an unknown speaker. The wavelet-based line of investigation concentrates on using vowel phonemes and non-verbal cues, such as tempo. The rationale for concentrating on vowels is there are a limited number of vowels phonemes, and at least one of them usually appears in even the shortest of speech segments. Using the fast, CWT algorithm, the details of both the formant frequency and the glottal excitation characteristics can be easily extracted from voice waveforms. The differences in the glottal excitation waveforms as well as the formant frequency are evident in the CWT output. More significantly, the CWT reveals significant detail of the glottal

Speaker recognition through NLP and CWT modeling.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Brown-VanHoozer, A.; Kercel, S. W.; Tucker, R. W.

The objective of this research is to develop a system capable of identifying speakers on wiretaps from a large database (>500 speakers) with a short search time duration (<30 seconds), and with better than 90% accuracy. Much previous research in speaker recognition has led to algorithms that produced encouraging preliminary results, but were overwhelmed when applied to populations of more than a dozen or so different speakers. The authors are investigating a solution to the ''huge population'' problem by seeking two completely different kinds of characterizing features. These features are extracted using the techniques of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and themore » continuous wavelet transform (CWT). NLP extracts precise neurological, verbal and non-verbal information, and assimilates the information into useful patterns. These patterns are based on specific cues demonstrated by each individual, and provide ways of determining congruency between verbal and non-verbal cues. The primary NLP modalities are characterized through word spotting (or verbal predicates cues, e.g., see, sound, feel, etc.) while the secondary modalities would be characterized through the speech transcription used by the individual. This has the practical effect of reducing the size of the search space, and greatly speeding up the process of identifying an unknown speaker. The wavelet-based line of investigation concentrates on using vowel phonemes and non-verbal cues, such as tempo. The rationale for concentrating on vowels is there are a limited number of vowels phonemes, and at least one of them usually appears in even the shortest of speech segments. Using the fast, CWT algorithm, the details of both the formant frequency and the glottal excitation characteristics can be easily extracted from voice waveforms. The differences in the glottal excitation waveforms as well as the formant frequency are evident in the CWT output. More significantly, the CWT reveals significant detail of

Ordered short-term memory differs in signers and speakers: Implications for models of short-term memory

PubMed Central

Bavelier, Daphne; Newport, Elissa L.; Hall, Matt; Supalla, Ted; Boutla, Mrim

2008-01-01

Capacity limits in linguistic short-term memory (STM) are typically measured with forward span tasks in which participants are asked to recall lists of words in the order presented. Using such tasks, native signers of American Sign Language (ASL) exhibit smaller spans than native speakers (Boutla, Supalla, Newport, & Bavelier, 2004). Here, we test the hypothesis that this population difference reflects differences in the way speakers and signers maintain temporal order information in short-term memory. We show that native signers differ from speakers on measures of short-term memory that require maintenance of temporal order of the tested materials, but not on those in which temporal order is not required. In addition, we show that, in a recall task with free order, bilingual subjects are more likely to recall in temporal order when using English than ASL. We conclude that speakers and signers do share common short-term memory processes. However, whereas short-term memory for spoken English is predominantly organized in terms of temporal order, we argue that this dimension does not play as great a role in signers’ short-term memory. Other factors that may affect STM processes in signers are discussed. PMID:18083155

Measuring Pragmatic Language in Speakers with Autism Spectrum Disorders: Comparing the Children's Communication Checklist-2 and the Test of Pragmatic Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Volden, Joanne; Phillips, Linda

2010-01-01

Purpose: To compare the Children's Communication Checklist-2 (CCC-2), a parent report instrument, with the Test of Pragmatic Language (TOPL), a test administered to the child, on the ability to identify pragmatic language impairment in speakers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) who had age-appropriate structural language skills. Method: Sixteen…

Multicompetence and Native Speaker Variation in Clausal Packaging in Japanese

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Brown, Amanda; Gullberg, Marianne

2012-01-01

Native speakers show systematic variation in a range of linguistic domains as a function of a variety of sociolinguistic variables. This article addresses native language variation in the context of multicompetence, i.e. knowledge of two languages in one mind (Cook, 1991). Descriptions of motion were elicited from functionally monolingual and…

Analysis of human scream and its impact on text-independent speaker verification.

PubMed

Hansen, John H L; Nandwana, Mahesh Kumar; Shokouhi, Navid

2017-04-01

Scream is defined as sustained, high-energy vocalizations that lack phonological structure. Lack of phonological structure is how scream is identified from other forms of loud vocalization, such as "yell." This study investigates the acoustic aspects of screams and addresses those that are known to prevent standard speaker identification systems from recognizing the identity of screaming speakers. It is well established that speaker variability due to changes in vocal effort and Lombard effect contribute to degraded performance in automatic speech systems (i.e., speech recognition, speaker identification, diarization, etc.). However, previous research in the general area of speaker variability has concentrated on human speech production, whereas less is known about non-speech vocalizations. The UT-NonSpeech corpus is developed here to investigate speaker verification from scream samples. This study considers a detailed analysis in terms of fundamental frequency, spectral peak shift, frame energy distribution, and spectral tilt. It is shown that traditional speaker recognition based on the Gaussian mixture models-universal background model framework is unreliable when evaluated with screams.

Do Listeners Store in Memory a Speaker's Habitual Utterance-Final Phonation Type?

PubMed Central

Bőhm, Tamás; Shattuck-Hufnagel, Stefanie

2009-01-01

Earlier studies report systematic differences across speakers in the occurrence of utterance-final irregular phonation; the work reported here investigated whether human listeners remember this speaker-specific information and can access it when necessary (a prerequisite for using this cue in speaker recognition). Listeners personally familiar with the voices of the speakers were presented with pairs of speech samples: one with the original and the other with transformed final phonation type. Asked to select the member of the pair that was closer to the talker's voice, most listeners tended to choose the unmanipulated token (even though they judged them to sound essentially equally natural). This suggests that utterance-final pitch period irregularity is part of the mental representation of individual speaker voices, although this may depend on the individual speaker and listener to some extent. PMID:19776665

Ordered Short-Term Memory Differs in Signers and Speakers: Implications for Models of Short-Term Memory

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bavelier, Daphne; Newport, Elissa L.; Hall, Matt; Supalla, Ted; Boutla, Mrim

2008-01-01

Capacity limits in linguistic short-term memory (STM) are typically measured with forward span tasks in which participants are asked to recall lists of words in the order presented. Using such tasks, native signers of American Sign Language (ASL) exhibit smaller spans than native speakers ([Boutla, M., Supalla, T., Newport, E. L., & Bavelier, D.…

A Semiotic Approach to Teaching Media Literacy to Nonnative Speakers of English.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Curry, Mary Jane

This paper examines how semiotic analysis may be useful in teaching media literacy to nonnative speakers of English (NNSs), including both immigrants and international students who plan to return to their countries. It focuses on two television shows. The first show, "Friends," covers issues and problems of contemporary urban life for…

Effect of Training Japanese L1 Speakers in the Production of American English /r/ Using Spectrographic Visual Feedback

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Patten, Iomi; Edmonds, Lisa A.

2015-01-01

The present study examines the effects of training native Japanese speakers in the production of American /r/ using spectrographic visual feedback. Within a modified single-subject design, two native Japanese participants produced single words containing /r/ in a variety of positions while viewing live spectrographic feedback with the aim of…

A Study on Metadiscoursive Interaction in the MA Theses of the Native Speakers of English and the Turkish Speakers of English

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Köroglu, Zehra; Tüm, Gülden

2017-01-01

This study has been conducted to evaluate the TM usage in the MA theses written by the native speakers (NSs) of English and the Turkish speakers (TSs) of English. The purpose is to compare the TM usage in the introduction, results and discussion, and conclusion sections by both groups' randomly selected MA theses in the field of ELT between the…

Segmentation of the Speaker's Face Region with Audiovisual Correlation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Liu, Yuyu; Sato, Yoichi

The ability to find the speaker's face region in a video is useful for various applications. In this work, we develop a novel technique to find this region within different time windows, which is robust against the changes of view, scale, and background. The main thrust of our technique is to integrate audiovisual correlation analysis into a video segmentation framework. We analyze the audiovisual correlation locally by computing quadratic mutual information between our audiovisual features. The computation of quadratic mutual information is based on the probability density functions estimated by kernel density estimation with adaptive kernel bandwidth. The results of this audiovisual correlation analysis are incorporated into graph cut-based video segmentation to resolve a globally optimum extraction of the speaker's face region. The setting of any heuristic threshold in this segmentation is avoided by learning the correlation distributions of speaker and background by expectation maximization. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can detect the speaker's face region accurately and robustly for different views, scales, and backgrounds.

Interactive voice technology: Variations in the vocal utterances of speakers performing a stress-inducing task

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mosko, J. D.; Stevens, K. N.; Griffin, G. R.

1983-08-01

Acoustical analyses were conducted of words produced by four speakers in a motion stress-inducing situation. The aim of the analyses was to document the kinds of changes that occur in the vocal utterances of speakers who are exposed to motion stress and to comment on the implications of these results for the design and development of voice interactive systems. The speakers differed markedly in the types and magnitudes of the changes that occurred in their speech. For some speakers, the stress-inducing experimental condition caused an increase in fundamental frequency, changes in the pattern of vocal fold vibration, shifts in vowel production and changes in the relative amplitudes of sounds containing turbulence noise. All speakers showed greater variability in the experimental condition than in more relaxed control situation. The variability was manifested in the acoustical characteristics of individual phonetic elements, particularly in speech sound variability observed serve to unstressed syllables. The kinds of changes and variability observed serve to emphasize the limitations of speech recognition systems based on template matching of patterns that are stored in the system during a training phase. There is need for a better understanding of these phonetic modifications and for developing ways of incorporating knowledge about these changes within a speech recognition system.

Acquired dyslexia in a Turkish-English speaker.

PubMed

Raman, Ilhan; Weekes, Brendan S

2005-06-01

The Turkish script is characterised by completely transparent bidirectional mappings between orthography and phonology. To date, there has been no reported evidence of acquired dyslexia in Turkish speakers leading to the naïve view that reading and writing problems in Turkish are probably rare. We examined the extent to which phonological impairment and orthographic transparency influence reading disorders in a native Turkish speaker. BRB is a bilingual Turkish-English speaker with deep dysphasia accompanied by acquired dyslexia in both languages. The main findings are an effect of imageability on reading in Turkish coincident with surface dyslexia in English and preserved nonword reading. BRB's acquired dyslexia suggests that damage to phonological representations might have a consequence for learning to read in Turkish. We argue that BRB's acquired dyslexia has a common locus in chronic underactivation of phonological representations in Turkish and English. Despite a common locus, reading problems manifest themselves differently according to properties of the script and the type of task.

A fundamental residue pitch perception bias for tone language speakers

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Petitti, Elizabeth

A complex tone composed of only higher-order harmonics typically elicits a pitch percept equivalent to the tone's missing fundamental frequency (f0). When judging the direction of residue pitch change between two such tones, however, listeners may have completely opposite perceptual experiences depending on whether they are biased to perceive changes based on the overall spectrum or the missing f0 (harmonic spacing). Individual differences in residue pitch change judgments are reliable and have been associated with musical experience and functional neuroanatomy. Tone languages put greater pitch processing demands on their speakers than non-tone languages, and we investigated whether these lifelong differences in linguistic pitch processing affect listeners' bias for residue pitch. We asked native tone language speakers and native English speakers to perform a pitch judgment task for two tones with missing fundamental frequencies. Given tone pairs with ambiguous pitch changes, listeners were asked to judge the direction of pitch change, where the direction of their response indicated whether they attended to the overall spectrum (exhibiting a spectral bias) or the missing f0 (exhibiting a fundamental bias). We found that tone language speakers are significantly more likely to perceive pitch changes based on the missing f0 than English speakers. These results suggest that tone-language speakers' privileged experience with linguistic pitch fundamentally tunes their basic auditory processing.

Robust Speech Processing & Recognition: Speaker ID, Language ID, Speech Recognition/Keyword Spotting, Diarization/Co-Channel/Environmental Characterization, Speaker State Assessment

DTIC Science & Technology

2015-10-01

Scoring, Gaussian Backend , etc.) as shown in Fig. 39. The methods in this domain also emphasized the ability to perform data purification for both...investigation using the same infrastructure was undertaken to explore Lombard effect “flavor” detection for improved speaker ID. The study The presence of...dimension selection and compared to a common N-gram frequency based selection. 2.1.2: Exploration on NN/DBN backend : Since Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have

Infants' Selectively Pay Attention to the Information They Receive from a Native Speaker of Their Language.

PubMed

Marno, Hanna; Guellai, Bahia; Vidal, Yamil; Franzoi, Julia; Nespor, Marina; Mehler, Jacques

2016-01-01

From the first moments of their life, infants show a preference for their native language, as well as toward speakers with whom they share the same language. This preference appears to have broad consequences in various domains later on, supporting group affiliations and collaborative actions in children. Here, we propose that infants' preference for native speakers of their language also serves a further purpose, specifically allowing them to efficiently acquire culture specific knowledge via social learning. By selectively attending to informants who are native speakers of their language and who probably also share the same cultural background with the infant, young learners can maximize the possibility to acquire cultural knowledge. To test whether infants would preferably attend the information they receive from a speaker of their native language, we familiarized 12-month-old infants with a native and a foreign speaker, and then presented them with movies where each of the speakers silently gazed toward unfamiliar objects. At test, infants' looking behavior to the two objects alone was measured. Results revealed that infants preferred to look longer at the object presented by the native speaker. Strikingly, the effect was replicated also with 5-month-old infants, indicating an early development of such preference. These findings provide evidence that young infants pay more attention to the information presented by a person with whom they share the same language. This selectivity can serve as a basis for efficient social learning by influencing how infants' allocate attention between potential sources of information in their environment.

Extracts of Equisetum giganteum L and Copaifera reticulate Ducke show strong antiviral activity against the sexually transmitted pathogen herpes simplex virus type 2.

PubMed

Churqui, Marianela Patzi; Lind, Liza; Thörn, Karolina; Svensson, Alexandra; Savolainen, Otto; Aranda, Katty Terrazas; Eriksson, Kristina

2018-01-10

Equisetum giganteum L and Copaifera reticulate Ducke have been traditionally used by women of the Tacana tribe in the Bolivian Amazonas for genital hygiene and for treatment of genital infection/inflammation. To assess the ability of extracts from Equisetum giganteum L and Copaifera reticulate Ducke to block genital viral infection by herpes simplex virus type 2. Equisetum giganteum L and Copaifera reticulate Ducke were collected from the Amazon region of La Paz, Bolivia. Extracts were prepared and screened for anti-viral activity against herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2) using both in vitro and in in vivo models of infection. Equisetum giganteum L and Copaifera reticulate Ducke efficiently blocked HSV-2 infection of cell cultures without major cell cytotoxic effects. Extracts of Equisetum giganteum L and Copaifera reticulate Ducke could prevent HSV-2 disease development when administered together with virus in a mouse model of genital HSV-2 infection. In vitro analyses revealed that both plant extracts exerted their anti-HSV-2 effects by interfering with viral cell attachment and entry, but could not block viral replication post entry. These studies show that extracts of Equisetum giganteum L and Copaifera reticulate Ducke have potent antiviral activities against HSV-2 comparable to those two previously identified plants, Croton lechleri Müll. Arg. and Uncaria tomentosa (Willd. ex Schult.) DC. These studies confirm that plants used by the Tacana tribe could be explored further for the development of novel topical antiviral microbicides. Copyright © 2017. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Native Speakers as Teachers in Turkey: Non-Native Pre-Service English Teachers' Reactions to a Nation-Wide Project

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Coskun, Abdullah

2013-01-01

Although English is now a recognized international language and the concept of native speaker is becoming more doubtful every day, the empowerment of the native speakers of English as language teaching professionals is still continuing (McKay, 2002), especially in Asian countries like China and Japan. One of the latest examples showing the…

Effects of various electrode configurations on music perception, intonation and speaker gender identification.

PubMed

Landwehr, Markus; Fürstenberg, Dirk; Walger, Martin; von Wedel, Hasso; Meister, Hartmut

2014-01-01

Advances in speech coding strategies and electrode array designs for cochlear implants (CIs) predominantly aim at improving speech perception. Current efforts are also directed at transmitting appropriate cues of the fundamental frequency (F0) to the auditory nerve with respect to speech quality, prosody, and music perception. The aim of this study was to examine the effects of various electrode configurations and coding strategies on speech intonation identification, speaker gender identification, and music quality rating. In six MED-EL CI users electrodes were selectively deactivated in order to simulate different insertion depths and inter-electrode distances when using the high definition continuous interleaved sampling (HDCIS) and fine structure processing (FSP) speech coding strategies. Identification of intonation and speaker gender was determined and music quality rating was assessed. For intonation identification HDCIS was robust against the different electrode configurations, whereas fine structure processing showed significantly worse results when a short electrode depth was simulated. In contrast, speaker gender recognition was not affected by electrode configuration or speech coding strategy. Music quality rating was sensitive to electrode configuration. In conclusion, the three experiments revealed different outcomes, even though they all addressed the reception of F0 cues. Rapid changes in F0, as seen with intonation, were the most sensitive to electrode configurations and coding strategies. In contrast, electrode configurations and coding strategies did not show large effects when F0 information was available over a longer time period, as seen with speaker gender. Music quality relies on additional spectral cues other than F0, and was poorest when a shallow insertion was simulated.

Hemispheric lateralization of linguistic prosody recognition in comparison to speech and speaker recognition.

PubMed

Kreitewolf, Jens; Friederici, Angela D; von Kriegstein, Katharina

2014-11-15

Hemispheric specialization for linguistic prosody is a controversial issue. While it is commonly assumed that linguistic prosody and emotional prosody are preferentially processed in the right hemisphere, neuropsychological work directly comparing processes of linguistic prosody and emotional prosody suggests a predominant role of the left hemisphere for linguistic prosody processing. Here, we used two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments to clarify the role of left and right hemispheres in the neural processing of linguistic prosody. In the first experiment, we sought to confirm previous findings showing that linguistic prosody processing compared to other speech-related processes predominantly involves the right hemisphere. Unlike previous studies, we controlled for stimulus influences by employing a prosody and speech task using the same speech material. The second experiment was designed to investigate whether a left-hemispheric involvement in linguistic prosody processing is specific to contrasts between linguistic prosody and emotional prosody or whether it also occurs when linguistic prosody is contrasted against other non-linguistic processes (i.e., speaker recognition). Prosody and speaker tasks were performed on the same stimulus material. In both experiments, linguistic prosody processing was associated with activity in temporal, frontal, parietal and cerebellar regions. Activation in temporo-frontal regions showed differential lateralization depending on whether the control task required recognition of speech or speaker: recognition of linguistic prosody predominantly involved right temporo-frontal areas when it was contrasted against speech recognition; when contrasted against speaker recognition, recognition of linguistic prosody predominantly involved left temporo-frontal areas. The results show that linguistic prosody processing involves functions of both hemispheres and suggest that recognition of linguistic prosody is based on

Children's Use of Information Quality to Establish Speaker Preferences

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gillis, Randall L.; Nilsen, Elizabeth S.

2013-01-01

Knowledge transfer is most effective when speakers provide good quality (in addition to accurate) information. Two studies investigated whether preschool- (4-5 years old) and school-age (6-7 years old) children prefer speakers who provide sufficient information over those who provide insufficient (yet accurate) information. Children were provided…

Intonation and Gesture as Bootstrapping Devices in Speaker Uncertainty

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hübscher, Iris; Esteve-Gibert, Núria; Igualada, Alfonso; Prieto, Pilar

2017-01-01

This study investigates 3- to 5-year-old children's sensitivity to lexical, intonational and gestural information in the comprehension of speaker uncertainty. Most previous studies on children's understanding of speaker certainty and uncertainty across languages have focused on the comprehension of lexical markers, and little is known about the…

L1 Use in L2 Vocabulary Learning: Facilitator or Barrier

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Liu, Jing

2008-01-01

Based on empirical research and qualitative analysis, this paper aims to explore the effects of L1 use on L2 vocabulary teaching. The results show that, during L2 vocabulary teaching process, the proper application of L1 can effectively facilitate the memorization of new words, and the bilingual method (both English explanation and Chinese…

Speech rate reduction and "nasality" in normal speakers.

PubMed

Brancewicz, T M; Reich, A R

1989-12-01

This study explored the effects of reduced speech rate on nasal/voice accelerometric measures and nasality ratings. Nasal/voice accelerometric measures were obtained from normal adults for various speech stimuli and speaking rates. Stimuli included three sentences (one obstruent-loaded, one semivowel-loaded, and one containing a single nasal), and /pv/ syllable trains.. Speakers read the stimuli at their normal rate, half their normal rate, and as slowly as possible. In addition, a computer program paced each speaker at rates of 1, 2, and 3 syllables per second. The nasal/voice accelerometric values revealed significant stimulus effects but no rate effects. The nasality ratings of experienced listeners, evaluated as a function of stimulus and speaking rate, were compared to the accelerometric measures. The nasality scale values demonstrated small, but statistically significant, stimulus and rate effects. However, the nasality percepts were poorly correlated with the nasal/voice accelerometric measures.

Advancements in robust algorithm formulation for speaker identification of whispered speech

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fan, Xing

Whispered speech is an alternative speech production mode from neutral speech, which is used by talkers intentionally in natural conversational scenarios to protect privacy and to avoid certain content from being overheard/made public. Due to the profound differences between whispered and neutral speech in production mechanism and the absence of whispered adaptation data, the performance of speaker identification systems trained with neutral speech degrades significantly. This dissertation therefore focuses on developing a robust closed-set speaker recognition system for whispered speech by using no or limited whispered adaptation data from non-target speakers. This dissertation proposes the concept of "High''/"Low'' performance whispered data for the purpose of speaker identification. A variety of acoustic properties are identified that contribute to the quality of whispered data. An acoustic analysis is also conducted to compare the phoneme/speaker dependency of the differences between whispered and neutral data in the feature domain. The observations from those acoustic analysis are new in this area and also serve as a guidance for developing robust speaker identification systems for whispered speech. This dissertation further proposes two systems for speaker identification of whispered speech. One system focuses on front-end processing. A two-dimensional feature space is proposed to search for "Low''-quality performance based whispered utterances and separate feature mapping functions are applied to vowels and consonants respectively in order to retain the speaker's information shared between whispered and neutral speech. The other system focuses on speech-mode-independent model training. The proposed method generates pseudo whispered features from neutral features by using the statistical information contained in a whispered Universal Background model (UBM) trained from extra collected whispered data from non-target speakers. Four modeling methods are proposed

A Method for Determining the Timing of Displaying the Speaker's Face and Captions for a Real-Time Speech-to-Caption System

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kuroki, Hayato; Ino, Shuichi; Nakano, Satoko; Hori, Kotaro; Ifukube, Tohru

The authors of this paper have been studying a real-time speech-to-caption system using speech recognition technology with a “repeat-speaking” method. In this system, they used a “repeat-speaker” who listens to a lecturer's voice and then speaks back the lecturer's speech utterances into a speech recognition computer. The througoing system showed that the accuracy of the captions is about 97% in Japanese-Japanese conversion and the conversion time from voices to captions is about 4 seconds in English-English conversion in some international conferences. Of course it required a lot of costs to achieve these high performances. In human communications, speech understanding depends not only on verbal information but also on non-verbal information such as speaker's gestures, and face and mouth movements. So the authors found the idea to display information of captions and speaker's face movement images with a suitable way to achieve a higher comprehension after storing information once into a computer briefly. In this paper, we investigate the relationship of the display sequence and display timing between captions that have speech recognition errors and the speaker's face movement images. The results show that the sequence “to display the caption before the speaker's face image” improves the comprehension of the captions. The sequence “to display both simultaneously” shows an improvement only a few percent higher than the question sentence, and the sequence “to display the speaker's face image before the caption” shows almost no change. In addition, the sequence “to display the caption 1 second before the speaker's face shows the most significant improvement of all the conditions.

Speaker-Machine Interaction in Automatic Speech Recognition. Technical Report.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Makhoul, John I.

The feasibility and limitations of speaker adaptation in improving the performance of a "fixed" (speaker-independent) automatic speech recognition system were examined. A fixed vocabulary of 55 syllables is used in the recognition system which contains 11 stops and fricatives and five tense vowels. The results of an experiment on speaker…

Single-Word Intelligibility in Speakers with Repaired Cleft Palate

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Whitehill, Tara; Chau, Cynthia

2004-01-01

Many speakers with repaired cleft palate have reduced intelligibility, but there are limitations with current procedures for assessing intelligibility. The aim of this study was to construct a single-word intelligibility test for speakers with cleft palate. The test used a multiple-choice identification format, and was based on phonetic contrasts…

Modeling the Control of Phonological Encoding in Bilingual Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Roelofs, Ardi; Verhoef, Kim

2006-01-01

Phonological encoding is the process by which speakers retrieve phonemic segments for morphemes from memory and use the segments to assemble phonological representations of words to be spoken. When conversing in one language, bilingual speakers have to resist the temptation of encoding word forms using the phonological rules and representations of…

/l/ Production in English-Arabic Bilingual Speakers.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Khattab, Ghada

2002-01-01

Reports an analysis of /l/ production by English-Arabic bilingual children. Addresses the question of whether the bilingual develops one phonological system or two by calling for a refinement of the notion of system using insights from recent phonetic and sociolinguistic work on variability in speech. English-Arabic bilinguals were studied.…

L1 and L2 reading skills in Dutch adolescents with a familial risk of dyslexia

PubMed Central

Tops, Wim; Hakvoort, Britt E.; van der Leij, Aryan; Maurits, Natasha M.; Maassen, Ben A.M.

2017-01-01

Background The present study investigated differences in reading and spelling outcomes in Dutch and English as a second language (ESL) in adolescents with a high familial risk of dyslexia, of whom some have developed dyslexia (HRDys) while others have not (HRnonDys), in comparison to a low familial risk control group without dyslexia (LRnonDys). This allowed us to investigate the persistence of dyslexia in the first language (L1) and the effect of dyslexia on the second language (L2), which has, in this case, a lower orthographic transparency. Furthermore, the inclusion of the HRnonDys group allowed us to investigate the continuity of the familial risk of dyslexia, as previous studies observed that the HRnonDys group often scores in between the HRDys and LRnonDys group, and whether these readers without reading deficits in Dutch, have more reading difficulties in ESL. Methods The data of three groups of adolescents were analyzed; 27 LRnonDys, 25 HRdys 25 HRnonDys. The mean age was 14;1 years; months, and 37 were male. All were native speakers of Dutch, attended regular secondary education (grade 7–10), and were non-native speakers of English. Using MANOVA the groups were compared on Dutch and English word reading fluency (WRF), spelling and vocabulary, Dutch pseudoword and loanword reading fluency, phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN), and verbal short term and working memory. A repeated measures ANOVA was used to compare English and Dutch WRF, spelling and vocabulary directly within the three groups. Results The analyses revealed that the HRDys group had a deficit in both reading and spelling in Dutch and ESL. They also performed poorer than the LRnonDys group on all other measures. Effect sizes were especially large for pseudoword reading and the reaction times during the PA task. The HRnonDys group scored generally poorer than the LRnonDys group but this difference was only significant for Dutch pseudoword reading, PA reaction times and

L1 and L2 reading skills in Dutch adolescents with a familial risk of dyslexia.

PubMed

van Setten, Ellie R H; Tops, Wim; Hakvoort, Britt E; van der Leij, Aryan; Maurits, Natasha M; Maassen, Ben A M

2017-01-01

The present study investigated differences in reading and spelling outcomes in Dutch and English as a second language (ESL) in adolescents with a high familial risk of dyslexia, of whom some have developed dyslexia (HRDys) while others have not (HRnonDys), in comparison to a low familial risk control group without dyslexia (LRnonDys). This allowed us to investigate the persistence of dyslexia in the first language (L1) and the effect of dyslexia on the second language (L2), which has, in this case, a lower orthographic transparency. Furthermore, the inclusion of the HRnonDys group allowed us to investigate the continuity of the familial risk of dyslexia, as previous studies observed that the HRnonDys group often scores in between the HRDys and LRnonDys group, and whether these readers without reading deficits in Dutch, have more reading difficulties in ESL. The data of three groups of adolescents were analyzed; 27 LRnonDys, 25 HRdys 25 HRnonDys. The mean age was 14;1 years; months, and 37 were male. All were native speakers of Dutch, attended regular secondary education (grade 7-10), and were non-native speakers of English. Using MANOVA the groups were compared on Dutch and English word reading fluency (WRF), spelling and vocabulary, Dutch pseudoword and loanword reading fluency, phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN), and verbal short term and working memory. A repeated measures ANOVA was used to compare English and Dutch WRF, spelling and vocabulary directly within the three groups. The analyses revealed that the HRDys group had a deficit in both reading and spelling in Dutch and ESL. They also performed poorer than the LRnonDys group on all other measures. Effect sizes were especially large for pseudoword reading and the reaction times during the PA task. The HRnonDys group scored generally poorer than the LRnonDys group but this difference was only significant for Dutch pseudoword reading, PA reaction times and verbal short term memory. In

Listening: The Second Speaker.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Erway, Ella Anderson

1972-01-01

Scholars agree that listening is an active rather than a passive process. The listening which makes people achieve higher scores on current listening tests is "second speaker" listening or active participation in the encoding of the message. Most of the instructional suggestions in listening curriculum guides are based on this concept. In terms of…

Perception and Production of Prosody by Speakers with Autism Spectrum Disorders

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Paul, Rhea; Augustyn, Amy; Klin, Ami; Volkmar, Fred R.

2005-01-01

Speakers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show difficulties in suprasegmental aspects of speech production, or "prosody," those aspects of speech that accompany words and sentences and create what is commonly called "tone of voice." However, little is known about the perception of prosody, or about the specific aspects of…

Initial Teacher Training Courses and Non-Native Speaker Teachers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Anderson, Jason

2016-01-01

This article reports on a study contrasting 41 native speakers (NSs) and 38 non-native speakers (NNSs) of English from two short initial teacher training courses, the Cambridge Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults and the Trinity College London CertTESOL. After a brief history and literature review, I present findings on teachers'…

A novel mechanism of RNase L inhibition: Theiler's virus L* protein prevents 2-5A from binding to RNase L

PubMed Central

Drappier, Melissa; Elliott, Ruth; Zhang, Rong; Weiss, Susan R.; Silverman, Robert H.

2018-01-01

The OAS/RNase L pathway is one of the best-characterized effector pathways of the IFN antiviral response. It inhibits the replication of many viruses and ultimately promotes apoptosis of infected cells, contributing to the control of virus spread. However, viruses have evolved a range of escape strategies that act against different steps in the pathway. Here we unraveled a novel escape strategy involving Theiler’s murine encephalomyelitis virus (TMEV) L* protein. Previously we found that L* was the first viral protein binding directly RNase L. Our current data show that L* binds the ankyrin repeats R1 and R2 of RNase L and inhibits 2’-5’ oligoadenylates (2-5A) binding to RNase L. Thereby, L* prevents dimerization and oligomerization of RNase L in response to 2-5A. Using chimeric mouse hepatitis virus (MHV) expressing TMEV L*, we showed that L* efficiently inhibits RNase L in vivo. Interestingly, those data show that L* can functionally substitute for the MHV-encoded phosphodiesterase ns2, which acts upstream of L* in the OAS/RNase L pathway, by degrading 2-5A. PMID:29652922

The Employability of Non-Native-Speaker Teachers of EFL: A UK Survey

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Clark, Elizabeth; Paran, Amos

2007-01-01

The native speaker still has a privileged position in English language teaching, representing both the model speaker and the ideal teacher. Non-native-speaker teachers of English are often perceived as having a lower status than their native-speaking counterparts, and have been shown to face discriminatory attitudes when applying for teaching…

Generic Language and Speaker Confidence Guide Preschoolers' Inferences about Novel Animate Kinds

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stock, Hayli R.; Graham, Susan A.; Chambers, Craig G.

2009-01-01

We investigated the influence of speaker certainty on 156 four-year-old children's sensitivity to generic and nongeneric statements. An inductive inference task was implemented, in which a speaker described a nonobvious property of a novel creature using either a generic or a nongeneric statement. The speaker appeared to be confident, neutral, or…

Processing ser and estar to locate objects and events

PubMed Central

Dussias, Paola E.; Contemori, Carla; Román, Patricia

2016-01-01

In Spanish locative constructions, a different form of the copula is selected in relation to the semantic properties of the grammatical subject: sentences that locate objects require estar while those that locate events require ser (both translated in English as ‘to be’). In an ERP study, we examined whether second language (L2) speakers of Spanish are sensitive to the selectional restrictions that the different types of subjects impose on the choice of the two copulas. Twenty-four native speakers of Spanish and two groups of L2 Spanish speakers (24 beginners and 18 advanced speakers) were recruited to investigate the processing of ‘object/event + estar/ser’ permutations. Participants provided grammaticality judgments on correct (object + estar; event + ser) and incorrect (object + ser; event + estar) sentences while their brain activity was recorded. In line with previous studies (Leone-Fernández, Molinaro, Carreiras, & Barber, 2012; Sera, Gathje, & Pintado, 1999), the results of the grammaticality judgment for the native speakers showed that participants correctly accepted object + estar and event + ser constructions. In addition, while ‘object + ser’ constructions were considered grossly ungrammatical, ‘event + estar’ combinations were perceived as unacceptable to a lesser degree. For these same participants, ERP recording time-locked to the onset of the critical word ‘en’ showed a larger P600 for the ser predicates when the subject was an object than when it was an event (*La silla es en la cocina vs. La fiesta es en la cocina). This P600 effect is consistent with syntactic repair of the defining predicate when it does not fit with the adequate semantic properties of the subject. For estar predicates (La silla está en la cocina vs. *La fiesta está en la cocina), the findings showed a central-frontal negativity between 500–700 ms. Grammaticality judgment data for the L2 speakers of Spanish showed that beginners were significantly less

The Dynamic Range for Korean Standard Sentence Material: A Gender Comparison in a Male and a Female Speakers.

PubMed

Park, Kyeong-Yeon; Jin, In-Ki

2015-09-01

The purpose of this study was to identify differences between the dynamic ranges (DRs) of male and female speakers using Korean standard sentence material. Consideration was especially given to effects within the predefined segmentalized frequency-bands. We used Korean standard sentence lists for adults as stimuli. Each sentence was normalized to a root-mean-square of 65 dB sound pressure level. The sentences were then modified to ensure there were no pauses, and the modified sentences were passed through a filter bank in order to perform the frequency analysis. Finally, the DR was quantified using a histogram that showed the cumulative envelope distribution levels of the speech in each frequency band. In DRs that were averaged across all frequency bands, there were no significant differences between the male and the female speakers. However, when considering effects within the predefined frequency bands, there were significant differences in several frequency bands between the DRs of male speech and those of female speech. This study shows that the DR of speech for the male speaker differed from the female speaker in nine frequency bands among 21 frequency bands. These observed differences suggest that a standardized DR of male speech in the band-audibility function of the speech intelligibility index may differ from that of female speech derived in the same way. Further studies are required to derive standardized DRs for Korean speakers.

A study on (K, Na) NbO3 based multilayer piezoelectric ceramics micro speaker

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gao, Renlong; Chu, Xiangcheng; Huan, Yu; Sun, Yiming; Liu, Jiayi; Wang, Xiaohui; Li, Longtu

2014-10-01

A flat panel micro speaker was fabricated from (K, Na) NbO3 (KNN)-based multilayer piezoelectric ceramics by a tape casting and cofiring process using Ag-Pd alloys as an inner electrode. The interface between ceramic and electrode was investigated by scanning electron microscope (SEM) and transmission electron microscope (TEM). The acoustic response was characterized by a standard audio test system. We found that the micro speaker with dimensions of 23 × 27 × 0.6 mm3, using three layers of 30 μm thickness KNN-based ceramic, has a high average sound pressure level (SPL) of 87 dB, between 100 Hz-20 kHz under five voltage. This result was even better than that of lead zirconate titanate (PZT)-based ceramics under the same conditions. The experimental results show that the KNN-based multilayer ceramics could be used as lead free piezoelectric micro speakers.

Lexical and semantic representations in the acquisition of L2 cognate and non-cognate words: evidence from two learning methods in children.

PubMed

Comesaña, Montserrat; Soares, Ana Paula; Sánchez-Casas, Rosa; Lima, Cátia

2012-08-01

How bilinguals represent words in two languages and which mechanisms are responsible for second language acquisition are important questions in the bilingual and vocabulary acquisition literature. This study aims to analyse the effect of two learning methods (picture- vs. word-based method) and two types of words (cognates and non-cognates) in early stages of children's L2 acquisition. Forty-eight native speakers of European Portuguese, all sixth graders (mean age = 10.87 years; SD= 0.85), participated in the study. None of them had prior knowledge of Basque (the L2 in this study). After a learning phase in which L2 words were learned either by a picture- or a word-based method, children were tested in a backward-word translation recognition task at two times (immediately vs. one week later). Results showed that the participants made more errors when rejecting semantically related than semantically unrelated words as correct translations (semantic interference effect). The magnitude of this effect was higher in the delayed test condition regardless of the learning method. Moreover, the overall performance of participants from the word-based method was better than the performance of participants from the picture-word method. Results were discussed concerning the most significant bilingual lexical processing models. ©2011 The British Psychological Society.

Children's comprehension of an unfamiliar speaker accent: a review.

PubMed

Harte, Jennifer; Oliveira, Ana; Frizelle, Pauline; Gibbon, Fiona

2016-05-01

The effect of speaker accent on listeners' comprehension has become a key focus of research given the increasing cultural diversity of society and the increased likelihood of an individual encountering a clinician with an unfamiliar accent. To review the studies exploring the effect of an unfamiliar accent on language comprehension in typically developing (TD) children and in children with speech and language difficulties. This review provides a methodological analysis of the relevant studies by exploring the challenges facing this field of research and highlighting the current gaps in the literature. A total of nine studies were identified using a systematic search and organized under studies investigating the effect of speaker accent on language comprehension in (1) TD children and (2) children with speech and/or language difficulties. This review synthesizes the evidence that an unfamiliar speaker accent may lead to a breakdown in language comprehension in TD children and in children with speech difficulties. Moreover, it exposes the inconsistencies found in this field of research and highlights the lack of studies investigating the effect of speaker accent in children with language deficits. Overall, research points towards a developmental trend in children's ability to comprehend accent-related variations in speech. Vocabulary size, language exposure, exposure to different accents and adequate processing resources (e.g. attention) seem to play a key role in children's ability to understand unfamiliar accents. This review uncovered some inconsistencies in the literature that highlight the methodological issues that must be considered when conducting research in this field. It explores how such issues may be controlled in order to increase the validity and reliability of future research. Key clinical implications are also discussed. © 2016 Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

Toddlers Use Speech Disfluencies to Predict Speakers' Referential Intentions

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kidd, Celeste; White, Katherine S.; Aslin, Richard N.

2011-01-01

The ability to infer the referential intentions of speakers is a crucial part of learning a language. Previous research has uncovered various contextual and social cues that children may use to do this. Here we provide the first evidence that children also use speech disfluencies to infer speaker intention. Disfluencies (e.g. filled pauses "uh"…

Making Math Real: Effective Qualities of Guest Speaker Presentations and the Impact of Speakers on Student Attitude and Achievement in the Algebra Classroom

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McKain, Danielle R.

2012-01-01

The term real world is often used in mathematics education, yet the definition of real-world problems and how to incorporate them in the classroom remains ambiguous. One way real-world connections can be made is through guest speakers. Guest speakers can offer different perspectives and share knowledge about various subject areas, yet the impact…

Modern Greek Language: Acquisition of Morphology and Syntax by Non-Native Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Andreou, Georgia; Karapetsas, Anargyros; Galantomos, Ioannis

2008-01-01

This study investigated the performance of native and non native speakers of Modern Greek language on morphology and syntax tasks. Non-native speakers of Greek whose native language was English, which is a language with strict word order and simple morphology, made more errors and answered more slowly than native speakers on morphology but not…

Social Cues in Multimedia Learning: Role of Speaker's Voice.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mayer, Richard E.; Sobko, Kristina; Mautone, Patricia D.

2003-01-01

In 2 experiments, learners who were seated at a computer workstation received a narrated animation about lightning formation. Then, they took a retention test, a transfer test, and rated the speaker. The results are consistent with social agency theory, which posits that social cues in multimedia messages can encourage learners to interpret…

Tormenta Espacial: Engaging Spanish Speakers in the Planetarium and K-12 Classroom

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Salas, F.; Duncan, D.; Traub-Metlay, S.

2008-06-01

Reaching out to Spanish speakers is increasingly vital to workforce development and public support of space science projects. Building on a successful partnership with NASA's TIMED mission, LASP and Space Science Institute, Fiske Planetarium has translated its original planetarium show - ``Space Storm'' - into ``Tormenta Espacial.''

Muchas Caras: Engaging Spanish Speakers in the Planetarium and K--12 Classroom

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Traub-Metlay, S.; Salas, F.; Duncan, D.

2008-11-01

Reaching out to Spanish speakers is increasingly vital to workforce development and public support of space science projects. Fiske Planetarium offers Spanish translations of our newest planetarium shows, such as ``Las Personas del Telescopio Hubble'' (``The Many Faces of Hubble'') and ``Tormenta Espacial'' (``Space Storm'').

Co-Constructing Turns as Interactional Competence: Collaborative Turn Sequences in L1 and L2 Spanish

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Baxter, Robert Patrick

2017-01-01

"Interactional competence" is a theoretical construct that has only recently been tested empirically. Speakers contribute to an interaction with their individual resources; however, interactional competence is co-constructed by all participants. Interactional competence can be observed in spoken interaction as speakers' combined ability…

Open-set speaker identification with diverse-duration speech data

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Karadaghi, Rawande; Hertlein, Heinz; Ariyaeeinia, Aladdin

2015-05-01

The concern in this paper is an important category of applications of open-set speaker identification in criminal investigation, which involves operating with short and varied duration speech. The study presents investigations into the adverse effects of such an operating condition on the accuracy of open-set speaker identification, based on both GMMUBM and i-vector approaches. The experiments are conducted using a protocol developed for the identification task, based on the NIST speaker recognition evaluation corpus of 2008. In order to closely cover the real-world operating conditions in the considered application area, the study includes experiments with various combinations of training and testing data duration. The paper details the characteristics of the experimental investigations conducted and provides a thorough analysis of the results obtained.

Google Home: smart speaker as environmental control unit.

PubMed

Noda, Kenichiro

2017-08-23

Environmental Control Units (ECU) are devices or a system that allows a person to control appliances in their home or work environment. Such system can be utilized by clients with physical and/or functional disability to enhance their ability to control their environment, to promote independence and improve their quality of life. Over the last several years, there have been an emergence of several inexpensive, commercially-available, voice activated smart speakers into the market such as Google Home and Amazon Echo. These smart speakers are equipped with far field microphone that supports voice recognition, and allows for complete hand-free operation for various purposes, including for playing music, for information retrieval, and most importantly, for environmental control. Clients with disability could utilize these features to turn the unit into a simple ECU that is completely voice activated and wirelessly connected to appliances. Smart speakers, with their ease of setup, low cost and versatility, may be a more affordable and accessible alternative to the traditional ECU. Implications for Rehabilitation Environmental Control Units (ECU) enable independence for physically and functionally disabled clients, and reduce burden and frequency of demands on carers. Traditional ECU can be costly and may require clients to learn specialized skills to use. Smart speakers have the potential to be used as a new-age ECU by overcoming these barriers, and can be used by a wider range of clients.

Co-Construction of Nonnative Speaker Identity in Cross-Cultural Interaction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Park, Jae-Eun

2007-01-01

Informed by Conversation Analysis, this paper examines discursive practices through which nonnative speaker (NNS) identity is constituted in relation to native speaker (NS) identity in naturally occurring English conversations. Drawing on studies of social interaction that view identity as intrinsically a social, dialogic, negotiable entity, I…

Early neurophysiological indices of second language morphosyntax learning

PubMed Central

Hanna, Jeff; Shtyrov, Yury; Williams, John; Pulvermüller, Friedemann

2016-01-01

Humans show variable degrees of success in acquiring a second language (L2). In many cases, morphological and syntactic knowledge remain deficient, although some learners succeed in reaching nativelike levels, even if they begin acquiring their L2 relatively late. In this study, we use psycholinguistic, online language proficiency tests and a neurophysiological index of syntactic processing, the syntactic mismatch negativity (sMMN) to local agreement violations, to compare behavioural and neurophysiological markers of grammar processing between native speakers (NS) of English and non-native speakers (NNS). Variable grammar proficiency was measured by psycholinguistic tests. When NS heard ungrammatical word sequences lacking agreement between subject and verb (e.g. *we kicks), the MMN was enhanced compared with syntactically legal sentences (e.g. he kicks). More proficient NNS also showed this difference, but less proficient NNS did not. The main cortical sources of the MMN responses were localised in bilateral superior temporal areas, where, crucially, source strength of grammar-related neuronal activity correlated significantly with grammatical proficiency of individual L2 speakers as revealed by the psycholinguistic tests. As our results show similar, early MMN indices to morpho-syntactic agreement violations among both native speakers and non-native speakers with high grammar proficiency, they appear consistent with the use of similar brain mechanisms for at least certain aspects of L1 and L2 grammars. PMID:26752451

Communication-related affective, behavioral, and cognitive reactions in speakers with spasmodic dysphonia.

PubMed

Watts, Christopher R; Vanryckeghem, Martine

2017-12-01

To investigate the self-perceived affective, behavioral, and cognitive reactions associated with communication of speakers with spasmodic dysphonia as a function of employment status. Prospective cross-sectional investigation. 148 Participants with spasmodic dysphonia (SD) completed an adapted version of the Behavior Assessment Battery (BAB-Voice), a multidimensional assessment of self-perceived reactions to communication. The BAB-Voice consisted of four subtests: the Speech Situation Checklist for A) Emotional Reaction (SSC-ER) and B) Speech Disruption (SSC-SD), C) the Behavior Checklist (BCL), and D) the Communication Attitude Test for Adults (BigCAT). Participants were assigned to groups based on employment status (working versus retired). Descriptive comparison of the BAB-Voice in speakers with SD to previously published non-dysphonic speaker data revealed substantially higher scores associated with SD across all four subtests. Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) revealed no significantly different BAB-Voice subtest scores as a function of SD group status (working vs. retired). BAB-Voice scores revealed that speakers with SD experienced substantial impact of their voice disorder on communication attitude, coping behaviors, and affective reactions in speaking situations as reflected in their high BAB scores. These impacts do not appear to be influenced by work status, as speakers with SD who were employed or retired experienced similar levels of affective and behavioral reactions in various speaking situations and cognitive responses. These findings are consistent with previously published pilot data. The specificity of items assessed by means of the BAB-Voice may inform the clinician of valid patient-centered treatment goals which target the impairment extended beyond the physiological dimension. 2b.

Communication‐related affective, behavioral, and cognitive reactions in speakers with spasmodic dysphonia

PubMed Central

Vanryckeghem, Martine

2017-01-01

Objectives To investigate the self‐perceived affective, behavioral, and cognitive reactions associated with communication of speakers with spasmodic dysphonia as a function of employment status. Study Design Prospective cross‐sectional investigation Methods 148 Participants with spasmodic dysphonia (SD) completed an adapted version of the Behavior Assessment Battery (BAB‐Voice), a multidimensional assessment of self‐perceived reactions to communication. The BAB‐Voice consisted of four subtests: the Speech Situation Checklist for A) Emotional Reaction (SSC‐ER) and B) Speech Disruption (SSC‐SD), C) the Behavior Checklist (BCL), and D) the Communication Attitude Test for Adults (BigCAT). Participants were assigned to groups based on employment status (working versus retired). Results Descriptive comparison of the BAB‐Voice in speakers with SD to previously published non‐dysphonic speaker data revealed substantially higher scores associated with SD across all four subtests. Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) revealed no significantly different BAB‐Voice subtest scores as a function of SD group status (working vs. retired). Conclusions BAB‐Voice scores revealed that speakers with SD experienced substantial impact of their voice disorder on communication attitude, coping behaviors, and affective reactions in speaking situations as reflected in their high BAB scores. These impacts do not appear to be influenced by work status, as speakers with SD who were employed or retired experienced similar levels of affective and behavioral reactions in various speaking situations and cognitive responses. These findings are consistent with previously published pilot data. The specificity of items assessed by means of the BAB‐Voice may inform the clinician of valid patient‐centered treatment goals which target the impairment extended beyond the physiological dimension. Level of Evidence 2b PMID:29299525

Direct Speaker Gaze Promotes Trust in Truth-Ambiguous Statements

PubMed Central

Kessler, Luise; Schweinberger, Stefan R.

2016-01-01

A speaker’s gaze behaviour can provide perceivers with a multitude of cues which are relevant for communication, thus constituting an important non-verbal interaction channel. The present study investigated whether direct eye gaze of a speaker affects the likelihood of listeners believing truth-ambiguous statements. Participants were presented with videos in which a speaker produced such statements with either direct or averted gaze. The statements were selected through a rating study to ensure that participants were unlikely to know a-priori whether they were true or not (e.g., “sniffer dogs cannot smell the difference between identical twins”). Participants indicated in a forced-choice task whether or not they believed each statement. We found that participants were more likely to believe statements by a speaker looking at them directly, compared to a speaker with averted gaze. Moreover, when participants disagreed with a statement, they were slower to do so when the statement was uttered with direct (compared to averted) gaze, suggesting that the process of rejecting a statement as untrue may be inhibited when that statement is accompanied by direct gaze. PMID:27643789

Phase Asymmetries in Normophonic Speakers: Visual Judgments and Objective Findings

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bonilha, Heather Shaw; Deliyski, Dimitar D.; Gerlach, Terri Treman

2008-01-01

Purpose: To ascertain the amount of phase asymmetry of the vocal fold vibration in normophonic speakers via visualization techniques and compare findings for habitual and pressed phonations. Method: Fifty-two normophonic speakers underwent stroboscopy and high-speed videoendoscopy (HSV). The HSV images were further processed into 4 visual…

Dysprosody and Stimulus Effects in Cantonese Speakers with Parkinson's Disease

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ma, Joan K.-Y.; Whitehill, Tara; Cheung, Katherine S.-K.

2010-01-01

Background: Dysprosody is a common feature in speakers with hypokinetic dysarthria. However, speech prosody varies across different types of speech materials. This raises the question of what is the most appropriate speech material for the evaluation of dysprosody. Aims: To characterize the prosodic impairment in Cantonese speakers with…

Profiles of an Acquisition Generation: Nontraditional Heritage Speakers of Spanish

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

DeFeo, Dayna Jean

2018-01-01

Though definitions vary, the literature on heritage speakers of Spanish identifies two primary attributes: a linguistic and cultural connection to the language. This article profiles four Anglo college students who grew up in bilingual or Spanish-dominant communities in the Southwest who self-identified as Spanish heritage speakers, citing…

The Denial of Ideology in Perceptions of "Nonnative Speaker" Teachers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Holliday, Adrian; Aboshiha, Pamela

2009-01-01

There is now general acceptance that the traditional "nonnative speaker" label for teachers of English is problematic on sociolinguistic grounds and can be the source of employment discrimination. However, there continues to be disagreement regarding how far there is a prejudice against "nonnative speaker" teachers which is deep and sustained and…

Nonnative Speakers Do Not Take Competing Alternative Expressions into Account the Way Native Speakers Do

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Robenalt, Clarice; Goldberg, Adele E.

2016-01-01

When native speakers judge the acceptability of novel sentences, they appear to implicitly take competing formulations into account, judging novel sentences with a readily available alternative formulation to be less acceptable than novel sentences with no competing alternative. Moreover, novel sentences with a competing alternative are more…

Defining "Native Speaker" in Multilingual Settings: English as a Native Language in Asia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hansen Edwards, Jette G.

2017-01-01

The current study examines how and why speakers of English from multilingual contexts in Asia are identifying as native speakers of English. Eighteen participants from different contexts in Asia, including Singapore, Malaysia, India, Taiwan, and The Philippines, who self-identified as native speakers of English participated in hour-long interviews…

The role of fundamental frequency and formants in the perception of speaker sex

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hillenbrand, James M.

2005-09-01

The purpose of this study was to determine the relative contributions of fundamental frequency (F0) and formants in controlling the speaker-sex percept. A source-filter synthesizer was used to create four versions of 25 sentences spoken by men: (1) unmodified synthesis; (2) F0 only shifted up toward values typical of women; (3) formants only shifted up toward values typical of women; and (4) both F0 and formants shifted up. Identical methods were used to generate four comparable versions of 25 sentences spoken by women (e.g., unmodified synthesis, F0 only shifted down toward values typical of men, etc.). Listening tests showed: (1) perceived talker sex for the unmodified synthesis conditions was nearly always correct; (2) shifting both F0 and formants was usually effective (~82%) in changing the perceived sex of the utterance; (3) shifting either F0 or formants alone was usually ineffective in changing the perceived sex of the utterance. Both F0 and formants are apparently needed to specify speaker sex, though even together these cues are not entirely effective. Results also suggested that F0 is just slightly more important than formants, despite the fact that the male-female difference in F0 is proportionally much larger than the difference in formants. [Work supported by NIH.

Using Avatars for Improving Speaker Identification in Captioning

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Vy, Quoc V.; Fels, Deborah I.

Captioning is the main method for accessing television and film content by people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. One major difficulty consistently identified by the community is that of knowing who is speaking particularly for an off screen narrator. A captioning system was created using a participatory design method to improve speaker identification. The final prototype contained avatars and a coloured border for identifying specific speakers. Evaluation results were very positive; however participants also wanted to customize various components such as caption and avatar location.

12. TOOL ROOM SHOWING LANDIS MACHINE CO. BOL/T THREADER (L), ...

Library of Congress Historic Buildings Survey, Historic Engineering Record, Historic Landscapes Survey

12. TOOL ROOM SHOWING LANDIS MACHINE CO. BOL/T THREADER (L), OSTER MANUFACTURING CO. PIPE MASTER (R), AND OLDMAN KINK, A SHOP-MADE WELDING STRENGTH TESTER (L, BACKGROUND). VIEW NORTHEAST - Oldman Boiler Works, Office/Machine Shop, 32 Illinois Street, Buffalo, Erie County, NY