Matthew Carlson - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Matthew Carlson

Frontiers in psychology, 2017

On the surface, bi- and multilingualism would seem to be an ideal context for exploring questions... more On the surface, bi- and multilingualism would seem to be an ideal context for exploring questions of typological proximity. The obvious intuition is that the more closely related two languages are, the easier it should be to implement the two languages in one mind. This is the starting point adopted here, but we immediately run into the difficulty that the overwhelming majority of cognitive, computational, and linguistic research on bi- and multilingualism exhibits a monolingual bias (i.e., where monolingual grammars are used as the standard of comparison for outputs from bilingual grammars). The primary questions so far have focused on how bilinguals balance and switch between their two languages, but our perspective on typology leads us to consider the nature of bi- and multi-lingual systems as a whole. Following an initial proposal from Hsin (2014), we conjecture that bilingual grammars are neither isolated, nor (completely) conjoined with one another in the bilingual mind, but r...

How Wide the Divide? – Theorizing ‘Constructions’ in Generative and Usage-Based Frameworks

Frontiers in Psychology, 2021

Bilingualism: Language and Cognition

Spanish speakers tend to perceive an illusory [e] preceding word-initial [s]-consonant sequences,... more Spanish speakers tend to perceive an illusory [e] preceding word-initial [s]-consonant sequences, e.g. perceiving [stið] as [estið] , but this illusion is weaker for Spanish speakers who know English, which lacks the illusion (Carlson, . The present study aimed to shed light on why this occurs by assessing how a brief interval spent using English impacts performance in Spanish auditory discrimination and lexical decision. Late Spanish-English bilinguals' pattern of responses largely matched that of monolinguals, but their response times revealed significant differences between monolinguals and bilinguals, and between bilinguals who had just completed tasks in English vs. Spanish. These results suggest that late bilinguals do not simply learn to perceive initial [s]consonant sequences veridically, but that elements of both their phonotactic systems interact dynamically during speech perception, as listeners work to identify what it was they just heard.

Making Room for Second Language Phonotactics: Effects of L2 Learning and Environment on First Language Speech Perception

Language and Speech

Language-specific restrictions on sound sequences in words can lead to automatic perceptual repai... more Language-specific restrictions on sound sequences in words can lead to automatic perceptual repair of illicit sound sequences. As an example, no Spanish words begin with /s/-consonant sequences ([#sC]), and where necessary (e.g., foreign loanwords) [#sC] is repaired by inserting an initial [e], (e.g. foreign loanwords, cf., esnob, from English snob). As a result, Spanish speakers tend to perceive an illusory [e] before [#sC] sequences. Interestingly, this perceptual illusion is weaker in early Spanish–English bilinguals, whose other language, English, allows [#sC]. The present study explored whether this apparent influence of the English language on Spanish is restricted to early bilinguals, whose early language experience includes a mixture of both languages, or whether later learning of second language (L2) English can also induce a weakening of the first language (L1) perceptual illusion. Two groups of late Spanish–English bilinguals, immersed in Spanish or English, were tested on the same Spanish AX (...

Mental Transformation Skill in Young Children: The Role of Concrete and Abstract Motor Training

Cognitive Science

Abstract We examined the effects of three different training conditions, all of which involve the... more Abstract We examined the effects of three different training conditions, all of which involve the motor system, on kindergarteners' mental transformation skill. We focused on three main questions. First, we asked whether training that involves making a motor movement that is relevant to the mental transformation—either concretely through action (action training) or more abstractly through gestural movements that represent the action (move?gesture training)—resulted in greater gains than training using motor movements irrelevant to the mental transformation (point?gesture training). We tested children prior to training, immediately after training (posttest), and 1 week after training (retest), and we found greater improvement in mental transformation skill in both the action and move-gesture training conditions than in the point?gesture condition, at both posttest and retest. Second, we asked whether the total gain made by retest differed depending on the abstractness of the movement-relevant training (action vs. move-gesture), and we found that it did not. Finally, we asked whether the time course of improvement differed for the two movement-relevant conditions, and we found that it did—gains in the action condition were realized immediately at posttest, with no further gains at retest; gains in the move-gesture condition were realized throughout, with comparable gains from pretest-to-posttest and from posttest-to-retest. Training that involves movement, whether concrete or abstract, can thus benefit children's mental transformation skill. However, the benefits unfold differently over time—the benefits of concrete training unfold immediately after training (online learning); the benefits of more abstract training unfold in equal steps immediately after training (online learning) and during the intervening week with no additional training (offline learning). These findings have implications for the kinds of instruction that can best support spatial learning.

You Say dientito, I Say dentito: Navigating Complex Word Formation in Second Language Spanish

Native speakers seamlessly marshal morphological resources to create new words, displaying striki... more Native speakers seamlessly marshal morphological resources to create new words, displaying striking consistency even where multiple options are available, as when a stem contains a phonological alternation. This is true even when these options appear to be idiosyncratically applied in existing words. For example, in derived words, the alternation of diphthongs and monophthongs in certain Spanish stems defies traditional morphophonological analysis, but native speakers nonetheless agree on when to use one and when to use the other in novel derivations. Here we ask how second language learners of Spanish cope with this subtlety. Recently, native speakers’ agreement has been attributed to the way phonotactic and morpholexical properties influence morphological processing. In a lexical decision experiment, we show that while the polarity of learners’ responses differed from earlier native speaker results, their response latencies exhibit striking sensitivity to the very same ingredients shown to predict nativelike behavior.

International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2004

Navigating conflicting phonotactic constraints in bilingual speech perception

Journal of Memory and Language, 2014

We explored how phonological network structure influences the age of words' first appearance in c... more We explored how phonological network structure influences the age of words' first appearance in children's (14--50 months) speech, using a large, longitudinal corpus of spontaneous child--caregiver interactions. We represent the caregiver lexicon as a network in which each word is connected to all of its phonological neighbors, and consider both words' local neighborhood density (degree), and also their embeddedness among interconnected neighborhoods (clustering coefficient and coreness). The larger--scale structure reflected in the latter two measures is implicated in current theories of lexical development and processing, but its role in lexical development has not yet been explored. Multilevel discrete--time survival analysis revealed that children are more likely to produce new words whose network properties support lexical access for production: high degree, but low clustering coefficient and coreness. These effects appear to be strongest at earlier ages and largely absent from 30 months on. These results suggest that both a word's local connectivity in the lexicon and its position in the lexicon as a whole influences when it is learned, and they underscore how general lexical processing mechanisms contribute to productive vocabulary development. Why do children systematically produce some words at an earlier age than other words? What biases guide word learning, and how might these biases change as the child develops? Researchers have identified a variety of word properties that influence acquisition, including semantic, morphosyntactic, and formal properties (e.g.

Spanish diphthongizing stems: productivity, processing, and the shaping of the lexicon

We examine a classic problem in Spanish morphophonology as a way of shedding new light on the rel... more We examine a classic problem in Spanish morphophonology as a way of shedding new light on the relationship between grammar and processing. Spanish derivations with diphthongizing stems may contain either the diphthong or the monophthong stem allomorph, but the likelihood of the (phonotactically marked) diphthong appearing is related to the productivity of the suffix. Prior data also indicate that this bias constrains the formal properties of possible, but as yet unattested derivations. Interestingly, the documented relevance of suffix productivity and stem phonotactics for lexical processing suggests a relationship between the processing characteristics of neologisms and their favored formal properties. Spanish diphthongization provides an ideal window on this relationship because the availability of either allomorph for any neologism allows us to compare the processing characteristics of the grammatically preferred and the dispreferred form. We present visual lexical decision results that confirm the systematic biases concerning Spanish diphthongization and shed light on their possible roots in processing. The results illuminate this long-standing conundrum in Spanish and point to a more general picture in which the impact of distributional properties of morphemes on processing can account for the current shape and dynamic evolution of the lexicon.

Productivity is the key: morphophonology and the riddle of alternating diphthongs in Spanish

One of the most enduring problems in Spanish phonology has been the appearance of unstressed diph... more One of the most enduring problems in Spanish phonology has been the appearance of unstressed diphthongs in words with derivational suffixes. Despite robust conditioning of the diphthong alternation by stress, which predicts monophthongs in such words, derivational suffixes exhibit gradient tolerance for diphthongs. Moreover, speakers' intuitions appear to be keenly sensitive to this variability among suffixes. In this article we present corpus data identifying productivity as a crucial property of suffixes predicting the occurrence of diphthongs in extant Spanish derivations. This finding allows us to link the distribution of diphthongs to a more general, crosslinguistic tendency for words with productive morphology to be phonologically marked. We then present experimental results from lexical decision showing that this relationship between phonology and morphology drives not only Spanish speakers' intuitions but also their real-time processing of novel derivations. In addition to offering a solution to a long-standing problem in Spanish phonology, these findings have profound implications for our understanding of the phonology-morphology interface. Our corpus and experimental results conceptually motivate an argument that the contrasting demands of compositional and holistic processing of polymorphemic words play a crucial role in the increased incidence of marked phonology in particular morphological contexts.

Applied Linguistics, Jan 1, 2006

Over the last decade or so, the concept of multicompetence has attracted significant research att... more Over the last decade or so, the concept of multicompetence has attracted significant research attention in the field of applied linguistics and in particular in the study of multiple language use and learning. We argue that while research efforts concerned with multicompetence have been useful in advancing a more positive view of second language learners, they have been less successful in transforming understandings of language knowledge. One reason for their lack of success is the fact that these efforts have been mired in a state of theoretical confusion arising from a continued reliance on three assumptions. These assumptions include (1) a view of L1 and L2 language knowledge as distinct systems; (2) the presumption of a qualitative distinction between multicompetence and monocompetence; and (3) the assumption of homo- geneity of language knowledge across speakers and contexts. Our intent here is to redress these theoretical inadequacies by making a case for a usage-based view of multicompetence. We do so by drawing on empirical evidence and theoretical insights from other areas concerned with language and language development that expose the theoretical flaws in current research efforts on multicompetence. We then use these new understandings of language to reconsider findings on the language knowledge of multiple language users and to offer new directions for research on multicompetence.

Conference Presentations by Matthew Carlson

Gradient morphophonological patterns in adult learning of L2 Spanish: Data from the processing of novel derivations

Multiple Perspectives on the Critical Period for …, Jan 1, 2009

Contextually probable, high-frequency, or easily accessible words tend to be phonetically reduced... more Contextually probable, high-frequency, or easily accessible words tend to be phonetically reduced, a pattern usually attributed to faster lexical access. In principle, word forms that are frequent in their inflectional paradigms should also enjoy faster lexical access, leading again to phonetic reduction. Yet research has found evidence of both reduction and enhancement on paradigmatically probable inflectional affixes. The current corpus study uses pronunciation data from conversationally produced English verbs and nouns to test the predictions of two accounts. In an exemplar account, paradigmatically probable forms seem enhanced because their denser exemplar clouds resist influence from related word forms on the average production target. A second pressure reduces such forms because they are, after all, more easily accessed. Under this account, paradig-matically probable forms should have longer affixes but shorter stems. An alternative account proposes that paradigmatically probable forms are produced in such a way as to enhance not articulation, but contrasts between related word forms. This account predicts lengthening of suffixed forms, and shortening of unsuffixed forms. The results of the corpus study support the second account, suggesting that characterizing pronunciation variation in terms of phonetic reduction and enhancement oversimplifies the relationship between lexical storage, retrieval, and articulation.

This study probed the relationship between automatic phonotactic repair and speech production, by... more This study probed the relationship between automatic phonotactic repair and speech production, by asking whether the repair structure (a prothetic vowel) may be susceptible to reduction in speech. Spanish productively repairs word-initial /s/-consonant clusters (henceforth #sC) with a prothetic /e/ in both production and perception. We asked whether the initial vowel in Spanish #esC words like espalda 'back', which matches the default repair vowel, is more prone to reduction than other initial vowels, such as in aspirina 'aspirin'. We explore this question in the speech production of 15 speakers of Andalusian Spanish who produced half #esC and half #asC words in isolation (588 tokens). Outright vowel deletion was uncommon, but was more likely with initial /e/ (5%) than initial /a/ (0.3%, one token). Moreover, when the /s/ was realized with greater duration (cf. the common tendency to lenite syllable-final /s/ in Andalusian), shortening of /e/, but not /a/, was observed. These findings provide evidence that reduction may be enabled when the reduced material can be perceptually repaired, leading to the occurrence of apparently illicit sequences in actual speech, e.g. espalda produced as [spalda]. The influence of articulatory, frequency, and other factors on reduction is also evaluated.