Christine Shea | The University of Iowa (original) (raw)

Papers by Christine Shea

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Spoken word recognition proceeds by immediately activating items in the mental lexicon which matc... more Spoken word recognition proceeds by immediately activating items in the mental lexicon which match the incoming speech signal. These items compete for recognition over time. In multilinguals, the array of possible lexical competitors includes items across all their languages. Eye-tracking work indicates that the strength of early competitor activation relates to listeners’ proficiency: words from the dominant language outcompete those from the other(s). However, the neural mechanisms that give rise to this effect are not well known. We present a case study of a pediatric neurosurgical patient who was bilingual in English (nondominant) and Spanish (dominant). The participant passively listened to English and Spanish cohort competitors. We used machine learning techniques to decode within- and between-language lexical competition dynamics from the pattern of activity on the superior temporal plane. Spanish words were more robustly decodable than English words, regardless of their role...

Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism

We ask how dialect experience affects the perception of modified L2 words by speakers of differen... more We ask how dialect experience affects the perception of modified L2 words by speakers of different L1 dialects. Colombian Spanish speakers from Barranquilla (s-aspirating dialect) and Bogota (non-s-aspirating dialect) carried out cross-dialect phonological priming experiments in Spanish and L2 English. For Spanish, primes and targets were counterbalanced across dialect features. For English, half the primes and targets exhibited the /s/-aspiration of the Barranquilla dialect. Results showed an interaction between trial type and group for the s-aspirated forms. The Barranquilla group showed a significant priming effect in Spanish and also for the nonword /s/-aspirated forms in English. Further analysis revealed that the priming effect for English /s/-aspirated forms was attenuated in Barranquilla listeners with greater English proficiency. These results show that second language listeners transfer abstract native language dialect knowledge to L2 input even when this knowledge is not ...

Frontiers in Psychology, 2021

Introducing Linguistics, 2021

The Canadian Modern Language Review, 2019

Dans les écrits sur la fluidité en L2, la meilleure façon de définir les pauses de manière opérat... more Dans les écrits sur la fluidité en L2, la meilleure façon de définir les pauses de manière opérationnelle et de déterminer quel est le lien entre les différentes mesures des pauses et la maîtrise de la L2 est abondamment débattue. Cette question interpelle les chercheurs qui s’intéressent à la fluidité en L2, en particulier ceux qui travaillent auprès de groupes dont le degré de maîtrise de la L2 varie. Les auteures se penchent sur le sujet en étudiant les données relatives à la production orale de 48 apprenants de l’espagnol (dont la L1 est l’anglais), afin d’évaluer quelles mesures des pauses sont les meilleurs indicateurs de fluidité. Son analyse porte sur différentes mesures des pauses — par 100 syllabes ou par minute, selon la durée, la nature (remplies ou silencieuses) et l’emplacement (au milieu ou à la fin d’une proposition) — ainsi que sur leur relation avec la maîtrise de la L2. Le degré de maîtrise est opérationnalisé sous forme de score combiné en connaissances linguisti...

Language and Speech, 2018

The eight articles in this special issue ‘Learning to listen from sounds to words’ were presented... more The eight articles in this special issue ‘Learning to listen from sounds to words’ were presented at the conference Sound to Word in Bilingual and Second Language Speech Perception held at the University of Iowa in spring 2016. The selected contributions focus on how second language speech perception interacts with orthography, how phonology interacts with speech perception and how listeners use the cues in the input to segment and create the word forms for lexical processing. This collection of papers expands the field of speech perception and production by granting a central role to the lexicon and exploring how listeners and speakers activate representations, from sounds to words.

Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 2013

In this commentary I provide a brief overview of selected research areas and methodology used to ... more In this commentary I provide a brief overview of selected research areas and methodology used to study adult L2 phonology and phonetics. I focus the discussion on studies that include Spanish as either the first or target language.

Research shows that cross-dialect lexical recognition can be asymmetrical, favouring non-dominant... more Research shows that cross-dialect lexical recognition can be asymmetrical, favouring non-dominant dialect speakers and prejudicing dominant-dialect speakers [10]. We ask if non-dominant dialect speakers exhibit similar perceptual effects when exposed to modified L2 input that aligns with their particular L1 dialect. The dialect feature examined is Spanish coda [-s]-aspiration. Participants were from Bogotá (non-[-s]-aspirating) and Barranquilla ([-s]aspirating), Colombia. Participants carried out an auditory form-priming task with lexical decision. Critical Spanish trials consisted of word-pairs matched across dialects (basta ‘enough’ [bahta][bahta]) or unmatched ([bahta]-[basta]). In the English version, critical trials included similar items, modified to reflect the s-aspiration pattern of Barranquilla Spanish (‘display’ [dɪhpleɪ]-[dɪspleɪ]), also in matched or unmatched pairs. Results show that speakers of [-s]-aspirating dialects were equally fast at recognizing native-dialect t...

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 2021

Applied Psycholinguistics, 2021

This study examines how input mode – whether written or auditory – interacts with orthography in ... more This study examines how input mode – whether written or auditory – interacts with orthography in the production of North American English (NAE) schwar (/ɝ/, found in fur, heard, bird) by native Spanish speakers. Greater orthographic interference was predicted for written input, given the obligatory activation of orthographic representations in the execution of the task. Participants were L1 Mexican Spanish/L2 English speakers (L2, n = 15) and NAE (n = 15, rhotic dialect speakers). The target items were 10 schwar words and 10 words matched in graphemes to the onset and nucleus of the schwar words (e.g., bird was matched with big), for a total of 20 items. The degree of overlap between schwar productions across group and input mode (L2 only) was analyzed, followed by a generalized additive mixed model analysis of F3, one of the acoustic cues to rhotacization. Results showed that L2 schwar productions were different from the NAE productions in both the overlap and F3 measures, and the ...

Second Language Research, 2017

We consider how orthography activates sounds that are in a noncontrastive relationship in the sec... more We consider how orthography activates sounds that are in a noncontrastive relationship in the second language (L2) and for which only one variant exists in the first language (L1). Participants were L1 English / L2 Spanish and native Spanish listeners. Intervocalically, Spanish graphemes ‘b d g’ correspond phonetically to stops and approximants (e.g. lobo ‘wolf’, lo[β]o), and in English they correspond only to stops. In Experiment 1, native and L2 Spanish listeners completed cross-modal (written–auditory) and within modal (auditory) priming tasks. Prime-target pairs were counterbalanced for phonetic variant. The results for L2 listeners in the cross-modal condition showed a significant interaction between variant and mode. Experiment 2 used long-term repetition priming to tap into longer-term representations and test whether L1 orthography is activated even when it is not strictly necessary to complete the task. Results for L2 speakers showed priming by both phonetic variants while ...

Perceptual contrast and its consequences play a large role in both first and second language acqu... more Perceptual contrast and its consequences play a large role in both first and second language acquisition. Infants acquiring their native language must learn to divide the speech stream into the vowels and consonants that perform a contrastive role in the inventory of their language. Researchers have proposed that infants initially engage in a process of phonetic category learning and subsequently, after exposure to their native language contrasts, begin to unify these phonetic exemplars into more abstract phoneme categories (Pierrehumbert 2003). The objects of this phonetic learning process are the language’s allophones, or contextualized surface variants of the more abstract phoneme categories. The infant learner must determine whether the variation perceived in the speech stream is attributable to allophonic or phonemic contrasts in the language’s sound categories. The mechanism used by children to carry out this task is assumed to involve a statistical analysis of the acoustic sp...

The Modern Language Journal

We take a multidimensional perspective on the development of second language (L2) speaking abilit... more We take a multidimensional perspective on the development of second language (L2) speaking ability and examine how changes in the underlying cognitive variables of linguistic knowledge and processing speed interact with complexity, fluency, and accuracy over the course of a 3-month Spanish study abroad session. Study abroad provides a unique learning context for evaluating changes in the under- lying dimensions of L2 speaking because learners are fully immersed in the target language and have ample opportunity to implement, practice, and integrate newly gained skills. Participants were 39 native English speakers acquiring Spanish in Argentina. Results show that participants experienced significant gains across complexity, fluency, and accuracy. However, these gains were not evenly distributed across all dimensions or across all learners. Learners with higher levels of L2 linguistic knowledge and faster L2 processing speed prior to study abroad experienced greater gains in accuracy and syntactic and lexical complexity during study abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies in Second Language Acquisition

This study examines how dominance and proficiency relate to Spanish heritage speaker vowel produc... more This study examines how dominance and proficiency relate to Spanish heritage speaker vowel productions. Participants’ normalized vowel measurements were compared to nonheritage native speakers of Spanish and English using the Pillai score, an output of Multivariate Analysis of Variances (MANOVAs) that allows comparisons across distributions of two or more dependent variables. With Pillai scores as the dependent variable, we created two multiple regression models for each language, one with factors related to dominance, one with factors related to proficiency. We use commonality analysis (variance partitioning) to determine the unique and shared contribution of each variable to the regression models. The results showed different patterns of unique and shared variance across English and Spanish for the factors related to dominance and also for proficiency. Given this, we maintain that it is important to preserve dominance and proficiency as separate but related constructs when conside...

Modern Language Journal, 2013

J Urol, 1998

Editorial Comment: Since 35% of the patients did not return the case report forms and the expecte... more Editorial Comment: Since 35% of the patients did not return the case report forms and the expected placebo effect for subjective symptomatology ranges between 20 and 40?6, a randomized double-blind placebo controlled study clearly is necessary, as the authors suggest. Urology, suppl., 4 9 111-113, 1997 Objectives. On the assumption that interstitial cystitis (IC) is the result of a defective mucous lining of the bladder epithelium, a study was carried out to investigate the activity of hyaluronic acid (HA) in the treatment of IC. HA is an important glycosaminoglycan (GAG) present in all connective tissues, including the GAG layer of the vesical mucosa. It exhibits a variety of pharmacologic properties that enhance its appeal for the therapy of IC.

Educational Studies, 1987

History of Education Quarterly, 1996