Miquel Llompart | Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (original) (raw)

Papers by Miquel Llompart

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2016

Limited exposure to ambiguous auditory stimuli results in perceptual recalibration. When unambigu... more Limited exposure to ambiguous auditory stimuli results in perceptual recalibration. When unambiguous stimuli are used instead, selective adaptation (SA) effects have been reported, even after few adaptor presentations. Crucially, selective adaptation by an ambiguous sound in biasing lexical contexts had previously been found only after massive adaptor repetition [Samuel (2001). Psychol. Sci. 12(4), 348-351]. The present study shows that extensive exposure is not necessary for lexically driven selective adaptation to occur. Lexically driven selective adaptation can arise after as few as nine adaptor presentations. Additionally, build-up course inspection reveals several parallelisms with the time course observed for SA with unambiguous stimuli.

The question of how listeners deal with different phonetic variant forms for the same words in pe... more The question of how listeners deal with different phonetic variant forms for the same words in perception has sparked great interest over the past few decades, especially with regard to lenited and regional forms. However, the perception of free variant forms of allophones within the same syllable position remains surprisingly understudied. Because of this, in the present study, we investigate how free allophonic variation in the realization of the German rhotic (/r/) impacts spoken word recognition for native German listeners and two groups of non-native listeners (French and Italian learners of German). By means of a visual-world eye-tracking task, we tested the recognition of spoken German words starting with /r/ when the rhotic was produced either as the more canonical variant, the uvular fricative [K] which is considered the German standard, or as an alveolar trill [r], a common realization in the south of Germany. Results showed that German listeners were more efficient at recognizing /r/-initial words when these were produced with the uvular fricative than with the alveolar trill. French listeners did not differ from German listeners in that respect, but Italian listeners showed exactly the opposite pattern: they showed an advantage when words were produced with the alveolar trill. These findings suggest that, for native listeners, the canonicity of the variant form is an important determiner of ease of recognition, even in the absence of orthographic or perceptual motivations for the primacy of canonical variants for this particular example of variation. For non-native listeners, by contrast, results are better explained by the match of the different allophones to the canonical realization of /r/ in their native language than by the status or frequency of the allophones in the non-native language itself.

Bilingualism: Language and Cognition

Listening to speech entails adapting to vast amounts of variability in the signal. The present st... more Listening to speech entails adapting to vast amounts of variability in the signal. The present study examined the relationship between flexibility for adaptation in a second language (L2) and robustness of L2 phonolexical representations. Phonolexical encoding and phonetic flexibility for German learners of English were assessed by means of a lexical decision task containing nonwords with sound substitutions and a distributional learning task, respectively. Performance was analyzed for an easy (/i/-/ɪ/) and a difficult contrast (/ɛ/-/æ/, where /æ/ does not exist in German). Results showed that for /i/-/ɪ/ listeners were quite accurate in lexical decision, and distributional learning consistently triggered shifts in categorization. For /ɛ/-/æ/, lexical decision performance was poor but individual participants’ scores related to performance in distributional learning: the better learners were in their lexical decision, the smaller their categorization shift. This suggests that, for di...

Frontiers in Psychology

Establishing phonologically robust lexical representations in a second language (L2) is challengi... more Establishing phonologically robust lexical representations in a second language (L2) is challenging, and even more so for words containing phones in phonological contrasts that are not part of the native language. This study presents a series of additional analyses of lexical decision data assessing the phonolexical encoding of English /ε/ and /æ/ by German learners of English (/æ/ does not exist in German) in order to examine the influence of lexical frequency, phonological neighborhood density and the acoustics of the particular vowels on learners’ ability to reject nonwords differing from real words in the confusable L2 phones only (e.g., *l[æ]mon, *dr[ε]gon). Results showed that both the lexical properties of the target items and the acoustics of the critical vowels affected nonword rejection, albeit differently for items with /æ/ → [ε] and /ε/ → [æ] mispronunciations: For the former, lower lexical frequencies and higher neighborhood densities led to more accurate performance. F...

Bilingualism: Language and Cognition

This study investigated the contribution of second-language (L2) phonetic categorization abilitie... more This study investigated the contribution of second-language (L2) phonetic categorization abilities and vocabulary size to the phonolexical encoding of challenging non-native phonological contrasts into the L2 lexicon. Two groups of German learners of English differing in L2 proficiency (advanced vs. intermediate) participated in an English lexical decision task including words and nonwords with /ɛ/ and /æ/ (/æ/ does not exist in German), an /ɛ/-/æ/ phonetic categorization task and an English vocabulary test. Results showed that the effects of phonetic categorization and vocabulary size on lexical decision performance were modulated by proficiency: categorization predicted /ɛ/-/æ/ nonword rejection accuracy for intermediate learners, whereas vocabulary did so for advanced learners. This suggests that sufficient phonetic identification ability is key for an accurate phonological representation of difficult L2 phones, but, for learners for whom robust phonetic identification is already...

Frontiers in Communication

The present study investigated whether the ability to encode the sounds of difficult second-langu... more The present study investigated whether the ability to encode the sounds of difficult second-language (L2) contrasts into novel non-native lexical representations is modulated by the phonological form of the words to be learned. In three experiments, German learners of English were trained on word-picture associations with either novel minimal pairs only differing in the difficult /ɛ/-/ae/ contrast (Experiments 1 and 2; e.g., tendek-tandek) or pairs that additionally differed in their second syllables (Experiment 3; e.g., tenzer-tandek). Word recognition was assessed by means of a visual-world eye-tracking task. We asked whether learners would be more successful at encoding a distinction between the two vowels in the minimal-pair than in the non-minimal pair items because of the central role of the contrast for accurate word learning with minimal pairs. Results from eye-fixation analyses at test showed that learners recognized /ae/items faster than /ɛ/-items when they were minimal pairs and these pairs had already appeared together on the screen on a number of training trials (Experiment 1 vs. 2). This asymmetry could not be replicated with non-minimal pairs (Experiment 3). In line with previous studies, the asymmetry in Experiment 2 is taken as evidence of lexical separation for /ɛ/ and /ae/.

Language and Speech, 2018

This study investigated the relationship between imitation and both the perception and production... more This study investigated the relationship between imitation and both the perception and production abilities of second language (L2) learners for two non-native contrasts differing in their expected degree of difficulty. German learners of English were tested on perceptual categorization, imitation and a word reading task for the difficult English /ɛ/-/æ/ contrast, which tends not to be well encoded in the learners’ phonological inventories, and the easy, near-native /i/-/ɪ/ contrast. As expected, within-task comparisons between contrasts revealed more robust perception and better differentiation during production for /i/-/ɪ/ than /ɛ/-/æ/. Imitation also followed this pattern, suggesting that imitation is modulated by the phonological encoding of L2 categories. Moreover, learners’ ability to imitate /ɛ/ and /æ/ was related to their perception of that contrast, confirming a tight perception-production link at the phonological level for difficult L2 sound contrasts. However, no relationship was observed between acoustic measures for imitated and read-aloud tokens of /ɛ/ and /æ/. This dissociation is mostly attributed to the influence of inaccurate non-native lexical representations in the word reading task. We conclude that imitation is strongly related to the phonological representation of L2 sound contrasts, but does not need to reflect the learners’ productive usage of such non-native distinctions.

Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2018

Listening to speech entails adapting to vast amounts of variability in the signal. The present st... more Listening to speech entails adapting to vast amounts of variability in the signal. The present study examined the relationship between flexibility for adaptation in a second language (L2) and robustness of L2 phonolexical representations. Phonolexical encoding and phonetic flexibility for German learners of English were assessed by means of a lexical decision task containing nonwords with sound substitutions and a distributional learning task, respectively. Performance was analyzed for an easy (/i/-/ɪ/) and a difficult contrast (/ɛ/-/æ/, where /æ/ does not exist in German). Results showed that for /i/-/ɪ/ listeners were quite accurate in lexical decision, and distributional learning consistently triggered shifts in categorization. For /ɛ/-/æ/, lexical decision performance was poor but individual participants’ scores related to performance in distributional learning: the better learners were in their lexical decision, the smaller their categorization shift. This suggests that, for difficult L2 contrasts, rigidity at the phonetic level relates to better lexical performance.

Journal of Phonetics, 2018

Phonological features have frequently been singled out as the units of perception, especially for... more Phonological features have frequently been singled out as the units of perception, especially for vowels. Evidence of the use of features has been provided for vowel height and vowel position, which have one acoustic correlate only. However, findings on acoustically complex features such as tenseness are less clear. The present study assessed the role of phonological features in perception using the selective adaptation paradigm. Selective adaptation effects on German vowel contrasts differing in vowel height (Experiment 1), position (Experiment 2) and tenseness (Experiment 3) were examined. We tested how the categorization of each vowel contrast was affected by adaptation to words containing vowels that differently resembled or diverged from the vowels in the critical contrast acoustically and in terms of their phonological feature specifications. Results showed that selective adaptation patterns could be predicted by the vowels' phonological features for the height and position contrasts, but not for the tenseness contrast. However, adaptation patterns for the latter can be explained by the relationship between adaptors and continuum endpoints in each of the relevant acoustic cues to the contrast. This suggests that vowel perception may be dependent on these acoustic cues rather than phonological features.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 2017

The present study examined whether obtaining additional articulatory information about the sounds... more The present study examined whether obtaining additional articulatory information about the sounds of a difficult second language contrast (English /ɛ/-/æ/ for German speakers) could help non-native listeners to encode a lexical distinction between novel words containing these two categories. Novel words (e.g., tenzer-tandek) were trained with different types of input and their recognition was tested in a visual-world eye-tracking task. In Experiment 1, a baseline group was exposed to the words audio-only during training, while another group additionally saw videos of the speaker articulating the target words. In Experiment 2, listeners were asked to repeat the target words themselves as part of their training. It was found that both audiovisual input and word repetition during training resulted in asymmetric fixation patterns at test: words containing /ɛ/ were recognized more readily than those with /æ/, mirroring the recognition asymmetry reported for real English words. This asymmetry was not present for the audio-only group, where target words with the two vowels were fixated similarly. The results suggest that articulatory knowledge, acquired through both passive exposure to visual information (Exp. 1) and active production (Exp. 2), can help distinguishing words with difficult foreign sounds.

Language and Speech, 2018

This study investigates the production and auditory lexical processing of words involved in a pat... more This study investigates the production and auditory lexical processing of words involved in a patterned phonological alternation in two dialects of Catalan spoken on the island of Majorca, Spain. One of these dialects, that of Palma, merges /ɔ/ and /o/ as [o] in unstressed position, and it maintains /u/ as an independent category, [u]. In the dialect of Sóller, a small village, speakers merge unstressed /ɔ/, /o/, and /u/ to [u]. First, a production study asks whether the discrete, rule-based descriptions of the vowel alternations provided in the dialectological literature are able to account adequately for these processes: are mergers complete? Results show that mergers are complete with regards to the main acoustic cue to these vowel contrasts, that is, F1. However, minor differences are maintained for F2 and vowel duration. Second, a lexical decision task using cross-modal priming investigates the strength with which words produced in the phonetic form of the neighboring (versus one's own) dialect activate the listeners' lexical representations during spoken word recognition: are words within and across dialects accessed efficiently? The study finds that listeners from one of these dialects, Sóller, process their own and the neighboring forms equally efficiently, while listeners from the other one, Palma, process their own forms more efficiently than those of the neighboring dialect. This study has implications for our understanding of the role of lifelong linguistic experience on speech performance.

The Journal of the Acoustica Society of America, 2016

Limited exposure to ambiguous auditory stimuli results in perceptual recalibration. When unambigu... more Limited exposure to ambiguous auditory stimuli results in perceptual recalibration. When unambiguous stimuli are used instead, selective adaptation (SA) effects have been reported, even after few adaptor presentations. Crucially, selective adaptation by an ambiguous sound in biasing lexical contexts had previously been found only after massive adaptor repetition [Samuel (2001). Psychol. Sci. 12(4), 348–351]. The present study shows that extensive exposure is not necessary for lexically driven selective adaptation to occur. Lexically driven selective adaptation can arise after as few as nine adaptor presentations. Additionally, build-up course inspection reveals several parallelisms with the time course observed for SA with unambiguous stimuli.

Probus, 2017

Majorcan Catalan postverbal pronominal elements are typically described as being prominent due to... more Majorcan Catalan postverbal pronominal elements are typically described as being prominent due to stress shift from their host. This study sheds light on the prosodic phonology of these pronouns through the analysis of duration, vowel quality, and f0 in verb + pronominal sequences, which are compared to a baseline condition without pronominals and to the same sequences in a Catalan variety without stress shift. Our results show acoustic differences in the realization of pronominals in these varieties. The duration and vowel quality patterns are consistent with the stress shift account of postverbal pronominals in Majorcan Catalan. Analysis of f0 contours also reveals phono-logical differences across varieties. Whereas stressed postverbal pronominals are not rare in Romance, Majorcan Catalan is one of a much reduced number of varieties within the Romance domain, where the attachment of a pronominal element to a host triggers " true " stress shift rather than an additional prominence on the pronominal element, like Sardinian or Neapolitan.

Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, May 20, 2016

The subjects of unaccusative verbs of change of location (e. g., llegar, venir) may appear in pre... more The subjects of unaccusative verbs of change of location (e. g., llegar, venir) may appear in pre-verbal and post-verbal position. However, most syntactic accounts of word order in Spanish suggest that VS is the canonical order for these verbs. This claim has been supported by some experimental data, but further insight on the mechanisms underlying this particular instance of variation can still be gained from its study from a variationist, corpus-based perspective. We investigate the SV-VS alternation in the spontaneous oral discourse of two populations, monolingual Spanish speakers from Mexico City and Spanish-English bilingual speakers from Southern Arizona. Multivariate analyses reveal that the informative load of the subject, the animacy of the subject, verbal tense and aspect, and the presence or absence of an initial modifier, in this order, condition word order selection. The results also show that bilingual speakers from Southern Arizona are less flexible than monolinguals speakers in assigning word order to unaccusative verbs of change of location when the subject does not introduce new information, favoring SV almost categorically. A possible cause for this dissimilar behavior is the influence of English, where unaccusative verbs tend to appear pre-verbally, on the Spanish of these bilinguals.

Proceedings of the 18th ICPHS

The present paper explores the patterns of unstressed vowel reduction affecting the three back vo... more The present paper explores the patterns of unstressed vowel reduction affecting the three back vowels of Catalan: /ɔ/, /o/ and /u/. In particular, we examine two reduction patterns found in the Catalan dialect spoken on the island of Majorca: (i) the general Majorcan pattern according to which /ɔ/ and /o/ merge to [o] in unstressed position and /u/ remains different (as [u]), and (ii) a pattern found only in one small village on the island of Majorca, Sóller, according to which /ɔ/, /o/ and /u/ all merge to [u]. By means of an acoustic study, the present paper establishes that the traditional impressionistic descriptions of these sub-dialects of Catalan with respect to their back vowels are correct and that these processes are thus best described as categorical, phonological (rather than gradient, phonetic) processes.

Estudios de Fonética Experimental, 2013

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2016

Limited exposure to ambiguous auditory stimuli results in perceptual recalibration. When unambigu... more Limited exposure to ambiguous auditory stimuli results in perceptual recalibration. When unambiguous stimuli are used instead, selective adaptation (SA) effects have been reported, even after few adaptor presentations. Crucially, selective adaptation by an ambiguous sound in biasing lexical contexts had previously been found only after massive adaptor repetition [Samuel (2001). Psychol. Sci. 12(4), 348-351]. The present study shows that extensive exposure is not necessary for lexically driven selective adaptation to occur. Lexically driven selective adaptation can arise after as few as nine adaptor presentations. Additionally, build-up course inspection reveals several parallelisms with the time course observed for SA with unambiguous stimuli.

The question of how listeners deal with different phonetic variant forms for the same words in pe... more The question of how listeners deal with different phonetic variant forms for the same words in perception has sparked great interest over the past few decades, especially with regard to lenited and regional forms. However, the perception of free variant forms of allophones within the same syllable position remains surprisingly understudied. Because of this, in the present study, we investigate how free allophonic variation in the realization of the German rhotic (/r/) impacts spoken word recognition for native German listeners and two groups of non-native listeners (French and Italian learners of German). By means of a visual-world eye-tracking task, we tested the recognition of spoken German words starting with /r/ when the rhotic was produced either as the more canonical variant, the uvular fricative [K] which is considered the German standard, or as an alveolar trill [r], a common realization in the south of Germany. Results showed that German listeners were more efficient at recognizing /r/-initial words when these were produced with the uvular fricative than with the alveolar trill. French listeners did not differ from German listeners in that respect, but Italian listeners showed exactly the opposite pattern: they showed an advantage when words were produced with the alveolar trill. These findings suggest that, for native listeners, the canonicity of the variant form is an important determiner of ease of recognition, even in the absence of orthographic or perceptual motivations for the primacy of canonical variants for this particular example of variation. For non-native listeners, by contrast, results are better explained by the match of the different allophones to the canonical realization of /r/ in their native language than by the status or frequency of the allophones in the non-native language itself.

Bilingualism: Language and Cognition

Listening to speech entails adapting to vast amounts of variability in the signal. The present st... more Listening to speech entails adapting to vast amounts of variability in the signal. The present study examined the relationship between flexibility for adaptation in a second language (L2) and robustness of L2 phonolexical representations. Phonolexical encoding and phonetic flexibility for German learners of English were assessed by means of a lexical decision task containing nonwords with sound substitutions and a distributional learning task, respectively. Performance was analyzed for an easy (/i/-/ɪ/) and a difficult contrast (/ɛ/-/æ/, where /æ/ does not exist in German). Results showed that for /i/-/ɪ/ listeners were quite accurate in lexical decision, and distributional learning consistently triggered shifts in categorization. For /ɛ/-/æ/, lexical decision performance was poor but individual participants’ scores related to performance in distributional learning: the better learners were in their lexical decision, the smaller their categorization shift. This suggests that, for di...

Frontiers in Psychology

Establishing phonologically robust lexical representations in a second language (L2) is challengi... more Establishing phonologically robust lexical representations in a second language (L2) is challenging, and even more so for words containing phones in phonological contrasts that are not part of the native language. This study presents a series of additional analyses of lexical decision data assessing the phonolexical encoding of English /ε/ and /æ/ by German learners of English (/æ/ does not exist in German) in order to examine the influence of lexical frequency, phonological neighborhood density and the acoustics of the particular vowels on learners’ ability to reject nonwords differing from real words in the confusable L2 phones only (e.g., *l[æ]mon, *dr[ε]gon). Results showed that both the lexical properties of the target items and the acoustics of the critical vowels affected nonword rejection, albeit differently for items with /æ/ → [ε] and /ε/ → [æ] mispronunciations: For the former, lower lexical frequencies and higher neighborhood densities led to more accurate performance. F...

Bilingualism: Language and Cognition

This study investigated the contribution of second-language (L2) phonetic categorization abilitie... more This study investigated the contribution of second-language (L2) phonetic categorization abilities and vocabulary size to the phonolexical encoding of challenging non-native phonological contrasts into the L2 lexicon. Two groups of German learners of English differing in L2 proficiency (advanced vs. intermediate) participated in an English lexical decision task including words and nonwords with /ɛ/ and /æ/ (/æ/ does not exist in German), an /ɛ/-/æ/ phonetic categorization task and an English vocabulary test. Results showed that the effects of phonetic categorization and vocabulary size on lexical decision performance were modulated by proficiency: categorization predicted /ɛ/-/æ/ nonword rejection accuracy for intermediate learners, whereas vocabulary did so for advanced learners. This suggests that sufficient phonetic identification ability is key for an accurate phonological representation of difficult L2 phones, but, for learners for whom robust phonetic identification is already...

Frontiers in Communication

The present study investigated whether the ability to encode the sounds of difficult second-langu... more The present study investigated whether the ability to encode the sounds of difficult second-language (L2) contrasts into novel non-native lexical representations is modulated by the phonological form of the words to be learned. In three experiments, German learners of English were trained on word-picture associations with either novel minimal pairs only differing in the difficult /ɛ/-/ae/ contrast (Experiments 1 and 2; e.g., tendek-tandek) or pairs that additionally differed in their second syllables (Experiment 3; e.g., tenzer-tandek). Word recognition was assessed by means of a visual-world eye-tracking task. We asked whether learners would be more successful at encoding a distinction between the two vowels in the minimal-pair than in the non-minimal pair items because of the central role of the contrast for accurate word learning with minimal pairs. Results from eye-fixation analyses at test showed that learners recognized /ae/items faster than /ɛ/-items when they were minimal pairs and these pairs had already appeared together on the screen on a number of training trials (Experiment 1 vs. 2). This asymmetry could not be replicated with non-minimal pairs (Experiment 3). In line with previous studies, the asymmetry in Experiment 2 is taken as evidence of lexical separation for /ɛ/ and /ae/.

Language and Speech, 2018

This study investigated the relationship between imitation and both the perception and production... more This study investigated the relationship between imitation and both the perception and production abilities of second language (L2) learners for two non-native contrasts differing in their expected degree of difficulty. German learners of English were tested on perceptual categorization, imitation and a word reading task for the difficult English /ɛ/-/æ/ contrast, which tends not to be well encoded in the learners’ phonological inventories, and the easy, near-native /i/-/ɪ/ contrast. As expected, within-task comparisons between contrasts revealed more robust perception and better differentiation during production for /i/-/ɪ/ than /ɛ/-/æ/. Imitation also followed this pattern, suggesting that imitation is modulated by the phonological encoding of L2 categories. Moreover, learners’ ability to imitate /ɛ/ and /æ/ was related to their perception of that contrast, confirming a tight perception-production link at the phonological level for difficult L2 sound contrasts. However, no relationship was observed between acoustic measures for imitated and read-aloud tokens of /ɛ/ and /æ/. This dissociation is mostly attributed to the influence of inaccurate non-native lexical representations in the word reading task. We conclude that imitation is strongly related to the phonological representation of L2 sound contrasts, but does not need to reflect the learners’ productive usage of such non-native distinctions.

Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2018

Listening to speech entails adapting to vast amounts of variability in the signal. The present st... more Listening to speech entails adapting to vast amounts of variability in the signal. The present study examined the relationship between flexibility for adaptation in a second language (L2) and robustness of L2 phonolexical representations. Phonolexical encoding and phonetic flexibility for German learners of English were assessed by means of a lexical decision task containing nonwords with sound substitutions and a distributional learning task, respectively. Performance was analyzed for an easy (/i/-/ɪ/) and a difficult contrast (/ɛ/-/æ/, where /æ/ does not exist in German). Results showed that for /i/-/ɪ/ listeners were quite accurate in lexical decision, and distributional learning consistently triggered shifts in categorization. For /ɛ/-/æ/, lexical decision performance was poor but individual participants’ scores related to performance in distributional learning: the better learners were in their lexical decision, the smaller their categorization shift. This suggests that, for difficult L2 contrasts, rigidity at the phonetic level relates to better lexical performance.

Journal of Phonetics, 2018

Phonological features have frequently been singled out as the units of perception, especially for... more Phonological features have frequently been singled out as the units of perception, especially for vowels. Evidence of the use of features has been provided for vowel height and vowel position, which have one acoustic correlate only. However, findings on acoustically complex features such as tenseness are less clear. The present study assessed the role of phonological features in perception using the selective adaptation paradigm. Selective adaptation effects on German vowel contrasts differing in vowel height (Experiment 1), position (Experiment 2) and tenseness (Experiment 3) were examined. We tested how the categorization of each vowel contrast was affected by adaptation to words containing vowels that differently resembled or diverged from the vowels in the critical contrast acoustically and in terms of their phonological feature specifications. Results showed that selective adaptation patterns could be predicted by the vowels' phonological features for the height and position contrasts, but not for the tenseness contrast. However, adaptation patterns for the latter can be explained by the relationship between adaptors and continuum endpoints in each of the relevant acoustic cues to the contrast. This suggests that vowel perception may be dependent on these acoustic cues rather than phonological features.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 2017

The present study examined whether obtaining additional articulatory information about the sounds... more The present study examined whether obtaining additional articulatory information about the sounds of a difficult second language contrast (English /ɛ/-/æ/ for German speakers) could help non-native listeners to encode a lexical distinction between novel words containing these two categories. Novel words (e.g., tenzer-tandek) were trained with different types of input and their recognition was tested in a visual-world eye-tracking task. In Experiment 1, a baseline group was exposed to the words audio-only during training, while another group additionally saw videos of the speaker articulating the target words. In Experiment 2, listeners were asked to repeat the target words themselves as part of their training. It was found that both audiovisual input and word repetition during training resulted in asymmetric fixation patterns at test: words containing /ɛ/ were recognized more readily than those with /æ/, mirroring the recognition asymmetry reported for real English words. This asymmetry was not present for the audio-only group, where target words with the two vowels were fixated similarly. The results suggest that articulatory knowledge, acquired through both passive exposure to visual information (Exp. 1) and active production (Exp. 2), can help distinguishing words with difficult foreign sounds.

Language and Speech, 2018

This study investigates the production and auditory lexical processing of words involved in a pat... more This study investigates the production and auditory lexical processing of words involved in a patterned phonological alternation in two dialects of Catalan spoken on the island of Majorca, Spain. One of these dialects, that of Palma, merges /ɔ/ and /o/ as [o] in unstressed position, and it maintains /u/ as an independent category, [u]. In the dialect of Sóller, a small village, speakers merge unstressed /ɔ/, /o/, and /u/ to [u]. First, a production study asks whether the discrete, rule-based descriptions of the vowel alternations provided in the dialectological literature are able to account adequately for these processes: are mergers complete? Results show that mergers are complete with regards to the main acoustic cue to these vowel contrasts, that is, F1. However, minor differences are maintained for F2 and vowel duration. Second, a lexical decision task using cross-modal priming investigates the strength with which words produced in the phonetic form of the neighboring (versus one's own) dialect activate the listeners' lexical representations during spoken word recognition: are words within and across dialects accessed efficiently? The study finds that listeners from one of these dialects, Sóller, process their own and the neighboring forms equally efficiently, while listeners from the other one, Palma, process their own forms more efficiently than those of the neighboring dialect. This study has implications for our understanding of the role of lifelong linguistic experience on speech performance.

The Journal of the Acoustica Society of America, 2016

Limited exposure to ambiguous auditory stimuli results in perceptual recalibration. When unambigu... more Limited exposure to ambiguous auditory stimuli results in perceptual recalibration. When unambiguous stimuli are used instead, selective adaptation (SA) effects have been reported, even after few adaptor presentations. Crucially, selective adaptation by an ambiguous sound in biasing lexical contexts had previously been found only after massive adaptor repetition [Samuel (2001). Psychol. Sci. 12(4), 348–351]. The present study shows that extensive exposure is not necessary for lexically driven selective adaptation to occur. Lexically driven selective adaptation can arise after as few as nine adaptor presentations. Additionally, build-up course inspection reveals several parallelisms with the time course observed for SA with unambiguous stimuli.

Probus, 2017

Majorcan Catalan postverbal pronominal elements are typically described as being prominent due to... more Majorcan Catalan postverbal pronominal elements are typically described as being prominent due to stress shift from their host. This study sheds light on the prosodic phonology of these pronouns through the analysis of duration, vowel quality, and f0 in verb + pronominal sequences, which are compared to a baseline condition without pronominals and to the same sequences in a Catalan variety without stress shift. Our results show acoustic differences in the realization of pronominals in these varieties. The duration and vowel quality patterns are consistent with the stress shift account of postverbal pronominals in Majorcan Catalan. Analysis of f0 contours also reveals phono-logical differences across varieties. Whereas stressed postverbal pronominals are not rare in Romance, Majorcan Catalan is one of a much reduced number of varieties within the Romance domain, where the attachment of a pronominal element to a host triggers " true " stress shift rather than an additional prominence on the pronominal element, like Sardinian or Neapolitan.

Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, May 20, 2016

The subjects of unaccusative verbs of change of location (e. g., llegar, venir) may appear in pre... more The subjects of unaccusative verbs of change of location (e. g., llegar, venir) may appear in pre-verbal and post-verbal position. However, most syntactic accounts of word order in Spanish suggest that VS is the canonical order for these verbs. This claim has been supported by some experimental data, but further insight on the mechanisms underlying this particular instance of variation can still be gained from its study from a variationist, corpus-based perspective. We investigate the SV-VS alternation in the spontaneous oral discourse of two populations, monolingual Spanish speakers from Mexico City and Spanish-English bilingual speakers from Southern Arizona. Multivariate analyses reveal that the informative load of the subject, the animacy of the subject, verbal tense and aspect, and the presence or absence of an initial modifier, in this order, condition word order selection. The results also show that bilingual speakers from Southern Arizona are less flexible than monolinguals speakers in assigning word order to unaccusative verbs of change of location when the subject does not introduce new information, favoring SV almost categorically. A possible cause for this dissimilar behavior is the influence of English, where unaccusative verbs tend to appear pre-verbally, on the Spanish of these bilinguals.

Proceedings of the 18th ICPHS

The present paper explores the patterns of unstressed vowel reduction affecting the three back vo... more The present paper explores the patterns of unstressed vowel reduction affecting the three back vowels of Catalan: /ɔ/, /o/ and /u/. In particular, we examine two reduction patterns found in the Catalan dialect spoken on the island of Majorca: (i) the general Majorcan pattern according to which /ɔ/ and /o/ merge to [o] in unstressed position and /u/ remains different (as [u]), and (ii) a pattern found only in one small village on the island of Majorca, Sóller, according to which /ɔ/, /o/ and /u/ all merge to [u]. By means of an acoustic study, the present paper establishes that the traditional impressionistic descriptions of these sub-dialects of Catalan with respect to their back vowels are correct and that these processes are thus best described as categorical, phonological (rather than gradient, phonetic) processes.

Estudios de Fonética Experimental, 2013