Experience with a second language affects the use of fundamental frequency in speech segmentation (original) (raw)
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Differential Contribution of Prosodic Cues in Native and Non-native Speech Segmentation
2011
The present study investigates the contribution of fundamental frequency (F0) in native English and native French listeners‟ segmentation of French speech. The results of a word-monitoring task with resynthesized stimuli show that pitch accents modulated speech segmentation for both groups, but unlike native listeners, the English listeners, who were at mid and high proficiencies in French, were not able to use F0 rise as a cue to word-final boundaries in French. These findings are attributed to their native language, in which F0 rise is a cue to word-initial boundaries, and to the co-occurrence of F0 and duration cues in word-final syllables in French, thus preventing them from attending to F0 rise as a cue to word-final boundaries. Keywords: speech segmentation, prosodic cues, French, second/foreign language, lexical access F0 rise as a cue to word boundaries. It should be 1. INTRODUCTION An increasingly large body of evidence shows that native adult listeners use both accentual c...
Cross-linguistic differences in the use of durational cues for the segmentation of a novel language
Memory & Cognition, 2017
It is widely accepted that duration can be exploited as phonological phrase final lengthening in the segmentation of a novel language, i.e., in extracting discrete constituents from continuous speech. The use of final lengthening for segmentation and its facilitatory effect has been claimed to be universal. However, lengthening in the world languages can also mark lexically stressed syllables. Stress-induced lengthening can potentially be in conflict with right edge phonological phrase boundary lengthening. Thus the processing of durational cues in segmentation can be dependent on the listener's linguistic background, e.g. on the specific correlates and unmarked location of lexical stress in the native language of the listener. We tested this prediction and found that segmentation by both German and Basque speakers is facilitated when lengthening is aligned with the word final syllable and is not affected by lengthening on either the penultimate or the antepenultimate syllables. Lengthening of the word final syllable, however, does not help Italian and Spanish speakers to segment continuous speech, and lengthening of the antepenultimate syllable impedes their performance. We have also found a facilitatory effect of penultimate lengthening on segmentation by Italians. These results confirm our hypothesis that processing of lengthening cues is not universal, and interpretation of lengthening as a phonological phrase final boundary marker in a novel language of exposure can be overridden by the phonology of lexical stress in the native language of the listener.
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 2002
Varying degrees of plasticity in different subsystems of language have been demonstrated by studies showing that some aspects of language are processed similarly by native speakers and late-learners whereas other aspects are processed differently by the two groups. The study of speech segmentation provides a means by which the ability to process different types of linguistic information can be measured within the same task, because lexical, syntactic, and stress-pattern information can all indicate where one word ends and the next begins in continuous speech. In this study, native Japanese and native Spanish late-learners of English (as well as near-monolingual Japanese and Spanish speakers) were asked to determine whether specific sounds fell at the beginning or in the middle of words in English sentences. Similar to native English speakers, late-learners employed lexical information to perform the segmentation task. However, nonnative speakers did not use syntactic information to ...
Introduction. Second language learners often find it difficult to parse a stream of speech into words. The speech signal is a continuous flow of sounds in which word boundaries may not be clearly defined. While native speakers are able to segment speech effortlessly, non-native speakers face a more difficult challenge. Finding where one word ends and another word begins is a demanding task for learners of a second language (Aljasser 2008; Hanulíková et al. 2011; Weber and Cutler 2006; Altenberg 2005; Ito and Strange 2009). This difficulty is possibly a result of having an established segmentation system that is specialized to their L1 and could interfere with L2 boundary detection. L1 transfer is found to play a crucial role in speech perception and segmentation (Flege and MacKay 2004; Brown 1998; Shoemaker and Rast 2013; Weber and Cutler 2005). For example, in a language with initial stress, L1 listeners are likely to use stress as a cue to signal a word boundary (Vroomen et al....
"The present dissertation investigates the abilities of adult monolingual and bilingual speakers to implement statistical and prosodic cues in speech segmentation. Three are the aims of the present dissertation: (1) to examine whether bilingual speakers deploy the prosodic and statistical segmentation strategies that characterize their two languages, (2) to investigate the role that statistical and prosodic cues play in adult speech segmentation, and (3) to explore whether adult speakers make use of two types of cues that have been proposed as potentially allowing infants to determine the basic word order patter (OV/VO, head-initial or head-final) of the language under acquisition: the frequency distribution of functors and content words in natural languages (frequency-based cue) and the relative prominence within phonological phrases (prosodic cue). Three artificial language learning experiments were conducted, in which the segmentation preferences of ambiguous artificial languages that contain these frequency-based and prosodic cues by adult monolingual and bilingual speakers were examined. The results of the experiments showed that (1) bilingual speakers are able to implement the frequency-based segmentation strategies that characterize their two languages, though acquisition of the L2’s segmentation strategy appears to be constrained, (2) statistical and prosodic cues seem to be outranked by acoustic-phonetic cues, supporting thus a hierarchical account of segmentation cues in which statistical and prosodic cues are the least weighed by adult speakers, (3) frequent-initial segmentation might be the universally preferred segmentation strategy, (4) frequency-based segmentation strategies are available segmentation cues to adult speakers. "
Language Acquisition, 2018
Word segmentation in L2 is not as optimal as in L1 because many, though not all, cues to signal word boundaries appear to be largely languagespecific. Native English listeners use short-lag versus long-lag VOTs in segmenting pairs such as Lou spills versus loose pills. Polish contrasts negative versus short-lag VOTs, so speakers of Polish are expected to be largely insensitive to this English word-boundary cue. Forty-three lowerproficiency and 26 higher-proficiency Polish learners of English segmented English words from VOT cues. Both accuracy and RT measures were analyzed. The results showed that the general accuracy was 59%, identical to Spanish (Altenberg 2005) and French speakers (Shoemaker 2014) and lower than that for Japanese speakers (Ito & Strange 2009). There was no difference between segmenting aspirated and unaspirated onsets in accuracy or RTs. Higher proficiency did not lead to more successful segmentation, but higher-proficiency listeners were faster in their decisions.
Cues to speech segmentation: Evidence from juncture misperceptions and word spotting
1996
Understanding spoken language requires that listeners segment a spoken utterance into words or into some smaller unit from which the lexicon can be accessed. A major difficulty in speech segmentation is the fact that speakers do not provide stable acoustic cues to indicate boundaries between words or segments. At present, it is therefore unclear as to how to start a lexical access attempt in the absence of a reliable cue about where to start. Several decades of speech research have not yet led to a widely accepted solution for the speech segmentation problem. So far, three proposals have appeared in the literature that are of direct relevance here. One is that the continuous speech stream is categorized into discrete segments which then mediate between the acoustic signal and the lexicon. The second proposal is that there is an explicit mechanism that targets locations in the speech stream where word boundaries are likely to occur. The third is that word segmentation is a by-product of lexical competition. In the present study, these alternatives are considered.
An intonational cue to word segmentation in phonemically identical sequences
Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 2010
How do listeners accomplish the task of word segmentation, given that, in spoken language, there are no clear and obvious cues associated with word beginnings and ends? There is now a vast body of evidence showing that listeners use their tacit knowledge of a wide range of patterns in their native language to help them segment speech, including cues from allophonic variation, phonotactic constraints, transitional probabilities, and lexical stress (e.g.we examine the possibility that cues from intonation or the melodic structure of a language can help listeners find word beginnings in the speech stream.
Use of Word Segmentation Cues in Adults: L1 Phonotactics versus L2 Transitional Probabilities
csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu
We investigate whether adult learners' knowledge of phonotactic restrictions on word forms from their first language (L1) impact their word segmentation abilities in a new language. Adult learners were exposed to a speech stream in which language specific and non-language specific cues for word segmentation were pitted against one another. English rules about possible phonetic combinations (phonotactics) and transitional probabilities of syllables conflicted such that predictive transitional probabilities generated words that were phonotactically impossible in English. A control with phonotactically viable items was also run. At test, participants choose between words defined by deterministic transitional probabilities and words that are phonotactically possible in English, but have much lower transitional probabilities. A baseline of their abilities to track transitional probabilities in the stimuli was also collected. Results suggest that although participants are able to track the transitional probabilities in these stimuli, they are not using them to segment and extract words. Control subjects, however, do use transitional probabilities to segment words. This pattern of results is resilient, holding up with substantial increases in exposure and even when segmentation is encouraged by explicitly giving participants one of the words in the stream prior to exposure.
Laboratory Phonology, 2012
This study investigates the use of prosodic information in the segmentation of French speech by mid-level and high-level English second/foreign language (L2) learners of French and native French listeners. The results of two word-monitoring tasks, one with natural stimuli and one with resynthesized stimuli, show that as L2 learners become more proficient in French, they go from parsing accented syllables as word-initial to parsing them as word-final, but unlike native listeners, they use duration increase but not fundamental frequencyx (