Adult Native Speakers Of English Research Articles

Learning to perceptually organize speech signals in native fashion

The ability to recognize speech involves sensory, perceptual, and cognitive processes. For much of the history of speech perception research, investigators have focused on the first and third of these, asking how much and what kinds of sensory information are used by normal and impaired listeners, as well as how effective amounts of that information are altered by "top-down" cognitive processes. This experiment focused on perceptual processes, asking what accounts for how the sensory information in the speech signal gets organized. Two types of speech signals processed to remove properties that could be considered traditional acoustic cues (amplitude envelopes and sine wave replicas) were presented to 100 listeners in five groups: native English-speaking (L1) adults, 7-, 5-, and 3-year-olds, and native Mandarin-speaking adults who were excellent second-language (L2) users of English. The L2 adults performed more poorly than L1 adults with both kinds of signals. Children performed more poorly than L1 adults but showed disproportionately better performance for the sine waves than for the amplitude envelopes compared to both groups of adults. Sentence context had similar effects across groups, so variability in recognition was attributed to differences in perceptual organization of the sensory information, presumed to arise from native language experience.

Cross‐linguistic perception of velar and alveolar obstruents: A perceptual and psychoacoustic study.

It is well‐known that velar stop consonants coarticulate more with the following vowel than stops at other places of articulation. The fine phonetic detail of this coarticulation is highly language‐specific. For example, /k/ in Greek is more front before front vowels and more back before back vowels relative to /k/ in English [Arbisi‐Kelm et al. (2008)]. The purpose of this study was to investigate how these cross‐linguistic differences in production influence perception of place of articulation for lingual stops. The stimuli were word‐initial consonant‐vowel (CV) sequences excised from words produced by 2‐ to 5‐year‐old children and adults. The listeners were 20 adult native English speakers (tested in Minneapolis, USA) and Greek speakers (tested in Thessaloniki, Greece) who listened to these sequences combined across ages and languages in a visual analog scaling task [Urberg‐Carlson et al. (2008)]. Listeners rated how alveolar or velar each sequence was by clicking on a double‐headed arrow anchored with language‐specific orthographic representations of the target consonants. Results showed that the two groups of adults perceived the sounds differently, as would be expected. We will report on the relationship between listeners’ perception and psychoacoustic properties of the stop bursts. [Work supported by NIDCD 02932 and NSF BCS072914 and BCS0729277.]

Cognitive Predictors of Generalization of Russian Grammatical Gender Categories

This study explores how learners generalize grammatical categories such as noun gender. Adult native English speakers with no prior knowledge of Russian (N = 47, ages 17–55 years) were trained to categorize Russian masculine and feminine diminutive nouns according to gender. The training set was morphophonologically homogeneous due to similarities induced by the diminutive suffixes. Generalization was tested using simplex and diminutive nouns with trained or novel stems. Age, familiarity with other second languages, nonverbal intelligence, and verbal working memory capacity were used to predict performance. Compared to trained diminutives, learners showed equally high accuracy in gender categorization of transparent simplex nouns with trained stems and diminutive nouns with novel stems. Accuracy dropped significantly for nontransparent simplex nouns with trained stems and transparent simplex nouns with novel stems. Verbal working memory capacity predicted gender categorization of nontransparent nouns and vocabulary recall, whereas age, nonverbal intelligence, and prior experience with languages with transparent gender categories affected performance in nouns containing at least some degree of gender transparency. The findings indicate that pattern‐based and memory‐based learning processes coexist in adult learners. However, age affected performance on pattern‐based processes but not memory‐based processes like rote memorization of vocabulary and gender categorization of nontransparent nouns. This finding is interpreted in the context of proposals concerning the role of declarative and procedural memory in L2 learning.

Consequences of short-term language exposure in infancy on babbling.

Kuhl et al. [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 100, 9096–9101 (2003)] showed that the decline in the discrimination of non-native perceptual contrasts observed during development can be reversed with short-term exposure to a non-native language. In this poster, the question of whether short-term exposure also impacts the speech produced by infants is addressed. For this purpose, 9–10-month-old infants from monolingual English-speaking households were exposed to Spanish for a total of 5 h over 6 weeks (12 25-min sessions). At the end of this exposure, babbling data were collected from the infants in two sessions with (a) an English-speaking parent and (b) a Spanish-speaking research assistant. In this experiment, adult listeners were tested in their ability to identify the babbling produced by these infants as English or Spanish. Canonical syllables and multi-syllabic utterances from these sessions were played to adult native speakers of English and Spanish, who identified the tokens as English or Spanish using a forced-choice paradigm. Results will be discussed in the context of the literature on short-term exposure as well as the effects of social interactions on language acquisition.

Referencing in a Second Language: Korean EFL Learners' Cohesive Use of References in Written Narrative Discourse

This study examined Korean English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' ability to establish textual cohesion in English through appropriate selection of reference forms and reference management strategies in their written narrative discourse. It employed both quantitative and qualitative analysis to explore how the language-specific reference choices and strategies in their first language (L1) may be evident in their second language (L2) discourse production. Participants were Korean adult EFL learners and American native English speakers (NES) in college. Findings from the quantitative analysis of the written narratives showed that the specifically Korean referential strategies of heavily relying on nominals were not evident in the Korean EFL learners' English narrative discourse. However, a closer look at the data with a qualitative approach revealed that the Korean EFL learners' referential strategies were very different from those of the NES. More specifically, the qualitative analysis revealed that, unlike the NES who alternated the use of noun phrases and pronouns strategically to achieve certain discourse effects, the Korean participants did not display such sophisticated use of reference forms within an extended L2 discourse. The findings are attributed to the L1-specific reference management conventions and to the L2 learners' lack of practice and competence in referential strategies at the discourse level.

Children discover the spectral skeletons in their native language before the amplitude envelopes.

Much of speech perception research has focused on brief spectro-temporal properties in the signal, but some studies have shown that adults can recover linguistic form when those properties are absent. In this experiment, 7-year-old English-speaking children demonstrated adultlike abilities to understand speech when only sine waves (SWs) replicating the 3 lowest resonances of the vocal tract were presented, but they failed to demonstrate comparable abilities when noise bands amplitude-modulated with envelopes derived from the same signals were presented. In contrast, adults who were not native English speakers but who were competent 2nd-language learners were worse at understanding both kinds of stimuli than native English-speaking adults. Results showed that children learn to extract linguistic form from signals that preserve some spectral structure, even if degraded, before they learn to do so for signals that preserve only amplitude structure. The authors hypothesize that children's early sensitivity to global spectral structure reflects the role that it may play in language learning.

Plasticity in the Adult Human Auditory Brainstem following Short-term Linguistic Training

Peripheral and central structures along the auditory pathway contribute to speech processing and learning. However, because speech requires the use of functionally and acoustically complex sounds which necessitates high sensory and cognitive demands, long-term exposure and experience using these sounds is often attributed to the neocortex with little emphasis placed on subcortical structures. The present study examines changes in the auditory brainstem, specifically the frequency following response (FFR), as native English-speaking adults learn to incorporate foreign speech sounds (lexical pitch patterns) in word identification. The FFR presumably originates from the auditory midbrain and can be elicited preattentively. We measured FFRs to the trained pitch patterns before and after training. Measures of pitch tracking were then derived from the FFR signals. We found increased accuracy in pitch tracking after training, including a decrease in the number of pitch-tracking errors and a refinement in the energy devoted to encoding pitch. Most interestingly, this change in pitch-tracking accuracy only occurred in the most acoustically complex pitch contour (dipping contour), which is also the least familiar to our English-speaking subjects. These results not only demonstrate the contribution of the brainstem in language learning and its plasticity in adulthood but also demonstrate the specificity of this contribution (i.e., changes in encoding only occur in specific, least familiar stimuli, not all stimuli). Our findings complement existing data showing cortical changes after second-language learning, and are consistent with models suggesting that brainstem changes resulting from perceptual learning are most apparent when acuity in encoding is most needed.

Telling good stories in different languages

There are many ways to tell a story, but whether a story is good or bad depends on whether or not the listener/reader can comprehend all that the speaker/writer wants to convey in his or her story. This study examines the characteristics of stories that native speakers of given languages consider to be good. Forty English-Japanese bilingual children ages six to twelve were asked to narrate a picture storybook in both English and Japanese. Also involved in the study were 16 adult native Japanese speakers and 16 adult native English speakers who evaluated the stories produced by the bilingual children. An analysis of narratives receiving high ratings from evaluators shows that most stories considered good in English or Japanese should be lengthy stories with a large and varied vocabulary, and should be told in the past tense. In addition to those similarities in effective stories told in the two languages, we also found dissimilarities between “good” stories in English and “good” stories in Japanese. English evaluators felt that relating a series of events in chronological order is only one part of a good story. Providing evaluative comments (i.e., statements or words that tell the listener/reader what the narrator thinks about a person, place, thing, or event) is an indispensable part of telling good stories. So, in stories in English, aside from the standard expectation of a sequential series of events, providing the listener with emotional information is considered equally important. On the other hand, Japanese speakers accepted stories that emphasize a temporal sequence of action with less emphasis on nonsequential information, especially evaluative descriptions, and which effectively use passive forms and subject-referencing markers to enable a clear chronological sequence of events. Because the standards of what makes a good story may differ in the home and school languages/cultures, and because of the complex nature of such differences as shown in this study, it seems advisable that schools intervene and support the development of bilingual children’s skills in the use of the mainstream culture’s standards.

Morphologically complex words in L1 and L2 processing: Evidence from masked priming experiments in English

This paper reports results from masked priming experiments investigating regular past-tense forms and deadjectival nominalizations with -ness and -ity in adult native (L1) speakers of English and in different groups of advanced adult second language (L2) learners of English. While the L1 group showed efficient priming for both inflected and derived word forms, the L2 learners demonstrated repetition-priming effects (like the L1 group), but no priming for inflected and reduced priming for derived word forms. We argue that this striking contrast between L1 and L2 processing supports the view that adult L2 learners rely more on lexical storage and less on combinatorial processing of morphologically complex words than native speakers.

The Role of Structural Position in L2 Phonological Acquisition: Evidence from English Learners of Spanish as L2

Abstract: In this pilot study, the speech of 12 adult native speakers of English with intermediate to intermediate‐high proficiency in Spanish as a second language (L2) was analyzed to determine whether L2 learners rely on distributional information in the process of L2 speech learning and if so, if similar or dissimilar distributional patterns of sounds are more easily acquired. The parameter for (dis)similarity was set around the notion of structural position in combination with native language (L1) and L2 phonemic inventories. The results show that the subjects were consistently more successful in producing the phonemes with overlapping distributional patterns in L1 and L2 than phonemes whose distribution differed in L1 and L2 as well as novel L2 contrasts.

ERP measures of partial semantic knowledge: Left temporal indices of skill differences and lexical quality

This study examines the sensitivity of early event-related potentials (ERPs) to degrees of word semantic knowledge. Participants with strong, average, or weak vocabulary skills made speeded lexical decisions to letter strings. To represent the full spectrum of word knowledge among adult native-English speakers, we used rare words that were orthographically matched with more familiar words and with pseudowords. Since the lexical decision could not reliably be made on the basis of word form, subjects were obliged to use semantic knowledge to perform the task. A d′ analysis suggested that high-skilled subjects adopted a more conservative strategy in response to rare versus more familiar words. Moreover, the high-skilled participants showed a trend towards an enhanced “N2c” to rare words, and a similar posterior temporal effect reached significance ∼650 ms. Generators for these effects were localized to left temporal cortex. We discuss implications of these results for word learning and for theories of lexical semantic access.

The first years in an L2-speaking environment: A comparison of Japanese children and adults learning American English

This study examined Japanese speakers' learning of American English during their first years of immersion in the United States (U.S.). Native Japanese-speaking (NJ) children (n=16) and adults (n=16) were tested on two occasions, averaging 0.5 (T1) and 1.6 years (T2) after arrival in the U.S. Age-matched groups of native English-speaking children (n=16) and adults (n=16) also participated. The NJ adults' scores for segmental perception and production were higher than the NJ children's at T1. The NJ children's foreign accent scores and pronunciation of English fricatives improved significantly between T1 and T2, whereas the NJ adults' scores did not. These findings suggest that adults may have an advantage over children initially but that children may improve in production more quickly than adults when immersed in an L2-speaking environment.

PHONOLOGICAL MEMORY PREDICTS SECOND LANGUAGE ORAL FLUENCY GAINS IN ADULTS

This study investigated the relationship between phonological memory and second language (L2) fluency gains in native English-speaking adults learning Spanish in two learning contexts: at their home university or abroad in an immersion context. Phonological memory (operationalized as serial nonword recognition) and Spanish oral fluency (temporal/hesitation phenomena) were assessed at two times, 13 weeks apart. Hierarchical regressions showed that, after the variance attributable to learning context was partialed out, initial serial nonword recognition performance was significantly associated with L2 oral fluency development, explaining 4.5–9.7% of unique variance. These results indicate that phonological memory makes an important contribution to L2 learning in terms of oral fluency development. Furthermore, these results from an adult population extend conclusions from previous studies that have claimed a role for phonological memory primarily in vocabulary development in younger populations.This study was conducted by the first author as part of her doctoral dissertation research, under the supervision of Norman Segalowitz. The research was funded by a grant to Barbara Freed from the Council for International Educational Exchange (New York), in part by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to Norman Segalowitz, in part from the Dean's Office, Faculty of Arts and Science at Concordia University to Norman Segalowitz, and in part from the Fonds de recherche en santé du Québec to Irena O'Brien. The authors wish to thank Manuel Díaz-Campos, Barbara Lafford, and Nicole Lazar, who were members of the research team involved in the larger project of which this study is one part. The authors would also like to thank Peter Scherzer, Leif French, and two anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. Finally, the authors would like to thank Conchita Bueno, Hazel Casas, Elizabeth Gatbonton, Randall Halter, Guy Lacroix, Anne-Marie Linnen, Magnolia Negrete, Laura Renteria-Díaz, Marlene Taube-Schiff, and Naomi Yamasaki, who helped during various phases of this project.

Learning pitch patterns in lexical identification by native English-speaking adults

The current study investigates the learning of nonnative suprasegmental patterns for word identification. Native English-speaking adults learned to use suprasegmentals (pitch patterns) to identify a vocabulary of six English pseudosyllables superimposed with three pitch patterns (18 words). Successful learning of the vocabulary necessarily entailed learning to use pitch patterns in words. Two major facets of sound-to-word learning were investigated: could native speakers of a nontone language learn the use of pitch patterns for lexical identification, and what effect did more basic auditory ability have on learning success. We found that all subjects improved to a certain degree, although large individual differences were observed. Learning success was found to be associated with the learners' ability to perceive pitch patterns in a nonlexical context and their previous musical experience. These results suggest the importance of a phonetic–phonological–lexical continuity in adult nonnative word learning, including phonological awareness and general auditory ability.

Non-native speech rhythm: A large-scale study of English pronunciation by Korean learners

Kim, Jong-mi, Suzanne Flynn, and Mira Oh. 2007. Non-native speech rhythm: A large-scale study of English pronunciation by Korean learners. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 13.2. 219-250. To what degree do the rhythmical properties of the native language emerge in the acquisition of a second language? Specifically, would non-native English—a stress-timed language— evidence effects of Korean—a so-called syllable-timed language? In this study, we analyze the speech data from 111 adult native speakers of Korean at an intermediate level learning English as a second language, in comparison with those from 29 adult native speakers of English. The study involves a preand posttest analysis of speech elicited in a reading task. We focus on the acoustic quantification of the vowel duration in relation to F0 trace and formant location in all elicited speech that involve 1) stress alternation (‘John was ‘sick of ‘Fred and ‘Sandy), 2) stress assignment (a ‘blackboard vs. a black ‘board), and 3) stress reduction (add vs. addition). The results indicate that the speech rhythm contrast is manifested in both stress alternation and stress reduction in terms of the pair-wise variability of the vowel duration between the two groups of native and learner speech of English. These results are further supported by independent evidence from the developmental aspect in English pronunciation and perception. (Kangwon National University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Chonnam National University)

Comparing a nativist and emergentist approach to the initial stage of SLA: An investigation of Japanese scrambling

The aim of the present study was to evaluate how successfully the UG (nativist) and connectionist (emergentist) frameworks can account for early L2 development, focusing on the acquisition of Japanese word order by adult native English speakers. We conducted a laboratory-based language learning study in which participants were exposed to a semi-artificial language based on Japanese, and we measured incidental learning of scrambling (and head-direction). Although there was some evidence of learning a generalised notion of “free word order”, there was no evidence for accessing the relevant UG parameterised properties. The lack of clustering effects expected as a result of acquiring scrambling led us to conclude that adult SLA is not guided by UG. On the other hand, a connectionist simple recurrent network that was trained and tested on the same structures provided a close approximation to the participants’ data, suggesting that they had acquired a good sense of the statistical structure of the input. Nevertheless, we argue that such a model cannot provide a complete account of learning the word order phenomena that we investigated without being supplemented by symbolic rule-learning mechanisms.

Processing wh-dependencies in a second language: a cross-modal priming study

This study investigates the real-time processing of wh-dependencies by advanced Greek-speaking learners of English using a cross-modal picture priming task. Participants were asked to respond to different types of picture target presented either at structurally defined gap positions, or at pre-gap control positions, while listening to sentences containing indirect-object relative clauses. Our results indicate that the learners processed the experimental sentences differently from both adult native speakers of English and monolingual English-speaking children. Contrary to what has been found for native speakers, the learners' response pattern was not influenced by individual working memory differences. Adult second language learners differed from native speakers with a relatively high reading or listening span in that they did not show any evidence of structurally based antecedent reactivation at the point of the indirect object gap. They also differed from low-span native speakers, however, in that they showed evidence of maintained antecedent activation during the processing of the experimental sentences. Whereas the localized priming effect observed in the high-span controls is indicative of trace-based antecedent reactivation in native sentence processing, the results from the Greek-speaking learners support the hypothesis that the mental representations built during non-native language processing lack abstract linguistic structure such as movement traces.

Patient preferences for medical doctors

A sample of 395 white, native English-speaking adults were asked to rate eight medical doctors (general practitioners (GPs) and consultants), representing all permutations of the following three attributes: age (<35 versus >50), training location (UK versus Asia) and gender. Approximately half the participants were allocated in a group with a condition involving an intimate type of health problem and the rest in a group with a non-intimate condition. Participants showed a preference for UK-trained doctors, although it was unclear whether this was due to the homogeneous composition of the sample. There were significant two-way interactions involving patient gender and doctor gender in the first case and doctor age and training location in the second. Additional interactions were specific to either the general practitioner or the consultant ratings. Overall, there were more significant effects in general practitioner ratings, suggesting that people de-emphasize their preferences when selecting consultants.

The Acquisition of Spatial Constructions in American Sign Language and English

Spatial relations in American Sign Language (ASL) are often signed from the perspective of the signer and so involve a shift in perspective and mental rotation. This study examined developing knowledge of language used to refer to the spatial relations front, behind, left, right, towards, away, above, and below by children learning ASL and English. Because ASL is a classifier language in which noun referents are placed into groups, each spatial relation also appeared with person, animal, and vehicle classifiers. Twenty-three children and adults who learned ASL before the age of 5 years and 23 native English-speaking adults and children participated. Both language groups participated in a comprehension task in which they chose which of 2 pictures depicted a signed or spoken relation. Results showed that children learning ASL acquired the constructions for spatial relations that typically involve perspective shifts and mental rotation later than constructions that do not involve these abilities and later than English-speaking children. Children learning ASL did not differ from English-speaking children in learning constructions that did not involve these abilities. Results also suggest that users of ASL initially comprehend spatial relations more accurately with person and animal classifiers than with the classifier for vehicles. The results are relevant to understanding the acquisition of spatial relations in ASL.

LEARNING SECOND LANGUAGE SUPRASEGMENTALS: Effect of L2 Experience on Prosody and Fluency Characteristics of L2 Speech

This study examines effects of short, medium, and extended second language (L2) experience (3 months, 3 years, and 10 years of United States residence, respectively) on the production of five suprasegmentals (stress timing, peak alignment, speech rate, pause frequency, and pause duration) in six English declarative sentences by 30 adult Korean learners of English and 10 adult native English speakers. Acoustic analyses and listener judgments were used to determine how accurately the suprasegmentals were produced and to what extent they contributed to foreign accent. Results revealed that amount of experience influenced the production of one suprasegmental (stress timing), whereas adult learners' age at the time of first extensive exposure to the L2 (indexed as age of arrival in the United States) influenced the production of others (speech rate, pause frequency, pause duration). Moreover, it was found that suprasegmentals contributed to foreign accent at all levels of experience and that some suprasegmentals (pause duration, speech rate) were more likely to do so than others (stress timing, peak alignment). Overall, results revealed similarities between L2 segmental and suprasegmental learning.This research was partially supported by research grants from the University of Illinois and Brigham Young University. Many thanks are extended to Youngju Hong for her help in testing the Korean participants and to Molly Mack and James E. Flege for their advice throughout this research project. The authors gratefully acknowledge Randall Halter, Elizabeth Gatbonton, and five anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper as well as Randall Halter for his invaluable statistical assistance.