Dutch Listeners Research Articles

Emotional prosodic expression of children with hearing aids or cochlear implants, rated by adults and peers

Objective The emotional prosodic expression potential of children with cochlear implants is poorer than that of normal hearing peers. Though little is known about children with hearing aids. Design This study was set up to generate a better understanding of hearing aid users’ prosodic identifiability compared to cochlear implant users and peers without hearing loss. Study sample Emotional utterances of 75 Dutch speaking children (7 – 12 yr; 26 CHA, 23 CCI, 26 CNH) were gathered. Utterances were evaluated blindly by normal hearing Dutch listeners: 22 children and 9 adults (17 − 24 yrs) for resemblance to three emotions (happiness, sadness, anger). Results Emotions were more accurately recognised by adults than by children. Both children and adults correctly judged happiness significantly less often in CCI than in CNH. Also, adult listeners confused happiness with sadness more often in both CHA and CCI than in CNH. Conclusions Children and adults are able to accurately evaluate the emotions expressed through speech by children with varying degrees of hearing loss, ranging from mild to profound, nearly as well as they can with typically hearing children. The favourable outcomes emphasise the resilience of children with hearing loss in developing effective emotional communication skills.

Lexical recognition processes in L2-dominant bilingualism

To comprehend speech, listeners must resolve competition between potential candidate words. In second-language (L2) listening such competition may be inflated by spurious activation; the onsets of “reggae” and “legacy” may both activate “leg” for Japanese listeners, or the rhymes of “adapt” and “adept” may activate “apt” for Dutch listeners, while only one in each pair triggers competition for L1 listeners. Using eyetracking with L2-dominant bilingual emigrants, we directly compared within-language L1 and L2 lexical activation and competition in the same individuals. For these listeners, activation patterns did not differ across languages. Unexpectedly, however, we observed onset competition in both languages but rhyme competition in the L2 only (although the same stimuli elicited rhyme competition for control listeners in both languages). This suggests that L1 rhyme competition may disappear after long-time immersion in an L2 environment.

Listening like a native: Unprofitable procedures need to be discarded

AbstractTwo languages, historically related, both have lexical stress, with word stress distinctions signalled in each by the same suprasegmental cues. In each language, words can overlap segmentally but differ in placement of primary versus secondary stress (OCtopus, ocTOber). However, secondary stress occurs more often in the words of one language, Dutch, than in the other, English, and largely because of this, Dutch listeners find it helpful to use suprasegmental stress cues when recognising spoken words. English listeners, in contrast, do not; indeed, Dutch listeners can outdo English listeners in correctly identifying the source words of English word fragments (oc-). Here we show that Dutch-native listeners who reside in an English-speaking environment and have become dominant in English, though still maintaining their use of these stress cues in their L1, ignore the same cues in their L2 English, performing as poorly in the fragment identification task as the L1 English do.

Asymmetries in vowel perception align with focalization patterns, not peripherality: Acoustic evidence from Canadian French /e/ and /Ø/

The question of whether asymmetries in vowel perception stem from peripherality (location in F1/F2 vowel space) or focalization patterns (formant convergence) was examined. Prior studies with Danish and Dutch listeners reported asymmetric perception of /e-Ø/ such that discriminating a change from /e/ to /Ø/ was easier compared to the reverse direction (/Ø/ to /e/). Acoustic analyses of test stimuli suggest that focalization patterns predict this asymmetry whereas a peripherality-based prediction fails. Although this interpretation is compelling, it is based on analyses of several vowel tokens produced by a single talker. To confirm the reliability of these patterns we obtained acoustic and electromagnetic articulography recordings of Canadian French /e/ and /Ø/ productions from a broader sample of talkers (n = 20): 400 vowels/10 productions per vowel. Acoustic analyses revealed a robust pattern for all talkers: F1 and F2 (also F1 and F3) were spectrally closer for /Ø/ compared to /e/, and /e/ was also more peripheral than /Ø/ in F1/F2 space. These data align with the earlier (single-talker) analyses and confirm that /Ø/ is a more focal vowel than /e/. We will also discuss articulatory analyses of these French vowel productions that focus on how vocal-tract constrictions relate to focalization and peripherality.

The influence of musical abilities on the processing of second language prosody: An eye-tracking study

The perception of speech prosody in a second language (L2) remains challenging even for proficient L2 users. Eye-tracking evidence indicates that Dutch listeners show difficulty in the processing of pitch accents that signal a contrast (i.e., contrastive focus) in English, whereas native English listeners use this cue in perception to anticipate upcoming information [Ge et al., Appl. Psycholinguist. 42, 1057–1088 (2021)]. Prosody perception abilities in foreign languages have been associated with individual differences in musical abilities [Jansen et al., Speech Prosody, 713–717 (2022)]. We investigated whether musical abilities influenced the processing of prosodic cues by 45 Dutch adult L2 English users, using a visual-world eye-tracking paradigm. Participants listened to sentences with pitch accent cues to contrastive focus on different words, while viewing pictures showing objects and characters mentioned. We investigated to what extent participants showed anticipatory fixations on the image reflecting the alternative of the contrast, after hearing the accented word. We measured participants’ music perception abilities with a standardised test and analysed its influence on anticipatory fixations. Initial analyses indicate that individuals with stronger musical abilities show more anticipation. This suggests that having stronger perceptual resources underlying both music and speech processing [Patel, Front. Psychol. 2, 142 (2011)] may benefit L2 prosody perception.

Dutch students’ evaluations of EMI and L1MOI lectures: The role of non-native pronunciation

In a within-subjects experiment, 119 Dutch listeners evaluated authentic English and Dutch lecture fragments recorded by the same Dutch lecturer. For each fragment, they answered multiple-choice comprehension questions and rated the lecturer on comprehensibility, attitudinal measures (status, competence, likeability and dynamism), and perceived teaching quality. Findings showed that actual comprehension was not different for the English and the Dutch fragments. The lecturer was evaluated less positively in the English fragments than in the Dutch fragments in terms of status, competence, dynamism and teaching quality, but not likeability. A mediation analysis showed that language choice had no direct effect but only indirect effects on perceived teaching quality through comprehensibility and non-native pronunciation. Our study shows that the use of EMI instead of L1MOI would not appear to result in reduced comprehension but does result in more negative perceptions of the lecturer, and that non-native pronunciation contributes to these perceptions.

Speaker discrimination as a function of vowel realization: does focus affect perception?

The acoustic-phonetic characteristics of speech sounds are influenced by their linguistic position in the syllable or sentence. Because of acoustic-phonetic differences between different speech sounds, sounds vary in the amount of speaker information they contain. However, do spectral and durational differences between realizations of the same sound that were sampled from different linguistic positions also impact speaker information? We investigated speaker discrimination in [−focus] versus [+focus] word realizations. Twenty-one Dutch listeners participated in a same-different task, using stimuli varying in focus, vowel ([aː], [u]), and word context ([ɦ_k], [v_t]), spoken by 11 different speakers. Results showed that an effect of focus on speaker-dependent information was present, but limited to words containing [u]. Moreover, performance on [u] words was influenced by (interactions of) word context and trial type (same-vs. different-speaker). Context-dependent changes in a speech sound’s acoustics may affect its speaker-dependent information, albeit under specific conditions only.

Dutch listeners’ responses to Dutch, British and American English accents in three contexts.

The aim of this study was to assess Dutch listeners’ responses to native-accented Englishes compared with Dutch-accented English in terms of speech understandability and speech evaluations in three professional communication contexts. In a matched-guise experiment Dutch listeners (N=392) responded to a Dutch English, a standard British and American accent in terms of speech understandability (intelligibility, comprehensibility, interpretability) and speaker evaluations (status, affect, dynamism). Dutch listeners evaluated these accents in three communication contexts: Lecture, Audio Tour, Job Pitch. Only context affected speech understandability: comprehensibility and interpretability were higher for the Lecture compared to the Audio Tour and the Job Pitch. Accent only negatively affected status evaluations for Dutch-accented English. Context only evoked more affect in the Audio Tour and the Lecture than in the Job Pitch. Our main conclusion is that Dutch-accented English negatively impacts status, but not understanding, affect and dynamism. Context impacts understanding and affect.

The Lombard intelligibility benefit of native and non-native speech for native and non-native listeners

Speech produced in noise (Lombard speech) is more intelligible than speech produced in quiet (plain speech). Previous research on the Lombard intelligibility benefit focused almost entirely on how native speakers produce and perceive Lombard speech. In this study, we investigate the size of the Lombard intelligibility benefit of both native (American-English) and non-native (native Dutch) English for native and non-native listeners (Dutch and Spanish). We used a glimpsing metric to measure the energetic masking potential of speech, which predicted that both native and non-native Lombard speech could withstand greater amounts of masking to a similar extent, compared to plain speech. In an intelligibility experiment, native English, Spanish, and Dutch listeners listened to the same words, mixed with noise. While the non-native listeners appeared to benefit more from Lombard speech than the native listeners did, each listener group experienced a similar benefit for native and non-native Lombard speech. Energetic masking, as captured by the glimpsing metric, only accounted for part of the Lombard benefit, indicating that the Lombard intelligibility benefit does not only result from a shift in spectral distribution. Despite subtle native language influences on non-native Lombard speech, both native and non-native speech provides a Lombard benefit.

How expertise and language familiarity influence perception of speech of people with Parkinson’s disease

ABSTRACT Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive neurological disorder characterized by several motor and non-motor manifestations. PD frequently leads to hypokinetic dysarthria, which affects speech production and often has a detrimental impact on everyday communication. Among the typical manifestations of hypokinetic dysarthria, speech and language therapists (SLTs) identify prosody as the most affected cluster of speech characteristics. However, less is known about how untrained listeners perceive PD speech and how affected prosody influences their assessments of speech. This study explores the perception of sentence type intonation and healthiness of PD speech by listeners with different levels of familiarity with speech disorders in Dutch. We investigated assessments and classification accuracy differences between Dutch-speaking SLTs (n = 18) and Dutch/non-Dutch speaking untrained listeners (n = 27 and n = 124, respectively). We collected speech data from 30 Dutch speakers diagnosed with PD and 30 Dutch healthy controls. The stimuli set consisted of short phrases from spontaneous and read speech and of phrases produced with different sentence type intonation. Listeners participated in an online experiment targeting classification of sentence type intonation and perceived healthiness of speech. Results indicate that both familiarity with speech disorders and with speakers’ language are significant and have different effects depending on the task type, as different listener groups demonstrate different classification accuracy. There is evidence that untrained Dutch listeners classify PD speech as unhealthy more accurately than both trained Dutch and untrained non-Dutch listeners, while trained Dutch listeners outperform the other two groups in sentence type classification.

Dutch listeners’ evaluations of degrees of German-accented Dutch

Abstract The effect of non-native accented speech on speaker and message evaluations is well-researched for English, but accent-induced effects in languages other than English have been underexplored. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the effects of a weak and strong German accent in Netherlandic Dutch on Dutch listeners’ perceptions of and attitudes towards the speaker and the message (in terms of, for instance, comprehensibility, persuasiveness, status, likeability and dynamism). In an experiment, 188 listeners evaluated fragments recorded in Standard Dutch guises, weakly German-accented guises and strongly German-accented guises. Findings showed that strongly German-accented guises were evaluated as less comprehensible and attracted less positive evaluations than weakly German-accented guises, whereas guises with weaker German accents were evaluated similarly to Standard Dutch guises. Comprehensibility mediated the effect of accent strength on speaker evaluations, which, in turn, mediated the effect of accent strength on persuasiveness. Thus, our findings highlight the importance of comprehensibility in determining speaker evaluations.

First language effects on the identification and evaluation of second language speech

Abstract In Belgium, Dutch as spoken by Francophone learners is relatively frequent in political, commercial or educational contexts. While the characteristics of this second language (L2) variety have been studied extensively, there is to date no systematic report of how it is evaluated by either native speakers of Dutch or non-natives. Previous studies conducted in other language contexts have found that non-natives tend to be very critical towards L2 accents similar to their own. The main goal of the present study is to investigate the extent to which the listener’s first language (L1) impacts ratings of the fluency, accentedness and comprehensibility of L2 Dutch as spoken by Francophone learners and how it impacts the identification of the speakers’ L1. Specifically, we compared ratings by three groups of listeners: Francophone learners of Dutch, native speakers of Belgian Dutch and native speakers of Netherlandic Dutch. Moreover, the extent to which three additional cognitive and environmental factors influence L2 ratings is examined: listeners’ familiarity with the L2 variety, their language aptitude and language proficiency. The results show that the majority of native and non-native listeners recognized the speakers’ L1 (French). Non-native listeners perceived L2 speech as less fluent, less comprehensible and more accented than natives did, which corroborates the previously reported critical attitudes towards a shared L2 accent. Moreover, subtle differences in accent and fluency ratings were found between the Netherlandic Dutch and the Belgian Dutch listeners. No clear effects of other cognitive and environmental factors appeared in the ratings.

Contrast and Conflict in Dutch Vowels.

The nature of phonological representations has been extensively studied in phonology and psycholinguistics. While full specification is still the norm in psycholinguistic research, underspecified representations may better account for perceptual asymmetries. In this paper, we report on a mismatch negativity (MMN) study with Dutch listeners who took part in a passive oddball paradigm to investigate when the brain notices the difference between expected and observed vowels. In particular, we tested neural discrimination (indicating perceptual discrimination) of the tense mid vowel pairs /o/-/ø/ (place contrast), /e/-/ø/ (labiality or rounding contrast), and /e/-/o/ (place and labiality contrast). Our results show (a) a perceptual asymmetry for place in the /o/-/ø/ contrast, supporting underspecification of [CORONAL] and replicating earlier results for German, and (b) a perceptual asymmetry for labiality for the /e/-/ø/ contrast, which was not reported in the German study. A labial deviant [ø] (standard /e/) yielded a larger MMN than a deviant [e] (standard /ø/). No asymmetry was found for the two-feature contrast. This study partly replicates a similar MMN study on German vowels, and partly presents new findings indicating cross-linguistic differences. Although the vowel inventory of Dutch and German is to a large extent comparable, their (morpho)phonological systems are different, which is reflected in processing.

Dutch listeners' perception of English lexical stress: A cue-weighting approach.

We investigate whether acoustic cue weightings are transferred from the native language to the second language [research question 1 (RQ1)], how cue weightings change with increasing second-language proficiency (RQ2), and whether individual cues are used independently or together in the second language (RQ3). Vowel reduction is a strong cue to lexical stress in English but not Dutch. Native English listeners and Dutch second-language learners of English completed a cue-weighting stress perception experiment. Participants heard sentence-final pitch-accented auditory stimuli and identified them as DEsert (initial stress) or deSSERT (final stress). The stimuli were manipulated in seven steps from initial to final stress, manipulating two dimensions at a time: vowel quality and pitch, vowel quality and duration, and pitch and duration (other dimensions neutralized). Dutch listeners relied less on vowel quality and more on pitch than English listeners, with Dutch listeners' sensitivity to vowel quality increasing with English proficiency but their sensitivity to pitch not varying with proficiency; Dutch listeners evidenced similar or weaker reliance on duration than did English listeners, and their sensitivity to duration increased with proficiency; and Dutch listeners' use of pitch and duration were positively related. These results provide general support for a cue-based transfer approach to the perception of lexical stress.

The effects of lecturers’ non-native accent strength in English on intelligibility and attitudinal evaluations by native and non-native English students

The rapid spread of English medium instruction (EMI) across the globe has led to a growing number of non-native lecturers teaching in English to student populations that are increasingly international. The aim of the present study was to investigate to what extent lecturers with slight or moderate Dutch accents or native British English accents are evaluated differently in terms of intelligibility, comprehensibility and attitudinal impressions by non-native and native English-speaking listeners. In an experiment, 189 Dutch listeners, 175 international non-native listeners and 158 native English listeners evaluated fragments recorded by moderately accented Dutch, slightly accented Dutch and native English speakers. Findings showed that the moderately non-native accented lecturers were evaluated more negatively than lecturers with slight or native accents by both Dutch and international non-native listeners, but not by native English listeners. This suggests that non-native listeners evaluate the accents of non-native lecturers according to native speaker pronunciation norms.

Dutch speech intelligibility in bilingual Turkish-Dutch children in Flanders

AbstractThis study examines the Dutch intelligibility of a group of monolingual Dutch and bilingual Turkish-Dutch preschool children in Flanders, as rated by native Dutch listeners and measured by a Dutch intelligibility test. The intelligibility of the bilingual children is compared to that of the monolingual Dutch children, in order to examine whether age and/or task effects are similar or different in the two groups. The results revealed that intelligibility was affected by age, but showed no significant interaction between age and group. However, we found a significant interaction between age and task: children’s intelligibility increased with age for a word production as well as a sentence production task, but much more so for the latter than for the former. We discuss the results in relation to the children’s developing phonological systems, the age of exposure to Dutch and the nature of the test.

The effect of intermittent noise on lexically-guided perceptual learning in native and non-native listening

There is ample evidence that both native and non-native listeners deal with speech variation by quickly tuning into a speaker and adjusting their phonetic categories according to the speaker’s ambiguous pronunciation. This process is called lexically-guided perceptual learning. Moreover, the presence of noise in the speech signal has previously been shown to change the word competition process by increasing the number of candidate words competing for recognition and slowing down the recognition process. Given that reliable lexical information should be available quickly to induce lexically-guided perceptual learning and that word recognition is slowed down in the presence of noise, and especially so for non-native listeners, the present study investigated whether noise interferes with lexically-guided perceptual learning in native and non-native listening. Native English and Dutch listeners were exposed to a story in English in clean speech or with stretches of noise. All the /l/ and /ɹ/ sounds in the story were replaced with an ambiguous sound half-way between /l/ and /ɹ/. Although noise altered the pattern of responses for the non-native listeners in a subsequent phonetic categorization task, both native and non-native listeners demonstrated lexically-guided perceptual learning in both clean and noisy listening conditions. We argue that the robustness of perceptual learning in the presence of intermittent noise for both native and non-native listeners is additional evidence for the remarkable flexibility of native and non-native perceptual systems even in adverse listening conditions.

Anticipating words during spoken discourse comprehension: A large-scale, pre-registered replication study using brain potentials

Numerous studies report brain potential evidence for the anticipation of specific words during language comprehension. In the most convincing demonstrations, highly predictable nouns exert an influence on processing even before they appear to a reader or listener, as indicated by the brain's neural response to a prenominal adjective or article when it mismatches the expectations about the upcoming noun. However, recent studies suggest that some well-known demonstrations of prediction may be hard to replicate. This could signal the use of data-contingent analysis, but might also mean that readers and listeners do not always use prediction-relevant information in the way that psycholinguistic theories typically suggest. To shed light on this issue, we performed a close replication of one of the best-cited ERP studies on word anticipation (Van Berkum, Brown, Zwitserlood, Kooijman & Hagoort, 2005; Experiment 1), in which participants listened to Dutch spoken mini-stories. In the original study, the marking of grammatical gender on pre-nominal adjectives (‘groot/grote’) elicited an early positivity when mismatching the gender of an unheard, highly predictable noun, compared to matching gender. The current pre-registered study involved that same manipulation, but used a novel set of materials twice the size of the original set, an increased sample size (N = 187), and Bayesian mixed-effects model analyses that better accounted for known sources of variance than the original. In our study, mismatching gender elicited more negative voltage than matching gender at posterior electrodes. However, this N400-like effect was small in size and lacked support from Bayes Factors. In contrast, we successfully replicated the original's noun effects. While our results yielded some support for prediction, they do not support the Van Berkum et al. effect and highlight the risks associated with commonly employed data-contingent analyses and small sample sizes. Our results also raise the question whether Dutch listeners reliably or consistently use adjectival inflection information to inform their noun predictions.

(Not so) Great Expectations: Listening to Foreign-Accented Speech Reduces the Brain's Anticipatory Processes.

This study examines the effect of foreign-accented speech on the predictive ability of our brain. Listeners actively anticipate upcoming linguistic information in the speech signal so as to facilitate and reduce processing load. However, it is unclear whether or not listeners also do this when they are exposed to speech from non-native speakers. In the present study, we exposed native Dutch listeners to sentences produced by native and non-native speakers while measuring their brain activity using electroencephalography. We found that listeners’ brain activity differed depending on whether they listened to native or non-native speech. However, participants’ overall performance as measured by word recall rate was unaffected. We discussed the results in relation to previous findings as well as the automaticity of anticipation.

The interplay of prosodic cues in the L2: How intonation, rhythm, and speech rate in speech by Spanish learners of Dutch contribute to L1 Dutch perceptions of accentedness and comprehensibility

This study investigates the relative contribution of L2 intonation, rhythm, and speech rate to L1 perceptions of accentedness and comprehensibility. The intonation, rhythm, and speech rate of an L1 speaker of Dutch was transferred onto the segmental string of four Spanish learners of Dutch, resulting in eight conditions that reflect all possible combinations of these prosodic cues. Our results show that improving the prosody of L2 speakers positively affects L1 perceptions of L2 speech, but not to the same extent for both measures: Concerning accentedness, Dutch listeners were influenced by intonation and speech rate transfer, but not by rhythm transfer. No interactions were found between prosodic cues. Comprehensibility ratings were also affected by intonation and speech rate, but for this measure, the effects were mediated by interactions between the prosodic features. Our study reaffirms the importance of differentiating between different aspects of perception and provides insight into those features that are most likely to affect each L1 perception type.