Phonological Knowledge Research Articles

Teachers’ perceptions of letter learning among adults: The case of basic literacy education in Swedish for immigrants

This article sets out to examine teacher perceptions of letter learning in literacy programmes for L2-adults with limited earlier schooling, as demonstrated in their teaching. The theoretical frame is taken from New Literacy Studies, with literacy perceived as socially shared and organised. The study draws on occasions during lesson observations where teachers addressed the issue of coding and decoding of letters. Findings suggest that these teachers follow patterns that build on assumptions and traditions with roots in the teaching of L1 children and use the material that they have at hand. The teachers’ prosodic knowledge in relation to letters and spelling was insufficient. We argue that when teachers are not aware of the phonetic and phonological challenges facing adult L2 learners, they may not give students enough support in their development of early literacy skills. Although explicit letter teaching represents only a small part of overall teaching, if teachers miss out on phonetic and phonological knowledge, they may not be able to identify difficulties for students and may even create unnecessary stumbling blocks for them. We conclude that there is a strong need for the development of basic literacy education for L2-adults to include both teacher knowledge and teaching aids.

Latinx bilinguals using dual-language books to develop biliteracy

ABSTRACT With much focus on English development in United States schools and research, less is known about how bilinguals develop literacy in their home languages without sustained formal instruction. This qualitative study of reading strategies addressed that gap. It examined how young bilinguals used English literacy knowledge gained through formal instruction to develop biliteracy, specifically literacy skills in their home language of Spanish. Five third- and fifth-grade Spanish-English bilinguals read three dual-language books and engaged in two verbal protocols. Analysis of student interviews, running records, verbal protocols, and video recordings of reading sessions found that students used English phonological knowledge to support decoding. To read the Spanish text, they also relied on memory of and direct references to the book’s English text along with their Spanish oral language knowledge. Findings provide evidence of students leveraging oral and written linguistic knowledge across the Continua of Biliteracy to support their biliteracy development. Implications are discussed for bilingual reading development and instruction.

Visual phonemic knowledge and audiovisual speech-in-noise perception in school-age children

Our mental representations of speech sounds include information about the visible articulatory gestures that accompany different speech sounds. We call this visual phonemic knowledge. This study examined development of school-age children’s visual phonemic knowledge and their ability to use visual phonemic knowledge to supplement audiovisual speech processing. Sixty-two children (5–16 years) and 18 adults (19–35 years) completed auditory-only, visual-only, and audiovisual tests of consonant-vowel syllable repetition. Auditory-only and audiovisual conditions were presented in steady-state, speech-spectrum noise at individually set SNRs. Consonant confusions were analyzed to define visemes (clusters of phonemes that are visually confusable with one another but visually distinct from other phonemes) evident in adults’ responses to visual-only consonants and to compute the proportion of errors in each participant and modality that were within adults' visemes. Children were less accurate than adults at visual-only consonant identification. However, children as young as 5 years of age demonstrated some visual phonemic knowledge. Comparison of error patterns across conditions indicated that children used visual phonemic knowledge during audiovisual speech-in-noise recognition. Details regarding the order of acquisition of viseme will be discussed.

Production benefits recall of novel words with frequent, but not infrequent sound patterns

The production effect is influenced by various factors, including cognitive and linguistic-related variables. Previous studies found that the production effect varies when stimuli have native versus non-native speech sounds, but to date, no studies have investigated whether the effect is also modulated by the frequency of sound patterns within a language. Adults were taught novel words in two training conditions: Produced or Heard. These items were comprised of English sound patterns that varied in frequency. Participants trained on frequent English patterns recalled more Produced than Heard items. In contrast, participants trained on infrequent English patterns showed no difference in recall rates between conditions. The strength and direction of the production effect is modulated not only by native versus non-native speech sounds, but can also vary depending on the frequency of the sound patterns within a speaker’s native language. Thus, the production effect is linked to previously established, long-term phonological knowledge.

The Application of Phonological Knowledge in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language

With the improvement of China's comprehensive national power, the learning of Chinese has become a hot trend at home and abroad, and the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language has also become popular. As the foundation of teaching Chinese as a foreign language, the explanation of phonetics knowledge is of great significance. However, some Chinese learners who study in China still have the problem of "foreign emphasis" in the process of more in-depth learning. Based on this, this paper focuses on the problems related to the application of phonological knowledge in teaching Chinese as a foreign language, and puts forward suggestions.

Formalising phonological perception: The role of voicing assimilation in consonant cluster perception in Emilian dialects

Speech perception is influenced by language-specific phonological knowledge. While phonotactics has long been established to play a role, the study of how phonological alternations influence perception is still in its infancy. In this paper, we make a case for the latter by investigating the role of regressive voicing assimilation (RVA) in the perception of obstruent clusters in Emilian dialects of Italian. We provide empirical evidence from a phoneme-detection task, in which Emilian listeners reported to have heard [b] significantly more often in stimuli with a /p/ before a voiced obstruent (RVA context) than before a vowel (non-RVA context). Our experimental findings add to recent work on the influence of phonology on speech perception. In addition, we provide an explicit formalisation, which bolsters the need for a rigid distinction between phonetic, surface and underlying representation, and an explicit mapping between all three, both in the process of speech production and comprehension.

Phonetically incomplete neutralisation can be phonologically complete: evidence from Huai’an Mandarin

AbstractThe phenomenon of incomplete neutralisation describes a situation where a putative case of categorical phonological neutralisation is observed to be phonetically non-neutralising. This has been argued to be a problem for phonological theories that employ categorical features. Here, we use two distinct feeding orders of tone sandhi processes from Huai’an Mandarin to show that incomplete phonetic neutralisation is compatible with categorical phonological phenomena. Therefore, incomplete phonetic neutralisation does not automatically inform us of gradient phonological representations. We further show that incomplete phonetic neutralisation can in fact have a large effect size. Such results are not surprising from a classic generative view of phonology where linguistic performance is argued to be a multi-factorial problem, and linguistic knowledge (i.e., competence) is only one of the many factors involved. Furthermore, our results suggest that the observed incompleteness or gradience may have a source outside phonological knowledge.

Word learning in the context of semantic prior knowledge: evidence of interference from feature-based neighbours in children and adults

ABSTRACT The presence of phonological neighbours facilitates word-form learning, suggesting that prior phonological knowledge supports vocabulary acquisition. We tested whether prior semantic knowledge similarly benefits word learning by teaching 7-to-10-year-old children (Experiment 1) and adults (Experiment 2) pseudowords assigned to novel concepts with low or high semantic neighbourhood density according to feature norms. Form recall, definition recall, and semantic categorisation tasks were administered immediately after training, the next day, and one week later. Across sessions, pseudowords assigned to low-density (versus high-density) semantic neighbourhood concepts elicited better word-form recall (for adults) and better meaning recall (for children). Exploratory cross-experiment analyses demonstrated that the neighbourhood influence was most robust for recalling meanings. Children showed greater gains in form recall than adults across the week, regardless of links to semantic knowledge. While the results suggest that close semantic neighbours interfere with word learning, we consider alternative semantic dimensions that may be beneficial.

The Relationship Between Young EFL Learners’ Vocabulary Knowledge and Listening Comprehension

This study investigates the degree to which an elementary school EFL learner’s level of second language (L2) vocabulary correlates to their L2 listening ability. The study aims to further identify whether or to what extent various measures of vocabulary knowledge predict the variance in L2 listening comprehension. In particular, the study focuses on the relatively unexplored area of phonological knowledge of vocabulary.
 Three phonological measures which tap into both vocabulary breadth and depth knowledge were adopted in this study: the receptive phonological vocabulary breadth knowledge (RVB), productive phonological vocabulary breadth knowledge (PVB), and phonological vocabulary depth knowledge (VD) measures. Twenty elementary school EFL learners participated in the study and were required to complete an L2 listening comprehension test, followed by three vocabulary knowledge tests. Correlation analysis revealed that RVB most strongly correlated with L2 listening comprehension score (r = .77). Stepwise multiple regression analysis showed that the best fitting model which consists of RVB and VD could predict about 75% of the variance in L2 listening comprehension. The findings indicate that phonological vocabulary knowledge is a significant predictor of L2 listening ability of young EFL learners.

The Use of the LITMUS Quasi-Universal Nonword Repetition Task to Identify DLD in Monolingual and Early Second Language Learners Aged 8 to 10

This study evaluates whether the short version of the German LITMUS quasi-universal nonword repetition task (LITMUS-QU-NWR) can be used as an index test for monolingual and early second language learners (eL2) of German aged 8 to 10 years. The NWR taps into quasi-universal phonological knowledge via the so-called language-independent part and into language-specific phonological knowledge via the language-dependent part. Thirty-six monolingual and thirty-three eL2 learners of German, typically developing (TD) and diagnosed as language-impaired (DLD), participated in the study. The effects of the language group (Mo vs. eL2) and the clinical status (TD vs. DLD) on repetition accuracy are investigated by a logistic mixed-model analysis. Receiver operating characteristics (ROC) and likelihood ratios are calculated to determine the diagnostic accuracy of the two parts. The group comparisons showed significant effects of the clinical status but not of the language group. The ROC analyses and the likelihood ratios reveal better diagnostic values for the language-dependent compared to the language-independent part and almost similar diagnostic values for the monolingual and the eL2 group. The results indicate that the LITMUS-QU-NWR helps to disentangle DLD and DLD in monolingual children and eL2 learners aged 8 to 10 years.

THE CORRELATION BETWEEN HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS’ PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS AND THEIR PRONUNCIATION OF ENGLISH INFLECTIONAL MORPHEMES –ED AND -S: A CASE IN THE MEKONG DELTA OF VIETNAM

This study examined the relationship between high school students' phonological awareness and their performance in pronouncing allomorphs of English inflectional morphemes -ed and -s. The study involved 31 high school students in Can Tho City in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. Data of the study were collected through a pronunciation written test (PWT) and a pronunciation oral test (POT). The findings pointed out that all the students had phonological knowledge of the two morphemes; however, the majority of the participants made errors in pronouncing them which indicated their lack of pronunciation performance. In addition, there was no correlation between the students’ phonological awareness and their pronunciation performance detected in the study. Based on the results, pedagogical implications were suggested.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0307/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Unpacking the Unique Relationship Between Set for Variability and Word Reading Development: Examining Word- and Child-Level Predictors of Performance.

Set for variability (SfV) is an oral language task which requires an individual to disambiguate the mismatch between the decoded form of an irregular word and its actual lexical pronunciation. For example, in the task, the word wasp is pronounced to rhyme with clasp (i.e., /wæsp/) and the individual must recognize the actual pronunciation of the word to be /wɒsp/. SfV has been shown to be a significant predictor of both item-specific and general word reading variance above and beyond that associated with phonemic awareness skill, letter-sound knowledge, and vocabulary skill. However, very little is known about the child characteristics and word features that affect SfV item performance. In this study we explored whether word features and child characteristics that involve phonology only are adequate to explain item-level variance in SfV performance or whether including predictors that involve the connection between phonology and orthography explain additional variance. To accomplish this we administered the SfV task (N=75 items) to a sample of grade 2-5 children (N=489) along with a battery of reading, reading related, and language measures. Results suggest that variance in SfV performance is uniquely accounted for by measures tapping phonological skill along with those capturing knowledge of phonology to orthography associations, but more so in children with better decoding skill. Additionally, word reading skill was found to moderate the influence of other predictors suggesting that how the task is approached may be impacted by word reading and decoding ability.

Variability in L2 Vowel Production: Different Elicitation Methods Affect Individual Speakers Differently.

Elicitation methods are known to influence second language speech production. For teachers and language assessors, awareness of such effects is essential to accurate interpretations of testing outcomes. For speech researchers, understanding why one method gives better performance than another may yield insights into how second-language phonological knowledge is acquired, stored, and retrieved. Given these concerns, this investigation compared L2 vowel intelligibility on two elicitation tasks and determined the degree to which differences generalized across vowels, vowels in context, lexical items, and individual speakers. The dependent variable was the intelligibility of Cantonese speakers' productions of English /i I u ℧/ in varying phonetic environments. In a picture-naming task, the speakers produced responses without an auditory prompt. In a second task–interrupted repetition–they heard exemplars of the same targets without pictures, and repeated each one after counting aloud to 10, a step intended to disrupt their short-term auditory store and therefore prevent simple mimicry. For target words with scores below 80% on picture naming, mean intelligibility was more than 10 points higher on interrupted repetition. However, that difference did not generalize across conditions or across speakers. Thus, although it is technically accurate to say that, on average, interrupted repetition yielded better vowel intelligibility than did picture naming, that observation requires a great deal of qualification, particularly because of individual speaker differences. The outcomes are interpreted in terms of their relevance to language assessment and phonetic learning.

Phonemes in language development in elementary school students

In alphabetic languages like ours, learning to write requires awareness of the phonological structure of speech. Phonological awareness is the ability to access the structure of the oral language and be aware of the phonological segments of words. The purpose of the work is to carry out an analysis on the importance of the teaching of phonemes, as a key element for the development of the subject of language in the students at elementary school of the Educational Unit Fisco Misional Cinco de Mayo of the Chone Canton in the period 2021-2022, as well as the strong relationship that exists between the development of oral language and the skills that favor phonological knowledge in elementary school students. The research is based on a bibliographic review and descriptive work, which made it possible to characterize the impact of phonemes on the development of language in elementary school students and it was possible to verify the strong relationship that exists between the development of oral language and the skills that favor phonological knowledge in students.

Auditory perceptual learning in autistic adults.

The automatic retuning of phoneme categories to better adapt to the speech of a novel talker has been extensively documented across various (neurotypical) populations, including both adults and children. However, no studies have examined auditory perceptual learning effects in populations atypical in perceptual, social, and language processing for communication, such as populations with autism. Employing a classic lexically-guided perceptual learning paradigm, the present study investigated perceptual learning effects in Australian English autistic and non-autistic adults. The findings revealed that automatic attunement to existing phoneme categories was not activated in the autistic group in the same manner as for non-autistic control subjects. Specifically, autistic adults were able to both successfully discern lexical items and to categorize speech sounds; however, they did not show effects of perceptual retuning to talkers. These findings may have implications for the application of current sensory theories (e.g., Bayesian decision theory) to speech and language processing by autistic individuals. LAY SUMMARY: Lexically guided perceptual learning assists in the disambiguation of speech from a novel talker. The present study established that while Australian English autistic adult listeners were able to successfully discern lexical items and categorize speech sounds in their native language, perceptual flexibility in updating speaker-specific phonemic knowledge when exposed to a novel talker was not available. Implications for speech and language processing by autistic individuals as well as current sensory theories are discussed.

Three-Dimensional Hindcast of Nitrogen and Phosphorus Biogeochemical Dynamics in Lake Onego Ecosystem, 1985–2015. Part II: Seasonal Dynamics and Spatial Features; Integral Fluxes

A three-dimensional coupled hydrodynamical biogeochemical model of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles has been used for a long-term reanalysis of the Lake Onego ecosystem. The comparison between simulation and sparse irregular observations, presented in the first part of this paper, demonstrated plausibility of the reconstructed temporal and spatial features of biogeochemical dynamics at a long-term scale, while seasonal dynamics of variables and fluxes are presented here. As new regional phonological knowledge, the reanalysis quantifies that the spring phytoplankton bloom, previously overlooked, reaches a maximum of 500 ± ± 128 mg C m–2 d–1 in May, contributes to approximately half of the lake’s annual primary production of 17.0–20.6 g C m–2 yr–1, and is triggered by increasing light availability rather than by an insignificant rise in water temperature. Coherent nutrient budgets provide reliable estimates of phosphorus and nitrogen residence times of 47 and 17 years, respectively. The shorter nitrogen residence time is explained by sediment denitrification, which in Lake Onego removes over 90 % of the bioavailable nitrogen input, but is often ignored in studies of other large lakes. An overall assessment of the model performance allows us considering the model a necessary and reliable tool for scenario simulations of possible changes in the Lake Onego ecosystem at the requested spatial and temporal scales.

The Efficacy of Incidental Attention to Formulaic and Nonformulaic Forms in Focus on Form

AbstractFocus on form (FonF) studies have predominantly addressed its effectiveness in improving learners’ syntactic, lexical, orthographic, and phonological knowledge. Extending the scope of this line of research to formulaic FonF practices, this study investigates the relative effectiveness of incidental FonF targeting formulaic versus nonformulaic forms through (successful) uptake rate and individualized posttests. Formulaic forms refer to collocation, idiom, lexical bundle, and compound, whereas nonformulaic forms refer to grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and spelling. A total of 551 focus‐on‐form episodes (FFEs) with formulaic foci, and 874 instances of FFEs with nonformulaic foci were identified in 30 hours of teacher–learner interactions in English‐as‐a‐foreign‐language classes. FFEs with formulaic and nonformulaic foci (n = 446) were used as the basis for developing individualized test items. This study found that learners produced (successful) uptake more often following FFEs with formulaic foci than nonformulaic ones, while they performed less successfully on the individualized immediate and delayed posttests in the case of formulaic‐oriented FFEs. Based on the regression analyses, the occurrence of successful uptake following FFEs with formulaic foci was not found to be a significant predictor of learners’ retention of target forms on the individualized posttests.

The rarity of intervocalic voicing of stops in Danish spontaneous speech

Previous studies of the phonetics of Danish stops have neglected closure voicing. Danish is an aspiration language, but the aspirated stops /p t k/ are produced with shorter closure duration and less articulatory effort than the unaspirated stops /b d ɡ/. Furthermore, all Danish stops are characterized by some degree of glottal spreading during the closure. In this study, we use a corpus of Danish spontaneous speech (DanPASS) to investigate the intervocalic voicing—its distribution across the two laryngeal categories, whether it patterns as a lenition phenomenon, and whether the aerodynamic environment predicts its distribution. We find that intervocalic voicing is not the norm for either set of stops and is particularly rare in /p t k/. Voiced tokens are mostly found in environments associated with lenition. We suggest that the glottal spreading gesture found in all Danish stops is a phonological mechanism blocking voicing, which is probabilistically lost in spontaneous speech. This predicts our results better than relying on laryngeal features like [voice] or [spread glottis]. The study fills a gap in our knowledge of Danish phonetics and phonology, and is also one of the most extensive corpus studies of intervocalic stop voicing in an ‘aspiration language.’

Using AR filters in L2 pronunciation training: practice, perfection, and willingness to share

Traditional L2 pronunciation teaching puts too much emphasis on explicit phonological knowledge (‘knowing that’) rather than on procedural knowledge (‘knowing how’). The advancement of mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) offers new opportunities for L2 learners to proceduralize their declarative articulatory knowledge into production skills more efficiently through systematic practice. Within the framework of skill acquisition theory, and using a mixed-methods design including production tests, articulatory awareness quizzes, and a semi-structured interview, this study aims to investigate the effectiveness of using an augmented reality (AR) filter app during pronunciation practice to improve Chinese L2 students’ segmental production and articulatory awareness of the targeted English consonants (dark/ɫ/,/ð/and/θ/), and their attitudes towards this application. The experimental results indicate that the app with AR technology, facial detection technology, and digital zoom technology played a positive role in promoting students’ segmental production and raising their articulatory awareness. The interview results show that the AR filter helped to alleviate the learners’ speaking anxiety and embarrassment related to interacting with the teacher for corrective feedback, and encouraged daily practice by providing more fun. Combining all the qualitative and quantitative results, we conclude that an AR filter app can offer academic, psychological, and social support for L2 pronunciation skill learning.

On the Emergence of Phonological Knowledge and on Motor Planning and Motor Programming in a Developmental Model of Speech Production.

A broad sketch for a model of speech production is outlined which describes developmental aspects of its cognitive-linguistic and sensorimotor components. A description of the emergence of phonological knowledge is a central point in our model sketch. It will be shown that the phonological form level emerges during speech acquisition and becomes an important representation at the interface between cognitive-linguistic and sensorimotor processes. Motor planning as well as motor programming are defined as separate processes in our model sketch and it will be shown that both processes revert to the phonological information. Two computational simulation experiments based on quantitative implementations (simulation models) are undertaken to show proof of principle of key ideas of the model sketch: (i) the emergence of phonological information over developmental stages, (ii) the adaptation process for generating new motor programs, and (iii) the importance of various forms of phonological representation in that process. Based on the ideas developed within our sketch of a production model and its quantitative spell-out within the simulation models, motor planning can be defined here as the process of identifying a succession of executable chunks from a currently activated phoneme sequence and of coding them as raw gesture scores. Motor programming can be defined as the process of building up the complete set of motor commands by specifying all gestures in detail (fully specified gesture score including temporal relations). This full specification of gesture scores is achieved in our model by adapting motor information from phonologically similar syllables (adapting approach) or by assembling motor programs from sub-syllabic units (assembling approach).