Language Familiarity Research Articles

Visual scanning patterns of a talking face when evaluating phonetic information in a native and non-native language.

When comprehending speech, listeners can use information encoded in visual cues from a face to enhance auditory speech comprehension. For example, prior work has shown that the mouth movements reflect articulatory features of speech segments and durational information, while pitch and speech amplitude are primarily cued by eyebrow and head movements. Little is known about how the visual perception of segmental and prosodic speech information is influenced by linguistic experience. Using eye-tracking, we studied how perceivers' visual scanning of different regions on a talking face predicts accuracy in a task targeting both segmental versus prosodic information, and also asked how this was influenced by language familiarity. Twenty-four native English perceivers heard two audio sentences in either English or Mandarin (an unfamiliar, non-native language), which sometimes differed in segmental or prosodic information (or both). Perceivers then saw a silent video of a talking face, and judged whether that video matched either the first or second audio sentence (or whether both sentences were the same). First, increased looking to the mouth predicted correct responses only for non-native language trials. Second, the start of a successful search for speech information in the mouth area was significantly delayed in non-native versus native trials, but just when there were only prosodic differences in the auditory sentences, and not when there were segmental differences. Third, (in correct trials) the saccade amplitude in native language trials was significantly greater than in non-native trials, indicating more intensely focused fixations in the latter. Taken together, these results suggest that mouth-looking was generally more evident when processing a non-native versus native language in all analyses, but fascinatingly, when measuring perceivers' latency to fixate the mouth, this language effect was largest in trials where only prosodic information was useful for the task.

Does multilingual packaging influence purchasing in retail segment? Evidence from multiple experiments

The language on green product packaging shapes consumers' shopping experiences and purchase intentions. This study aims to explore the effects of multilingual packaging on consumers' intention to purchase green products through a series of four experiments with data collected using the survey method. Experimental findings reveal that consumers' familiarity with the language used on green product packaging positively influences their likelihood of purchasing such products. This relationship is strengthened in the presence of higher social crowding. Furthermore, the study uncovers that including bilingual or trilingual packaging enhances consumers' propensity to purchase green products. This research demonstrates the positive impact of multilingual packaging on sales of green products, attracting a more extensive consumer base and increasing consumers' purchase intention for environmentally friendly products. Additionally, the study identifies the role of different levels of social crowding in the relationship between consumer language familiarity and their intention to purchase green products. Besides significantly contributing to the scholarly discourse, it provides practical implications for companies and brands in designing future effective green product packaging language. These findings contribute to promoting green products, offering valuable suggestions to assist companies in better designing and packaging their products to attract a broader consumer base and, thus, increase their market share.

Neural basis of language familiarity effects on voice recognition: An fNIRS study

Recognizing talkers' identity via speech is an important social skill in interpersonal interaction. Behavioral evidence has shown that listeners can identify better the voices of their native language than those of a non-native language, which is known as the language familiarity effect (LFE). However, its underlying neural mechanisms remain unclear. This study therefore investigated how the LFE occurs at the neural level by employing functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Late unbalanced bilinguals were first asked to learn to associate strangers' voices with their identities and then tested for recognizing the talkers' identities based on their voices speaking a language either highly familiar (i.e., native language Chinese), or moderately familiar (i.e., second language English), or completely unfamiliar (i.e., Ewe) to participants. Participants identified talkers the most accurately in Chinese and the least accurately in Ewe. Talker identification was quicker in Chinese than in English and Ewe but reaction time did not differ between the two non-native languages. At the neural level, recognizing voices speaking Chinese relative to English/Ewe produced less activity in the inferior frontal gyrus, precentral/postcentral gyrus, supramarginal gyrus, and superior temporal sulcus/gyrus while no difference was found between English and Ewe, indicating facilitation of voice identification by the automatic phonological encoding in the native language. These findings shed new light on the interrelations between language ability and voice recognition, revealing that the brain activation pattern of the LFE depends on the automaticity of language processing.

Impact of language familiarity on abstract pattern recognition in 9- to 12-month-old infants

Previous studies found an impact of language familiarity on face recognition in 9- and 12-month-olds. Own race faces are better recognized when associated with native language, whereas for other race faces, it is with non-native language. The aim of this study is to investigate if language familiarity can also influence abstract pattern recognition. We tested 9- to 12-month-old monolingual infants with a visual paired-comparison task. During a 30-s familiarization phase, infants were shown an image of abstract patterns associated with an auditory soundtrack of a speaker reciting a story either in their native (French) or in a non-native language (German). After the familiarization, the familiar and a new abstract pattern were displayed side by side for the recognition test. We found a significant preference for the novel object in the native language condition but not in the non-native condition. These results suggest that language familiarity effects on infant memory are not specific to faces but also influence, on a larger scale, how infants process their immediate visual environment.

Dynamics of International Student Migration: An Explorative Study in the Context of Kerala, India

This study investigates the dynamics of international student migration from Kerala, a region with a distinctive history of skilled migration. The research focuses on understanding the motivations, experiences, and trends in student mobility, particularly in the post-pandemic era. Employing a mixed-methods approach, the study gathers data from 37 participants in Thiruvalla, Kerala, using structured questionnaires, telephonic interviews, and Google Forms. The demographic analysis of respondents primarily includes students aged 20-30 years, representing a blend of gender and socioeconomic backgrounds. Key findings indicate that the principal motivation for migration is the pursuit of higher quality education and improved career prospects. The study reveals a preference for English-speaking countries, with the UK, New Zealand, and Germany being the favored destinations, reflecting language familiarity and perceived educational excellence. Most respondents migrated after completing their undergraduate studies, aiming for postgraduate education abroad. The reliance on educational loans as the primary source of funding highlights the significant financial commitment of students and their families. The research identifies substantial challenges faced by students, including financial constraints, social and psychological adaptation issues, and the hurdles of cultural integration. Interestingly, a majority of students express a desire to seek employment in host countries post-graduation, suggesting a trend towards long-term migration goals. The study concludes that the perceived drawbacks of Kerala's educational institutions – such as low-quality education, outdated syllabi, and lack of job-oriented courses – significantly influence migration decisions. This underscores the need for educational reforms in Kerala to align with global standards and students' aspirations. The study provides valuable insights into the factors driving international student migration from Kerala, emphasizing the need for policy interventions and educational improvements.

Effects of English versus Spanish language exposure on basic multisensory attention skills across 3 to 36 months of age.

Recent research has demonstrated that individual differences in infant attention to faces and voices of women speaking predict language outcomes in childhood. These findings have been generated using two new audiovisual attention assessments appropriate for infants and young children, the Multisensory Attention Assessment Protocol (MAAP) and the Intersensory Processing Efficiency Protocol (IPEP). The MAAP and IPEP assess three basic attention skills (sustaining attention, shifting/disengaging, intersensory matching), as well as distractibility, deployed in the context of naturalistic audiovisual social (women speaking English) and nonsocial events (objects impacting a surface). Might children with differential exposure to Spanish versus English show different patterns of attention to social events on these protocols as a function of language familiarity? We addressed this question in several ways using children (n = 81 dual-language learners; n = 23 monolingual-language learners) from South Florida, tested longitudinally across 3-36 months. Surprisingly, results indicated no significant English language advantage on any attention measure for children from monolingual English versus dual English-Spanish language environments. Second, for dual-language learners, exposure to English changed across age, decreasing slightly from 3-12 months and then increasing considerably by 36 months. Furthermore, for dual-language learners, structural equation modeling analyses revealed no English language advantage on the MAAP or IPEP as a function of degree of English language exposure. The few relations found were in the direction of greater performance for children with greater Spanish exposure. Together, findings indicate no English language advantage for basic multisensory attention skills assessed by the MAAP or IPEP between the ages of 3 to 36 months. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Effects of language familiarity, utterance length, and speech quality in prosodic boundary identification

Abstract This study investigates the effects of several stimulus sources: language familiarity, utterance length, and speech quality, on listeners’ predictions of the sizes of the upcoming prosodic boundaries. Experiments with native Taiwanese speakers were conducted, and the stimuli varied in prosodic boundary units (i.e., word, phrase, and sentence), languages (i.e., Taiwanese, English, and Swedish), utterance lengths (i.e., 2-second, and 2 syllables; the latter is approximately 0.416-second long), and speech qualities (i.e., normal speech, low-pass filtered speech). Results showed that: (a) listeners performed better when the utterances were longer; (b) listeners performed better in low-pass filtered speech when they had no prior knowledge of the target language; (c) there was a tendency for the language familiarity effect, but this effect was heavily influenced by the extent of similarity of the phonetic realizations in different prosodic boundaries, and the listeners’ language proficiency which was associated with working memory storage capacity.

Utilizing programming traces to explore and model the dimensions of novices' code‐writing skill

AbstractStudies have found that most novice programmers have low proficiency in writing code. However, it is unclear what subskills compose code writing and which subskills novice programmers struggle with. This study utilizes programming traces to identify latent subskills that constitute code writing so that teachers can offer specific instruction on the weak subskills. Data were collected from an undergraduate course teaching introductory computer science in Java. Six hundred and fourteen students made submissions to homework programming questions in a web‐based learning system. Based on the submission traces, we computed 11 features related to correctness and time students spent on their submissions. We conducted an exploratory factor analysis on two‐thirds of students selected randomly and identified four factors. The first factor, code style proficiency, was mainly related to code style errors. The second, syntactic proficiency, concerned compiler errors. The third is semantic proficiency, which concerns runtime and logic errors. The fourth, syntactic debugging proficiency, concerned the success rate and time required for fixing compiler and code style errors. A confirmatory factor analysis conducted on the remaining one‐third of the data supported the four‐factor structure. The factor model showed measurement invariance between the data set where the model was developed and two new datasets, one from the same sample but collected at a different time point and another from a different sample and context (onsite course vs. online course). The factors were related to prior programming abilities, programming language familiarity, and future exam performance. These associations provided validity evidence for the factor model.

The Impact of Cultural Institutes on International Tourism

ABSTRACT It has been recognized that cultural institute programs that first started after World War II and aim to improve language familiarity and cultural awareness are beneficial for FDI and trade. We use gravity models to examine the impact from both the German Goethe-Institut and Chinese Confucius Institute (two large-scaled cultural institute programs) on tourism arrivals, a form of international trade. We find a positive impact on tourism arrivals from the Confucius Institute program but a negative impact from the Goethe-Institut program. In addition, both the Goethe-Institut and Confucius Institute programs help to reduce the impact of linguistic distance on international tourism.

The inversion effect in word recognition: The effect of language familiarity and handwriting.

Humans have expertise with visual words and faces. One marker of this expertise is the inversion effect. This is attributed to experience with those objects being biased towards a canonical orientation, rather than some inherent property of object structure or perceptual anisotropy. To confirm the role of experience, we measured inversion effects in word matching for familiar and unfamiliar languages. Second, we examined whether there may be more demands on reading expertise with handwritten stimuli rather than computer font, given the greater variability and irregularities in the former, with the prediction of larger inversion effects for handwriting. We recruited two cohorts of subjects, one fluent in Farsi and the other in Punjabi, neither of whom were able to read the other's language. Subjects performed a match-to-sample task with words in either computer fonts or handwritings. Subjects were more accurate and faster with their familiar language, even when it was inverted. Inversion effects were present for the familiar but not the unfamiliar language. The inversion effect in accuracy for handwriting was larger than that for computer fonts in the familiar language. We conclude that the word inversion effect is generated solely by orientation-biased experience, and that demands on this expertise are greater with handwriting than computer font.

Exploring Particular Learner Factors Associated with South African Mathematics Learners’ Achievement: Gender Gap or Not

Mathematics is a gateway to science-related careers and all stakeholders want to improve the achievement levels in mathematics. In this study we use data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study 2015 to investigate the association between the learner situational factors of gender, grade level age appropriateness, school location and test language familiarity with the mathematics achievement. We are particularly interested in whether gender can predict mathematics achievement, after taking into account these learner situational factors. The study used multiple regression to investigate the association between the variables where the mathematics achievement scores were calculated out of a possible 1000 scale points, with a mean of 500. The average score for the South African participants was 372. The regression predicts that learners who attend school in a rural and small village school are expected to achieve 63 and 48 points lower, respectively, than their counterparts from a similar background. In terms of the age effect, the regression predicts overall that a learner who is above the expected age for Grade 9 will get 60 points lower than a learner who is at the appropriate age the grade from a similar background. Furthermore the results show that if school location, familiarity with the test and age appropriateness are held constant, boys do better on average than girls by seven points and this is a significant effect. This result is unexpected since in the original data, the mean of the girls’ scores was on average higher than that of the boys. The study illustrates that gendered differences can only be adequately understood when other situational factors are considered. In order to improve the equity of the outcomes, targeted systemic interventions are necessary, which focus on improving the effectiveness of instruction and quality of learning opportunities so as to mediate the effect of these situational factors.

Automatic sound encoding is sensitive to language familiarity: Evidence from English monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals

We investigated whether language familiarity has a modulatory effect on automatic sound encoding in the auditory brainstem by measuring frequency-following responses (FFRs) to repeating speech syllables that played in the background while monolingual English speakers and Spanish-English bilingual speakers watched cartoon videos in English and Spanish. For the English monolinguals, we found that the FFR signal quality was different between the two language conditions, with higher signal to noise ratios emerging for the Spanish compared to the English condition. For the Spanish-English bilinguals, the FFR signal quality was overall higher than the monolinguals, but there no effect of language condition on the FFR. Thus, both language familiarity of the environment and bilingual language experience, may modulate automatic sound encoding.

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.

Clarifying the roles of schizotypy and psychopathic traits in lexical decision performance

IntroductionSome studies suggest that lexical recognition is impaired in people with schizophrenia, psychopathy and/or antisocial personality disorders, but not affective disorders. We examined the extent to which various traits dimensionally linked to one or more of these disorders are associated with lexical recognition performance in the general population. MethodsSeventy-eight healthy English-speaking participants completed self-report measures of schizotypy, psychopathy, impulsivity, depression, anxiety and stress. All participants were assessed on a one-choice variant of a lexical decision task (LDT). ResultsMeanness and Boldness traits of psychopathy (Triarchic Psychopathy Measure), and positive schizotypy (Unusual Experiences, Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences) were associated with poor word-nonword accuracy, and predicted a significant amount of unique variance (Meanness, 12%; Boldness, 4.8%; Positive Schizotypy, 4.4%; total 21%) in performance. Higher motor impulsivity predicted 30% of the variance in low-frequency words recognition accuracy, but only in non-native English speakers. Affective traits were not associated with LDT performance. ConclusionPsychopathic traits show stronger negative associations with lexical recognition performance than schizotypal traits, and impulsivity may differently influence lexical decision performance in native and non-native speakers. Further studies are needed to replicate these findings, especially the influence of language familiarity in the impulsivity-performance relationship, and to clarify the influence of corresponding symptom dimensions in lexical recognition abilities, taking language familiarity, migration status, and comorbidity into account, in people with schizophrenia, psychopathy, and/or antisocial personality disorders.

Can language modulate perceptual narrowing for faces? Other-race face recognition in infants is modulated by language experience

Between 6 and 9 months, while infant’s ability to discriminate faces within their own racial group is maintained, discrimination of faces within other-race groups declines to a point where 9-month-old infants fail to discriminate other-race faces. Such face perception narrowing can be overcome in various ways at 9 or 12 months of age, such as presenting faces with emotional expressions. Can language itself modulate face narrowing? Many adult studies suggest that language has an impact on the recognition of individuals. For example, adults remember faces previously paired with their native language more accurately than faces paired with a non-native language. We have previously found that from 9 months of age, own-race faces associated with the native language can be learned and recognized whereas own-race faces associated with a non-native language cannot. Based on the language familiarity effect, we hypothesized that the native language could restore recognition of other-race faces after perceptual narrowing has happened. We tested 9- and 12-month-old Caucasian infants. During a familiarization phase, infants were shown still photographs of an Asian face while audio was played either in the native or in the non-native language. Immediately after the familiarization, the familiar face and a novel one were displayed side-by-side for the recognition test. We compared the proportional looking time to the new face to the chance level. Both 9- and 12-month-old infants exhibited recognition memory for the other-race face when familiarized with non-native speech, but not with their native speech. Native language did not facilitate recognition of other-race faces after 9 months of age but a non-native language did, suggesting that 9- and 12-month-olds already have expectations about which language an individual should talk (or at least not talk). Our results confirm the strong links between face and speech processing during infancy.

Effects of language familiarity and style (font vs. handwriting) on the word inversion effect

Effects of language familiarity and style (font vs. handwriting) on the word inversion effect

Affective Concept-Based Encoding of Patient Narratives via Sentic Computing and Neural Networks.

The automatic generation of features without human intervention is the most critical task for biomedical sentiment analysis. Regarding the high dynamicity of shared patient narrative data, the lack of formal medical language sentiment dictionaries prevents retrieval of the appropriate sentiment, which is unapproachable and can be prone to annotator bias. We propose a novel affective biomedical concept-based encoding via sentic computing and neural networks. The main contributions include four aspects. First, a biomedical embedding, in which a medical entity is defined, normalized, and synthesized from a text, is built using online patient narratives after being combined with label propagation from a widely used comprehensive biomedical vocabulary. Second, considering the dependence on biomedical definitions, drug reaction sample selection based on general matching is suggested. These feature settings are then used to build and recognize affective semantics and sentics based on an extreme learning machine. Finally, a semisupervised LSTM-BiLSTM model for biomedical sentiment analysis is constructed. There was a massive influx of patient self-reports related to the COVID-19 pandemic. A study was conducted in this direction, and we tested the validity, medical language familiarity, and transferability of our approach by analyzing millions of COVID-19 tweets. Comparisons to affective lexicons also indicate that integrating extreme learning machine cognitive capabilities has advantages over biomedical sentiment analysis. By considering sentics vectors on top of the formed embeddings, our semisupervised LSTM-BiLSTM achieved an accuracy of 87.5%. The evaluations of unsupervised learning approximated the results of the previous model when dealing with a serious loss of biomedical data. In this paper, we demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating deep-learning-based cognitive capabilities for both enhancing distributed biomedical definitions and inferring sentiment compositions from many patient self-reports on social networks. The relevant encoding of affective information conveyed regarding medication subjects clearly reveals defined roles and expectations that can have a positive impact on public health.

Contribution of Low-Level Acoustic and Higher-Level Lexical-Semantic Cues to Speech Recognition in Noise and Reverberation

Masking noise and reverberation strongly influence speech intelligibility and decrease listening comfort. To optimize acoustics for ensuring a comfortable environment, it is crucial to understand the respective contribution of bottom-up signal-driven cues and top-down linguistic-semantic cues to speech recognition in noise and reverberation. Since the relevance of these cues differs across speech test materials and training status of the listeners, we investigate the influence of speech material type on speech recognition in noise, reverberation and combinations of noise and reverberation. We also examine the influence of training on the performance for a subset of measurement conditions. Speech recognition is measured with an open-set, everyday Plomp-type sentence test and compared to the recognition scores for a closed-set Matrix-type test consisting of syntactically fixed and semantically unpredictable sentences (c.f. data by Rennies et al., J. Acoust. Soc. America, 2014, 136, 2642–2653). While both tests yield approximately the same recognition threshold in noise in trained normal-hearing listeners, their performance may differ as a result of cognitive factors, i.e., the closed-set test is more sensitive to training effects while the open-set test is more affected by language familiarity. All experimental data were obtained at a fixed signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and/or reverberation time set to obtain the desired speech transmission index (STI) values of 0.17, 0.30, and 0.43. respectively, thus linking the data to STI predictions as a measure of pure low-level acoustic effects. The results confirm the consistent difference between robustness to reverberation observed in the literature between the matrix type sentences and the Plomp-type sentences, especially for poor and medium speech intelligibility. The robustness of the closed-set matrix type sentences against reverberation disappeared when listeners had no a priori knowledge about the speech material (sentence structure and words used), thus demonstrating the influence of higher-level lexical-semantic cues in speech recognition. In addition, the consistent difference between reverberation- and noise-induced recognition scores of everyday sentences for medium and high STI conditions and the differences between Matrix-type and Plomp-type sentence scores clearly demonstrate the limited utility of the STI in predicting speech recognition in noise and reverberation.

The Other Accent Effect in Talker Recognition: Now You See It, Now You Don't.

The existence of the Language Familiarity Effect (LFE), where talkers of a familiar language are easier to identify than talkers of an unfamiliar language, is well-documented and uncontroversial. However, a closely related phenomenon known as the Other Accent Effect (OAE), where accented talkers are more difficult to recognize, is less well understood. There are several possible explanations for why the OAE exists, but to date, little data exist to adjudicate differences between them. Here, we begin to address this issue by directly comparing listeners' recognition of talkers who speak in different types of accents, and by examining both the LFE and OAE in the same set of listeners. Specifically, Canadian English listeners were tested on their ability to recognize talkers within four types of voice line-ups: Canadian English talkers, Australian English talkers, Mandarin-accented English talkers, and Mandarin talkers. We predicted that the OAE would be present for talkers of Mandarin-accented English but not for talkers of Australian English-which is precisely what we observed. We also observed a disconnect between listeners' confidence and performance across different types of accents; that is, listeners performed equally poorly with Mandarin and Mandarin-accented talkers, but they were more confident with their performance with the latter group of talkers. The present findings set the stage for further investigation into the nature of the OAE by exploring a range of potential explanations for the effect, and introducing important implications for forensic scientists' evaluation of ear witness testimony.

Interacting with virtual instructors: The effect of gender and years of study on the perception of in‐game instructors

AbstractPrevious research has shown that student‐instructor interaction is vital to motivating students to learn a second language. However, it is unclear whether learners' demographics affect in‐game immersion and interactions with virtual instructors. This study's purpose is to investigate whether the number of years learning Japanese (foreign language familiarity) influences students' immersion levels in serious games and their interactions with virtual instructors. We developed a 3D animated Japanese roleplaying game with a virtual in‐game instructor. Eighty‐four college students enrolled in 200‐ and 300‐level Japanese language courses voluntarily participated in the study. Participants played the game and then answered a questionnaire concerning virtual character appearance, attentiveness to the instructor, and immersion in the game. The findings indicated that gender and the number of years studying Japanese significantly impact multiple measurements.