Phonological Learning Research Articles

Disrupted Subcortical-Cortical Connections in a Phonological but Not Semantic Task in Chinese Children With Dyslexia.

Reading disability has been considered as a disconnection syndrome. Recently, an increasing number of studies have emphasized the role of subcortical regions in reading. However, the majority of research on reading disability has focused on the connections amongst brain regions within the classic cortical reading network. Here, we used graph theoretical analysis to investigate whether subcortical regions serve as hubs (regions highly connected with other brain regions) during reading both in Chinese children with reading disability (N = 15, age ranging from 11.03 to 13.08 years) and in age-matched typically developing children (N = 16, age ranging from 11.17 to 12.75 years) using a visual rhyming judgment task and a visual meaning judgment task. We found that the bilateral thalami were the unique hubs for typically developing children across both tasks. Additionally, subcortical regions (right putamen, left pallidum) were also unique hubs for typically developing children but only in the rhyming task. Among these subcortical hub regions, the left pallidum showed reduced connectivity with inferior frontal regions in the rhyming judgment but not semantic task in reading disabled compared with typically developing children. These results suggest that subcortical-cortical disconnection, which may be particularly relevant to the phonological and phonology-related learning process, may be associated with Chinese reading disability.

Bridging form and meaning: support from derivational suffixes in word learning

BackgroundVocabulary development is closely associated with morphological knowledge, yet work is needed to understand the mechanisms underpinning this relationship. One possibility is that because morphological relationships entail systematic mappings between word form (phonology and orthography) and word meaning (semantics and grammar), children may take advantage of these links to form high‐quality lexical representations when learning novel words. This study examined whether developing readers show superior semantic, phonological and orthographic learning of novel words when those words contain an existing suffix that is congruent with the definition of that word.MethodsTwo groups of adolescents (younger: 12–13 years, n = 39, and older: 16–19 years, n = 39) learned definitions for 18 nonwords, each comprising a nonword stem and an existing suffix (e.g., clantist). Half the definitions were semantically and syntactically congruent with the suffix; the other half were incongruent. Training took place across two sessions, followed by a series of post‐tests measuring semantic learning (through a semantic recall task), phonological learning (through a shadowing task), lexicalisation of nonwords (through a lexical decision task) and orthographic learning (through a spelling task).ResultsBoth age groups showed significantly stronger semantic recall for items taught in the congruent compared with the incongruent condition. However, this effect did not emerge in our measures of phonological and orthographic learning or in lexicalisation of nonwords.ConclusionsThese findings provide some evidence that the presence of familiar suffixes in unfamiliar words facilitates novel word learning in adolescents, but in the present study, this benefit was only observed in the mappings between word form and meaning and not in the learning of word forms.

Infants' discrimination of consonant contrasts in the presence and absence of talker variability.

To learn speech-sound categories, infants must identify the acoustic dimensions that differentiate categories and selectively attend to them as opposed to irrelevant dimensions. Variability on irrelevant acoustic dimensions can aid formation of robust categories in infants through adults in tasks such as word learning (e.g., Rost and McMurray, 2009) or speech-sound learning (e.g., Lively et al., 1993). At the same time, variability sometimes overwhelms learners, interfering with learning and processing. Two prior studies (Kuhl & Miller, 1982; Jusczyk, Pisoni, & Mullennix, 1992) found that irrelevant variability sometimes impaired early sound discrimination. We asked whether variability would impair or facilitate discrimination for older infants, comparing 7.5-month-old infants' discrimination of an early acquired native contrast, /p/ vs. /b/ (in the word forms /pIm/ vs. /bIm/), in Experiment 1, with an acoustically subtle, non-native contrast, /n/ vs. /ŋ/ (in /nIm/ vs. /ŋIm/), in Experiment 2. Words were spoken by one or four talkers. Infants discriminated the native but not the non-native contrast, and there were no significant effects of talker condition. We discuss implications for theories of phonological learning and avenues for future research.

The bilingual advantage in learning a novel accent: does specific language background modulate phonetic and phonological learning?

Bilinguals outperformed monolinguals in phonetic and phonological learning tasks (Tremblay and Sabourin, 2012; Antoniou et al., 2015; Spinu et al., 2018). Spinu et al. (2020) presented monolingual and bilingual participants (n = 36) with an artificial accent of English differing in four distinct ways from Standard American English: a vocalic change (diphthongization of a monophthong), consonantal change (tapping of intervocalic liquids), syllable structure change (epenthesis in s-clusters) and suprasegmental change (a novel intonation pattern in tag questions). Bilinguals outperformed monolinguals across the board but the differences were more pronounced with tapping and tag questions. Because the bilinguals’ other languages were diverse (Arabic, Cantonese, Hebrew, Russian, Spanish, Urdu, Thai, and Haitian/Jamaican/St. Lucian Creole), the authors concluded that the specific languages spoken by the participants did not greatly affect the outcome, and the observed advantage correlates with the state of being bilingual. In the current study, we explore the connection between specific language background and performance with each of the four novel features. We evaluate our findings against previous claims that phonetic learning is modulated by the degree of similarity between the phonologies existent in the bilinguals’ repertoire and the universal difficulty of the phonetic features learnt (Kopeckova, 2016).

The connection between executive function and phonetic and phonological learning in monolingual and bilingual speakers

Recent work shows bilingual speakers exhibit an advantage in phonetic and phonological learning (PPL) compared to monolinguals. Specifically, bilinguals displayed stronger subcortical encoding of sound when processing speech stimuli (Krizman et al., 2012), and outperformed monolinguals in speech perception tasks (Tremblay and Sabourin, 2012). Bilinguals also displayed an advantage in learning vocabularies that differentiated words using foreign phonetic contrasts (Antoniou et al., 2015), and various aspects of novel accent pronunciation with both natural and artificial accents (Spinu et al., 2018, 2020). The current study explores the mechanisms underlying these enhanced skills by aiming to establish whether a correlation exists between PPL and higher-order cognitive abilities (i.e., executive functions) already shown to be enhanced in bilinguals: attentional control and inhibition (Bialystok, 2017). Our experiment explores the learning of two new segmental patterns in an artificial accent of English (following Spinu et al., 2020) in 20 monolingual English speakers and 20 early Spanish-English bilinguals from NYC. We also compare participants' accent learning scores with performance on two classic tasks that assess executive functioning (EF). By revealing a connection between PPL and EF, we add to the body of work on PPL in general, and the bilingual advantage in particular.

Generative Adversarial Phonology: Modeling Unsupervised Phonetic and Phonological Learning With Neural Networks.

Training deep neural networks on well-understood dependencies in speech data can provide new insights into how they learn internal representations. This paper argues that acquisition of speech can be modeled as a dependency between random space and generated speech data in the Generative Adversarial Network architecture and proposes a methodology to uncover the network's internal representations that correspond to phonetic and phonological properties. The Generative Adversarial architecture is uniquely appropriate for modeling phonetic and phonological learning because the network is trained on unannotated raw acoustic data and learning is unsupervised without any language-specific assumptions or pre-assumed levels of abstraction. A Generative Adversarial Network was trained on an allophonic distribution in English, in which voiceless stops surface as aspirated word-initially before stressed vowels, except if preceded by a sibilant [s]. The network successfully learns the allophonic alternation: the network's generated speech signal contains the conditional distribution of aspiration duration. The paper proposes a technique for establishing the network's internal representations that identifies latent variables that correspond to, for example, presence of [s] and its spectral properties. By manipulating these variables, we actively control the presence of [s] and its frication amplitude in the generated outputs. This suggests that the network learns to use latent variables as an approximation of phonetic and phonological representations. Crucially, we observe that the dependencies learned in training extend beyond the training interval, which allows for additional exploration of learning representations. The paper also discusses how the network's architecture and innovative outputs resemble and differ from linguistic behavior in language acquisition, speech disorders, and speech errors, and how well-understood dependencies in speech data can help us interpret how neural networks learn their representations.

Phonological Memory and L2 Vocabulary Learning in a Narrated Story Task.

The objective of this study was to explore the role played by phonological memory (PM) in the learning of new second language (L2) vocabulary presented in a narrated story. The proposal was that individuals with a strong PM would do better on this largely auditory task than those with poor PM capacity, since fewer visual/written cues could make remembering vocabulary a more challenging task. Participants were French native speakers, advanced learners of English (N = 55). The results revealed that PM, measured by a nonword repetition task and a serial recognition task, did not predict vocabulary retention scores in the group as a whole. However, when low and high PM subgroups were formed, a significant association between PM and vocabulary retention was found in the low PM group only, suggesting the contribution of PM to short-term vocabulary learning in advanced learners is outweighed by other factors, except when PM is quite weak.

The contribution of orthographic input, phonological skills, and rise time discrimination to the learning of non-native phonemic contrasts

AbstractAlthough learning second language phonology is a difficult task, orthographic input may support the learning of difficult sound contrasts through a process known as orthographic facilitation. We extended this research by examining the effects of orthographic input together with individual differences in three different phonological learning processes, namely, the production of, perception of, and memorization of words containing three Marathi phonemic contrasts (i.e., [k-kh], [], and []) by native English speakers. Moreover, because the [] and [] contrasts were particularly challenging in previous auditory training studies (e.g., Polka, 1991), we used cross-modal training in order to enhance learning by pairing auditory perception tasks with visual orthographic information, the amplification of relevant acoustic cues, and proprioceptive descriptions to the articulation of target phonemes. Results showed significant learning from the pre- to the posttest across tasks and contrasts, supporting the effectiveness of cross-modal training. Furthermore, incongruent orthographic input could inhibit perception, and orthographic input generally supported memory for word pronunciations. Moreover, individual differences regarding phonological skills and nonspeech auditory discrimination predicted participants’ success in different phonological learning processes. These results provide a detailed picture of the complexity between different aspects of second language phonological learning and cross-modal training.

ICT-based Al-Qur’an phonology learning

This research seeks to analyse the process of ICT-based Al-Qur’an phonology learning by using MTT Tahsin application. Indonesian people, whose mother tongue is not Arabic, need to learn the Al-Qur’an phonology to avoid letter sound interference in Al-Qur’an reading. The research method conducted the following stages: (1) search and download MTT Tahsin application; (2) explain the application features; (3) learn Al-Qur’an by using the application; and (4) evaluate the learning process. The subjects of this research were students with Javanese culture background, consisting of 14 male students and 9 female students of a university in Kabupaten Sumedang. The findings are: (1) MTT Tahsin application is equipped with trans-literacy feature and explanation of hijaiyyah letters characteristics, hence, it assisted the students to comprehend the pronunciation; (2) The application is equipped with makhroj (place from which the sound of a letter originates) pronunciation with all marks, hence, it assists the students to comprehend makhroj pronunciation; (3) The learning process could be done wherever and whenever; and (4) the evaluation of learning process showed that MTT Tahsin application could minimize the phonology interference in Al-Qur’an reading practices. To conclude, Al-Qur’an learning using MTT Tahsin application could improve phonology mastery for Javanese people.

Sleep Promotes Phonological Learning in Children Across Language and Autism Spectra.

Purpose Establishing stable and flexible phonological representations is a key component of language development and one which is thought to vary across children with neurodevelopmental disorders affecting language acquisition. Sleep is understood to support the learning and generalization of new phonological mappings in adults, but this remains to be examined in children. This study therefore explored the time course of phonological learning in childhood and how it varies by structural language and autism symptomatology. Method Seventy-seven 7- to 13-year-old children, 30 with high autism symptomatology, were included in the study; structural language ability varied across the sample. Children learned new phonological mappings based on synthesized speech tokens in the morning; performance was then charted via repetition (without feedback) over 24 hr and followed up 4 weeks later. On the night following learning, children's sleep was monitored with polysomnography. Results A period of sleep but not wake was associated with improvement on the phonological learning task in childhood. Sleep was associated with improved performance for both trained items and novel items. Structural language ability predicted overall task performance, though language ability did not predict degree of change from one session to the next. By contrast, autism symptomatology did not explain task performance. With respect to sleep architecture, rapid eye movement features were associated with greater phonological generalization. Conclusions Children's sleep was associated with improvement in performance on both trained and novel items. Phonological generalization was associated with brain activity during rapid eye movement sleep. This study furthers our understanding of individual differences in the acquisition of new phonological mappings and the role of sleep in this process over childhood. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.11126732.

Using Weekly Group Political Presentations to Enhance the Phonological Learning of Second-Year English Major Students at a University in Vietnam

Studies about the learning value of group presentations in ESL and EFL have become increasingly common, particularly in relation to spoken fluency. However, few studies have explored their impact on students’ intelligible pronunciation. In a Vietnamese context, recent changes in teaching and learning strategies set by the government have shifted attention to students’ ability to communicate effectively in today’s increasingly globalized environment. This inevitably turns the spotlight on pronunciation, an aspect of EFL long ignored in Vietnam. Qualitatively describing a case where group presentations were a key mode of teaching, learning and assessment for 17 second-year students majoring in English for Political Discipline at the Institute of International Studies in Hanoi over the course of one semester, this study suggests that monitored and transcribed group presentations may be one rational answer. 
 The study investigates the impacts on participants’ pronunciation of sounds and word stress and considers their attitude towards this method. The results reveal that students acknowledged the benefits of group presentations and experienced improvements in pronunciation, confidence and range of political vocabulary. These changes were diverse depending on each participant’s attitude. The article concludes with reflective evaluations of the lessons and explores the pedagogical implications for future projects on implementing research into presentations among Vietnamese students of foreign languages.

Language dominance does not always predict cross-linguistic interactions in bilingual speech production

Abstract The present study describes the results of two experiments that analyze the effects of language dominance on Catalan/Spanish bilingual speech production. We examined the acoustics of the Catalan [a]~[ə] alternation (a phonological process induced by lexical stress) and of the Catalan mid vowel contrasts /e/-/ɛ/ and /o/-/ɔ/ (two phonemic contrasts) in the speech of Catalan- vs. Spanish-dominant early Catalan/Spanish bilinguals from Majorca (Spain). The results indicate that, contrary to the analysis of the Catalan mid vowels, stressed and unstressed Spanish and Catalan /a/ yielded no significant difference as a function of language dominance. These findings suggest that unstressed vowel reduction, a phonological process, may be relatively easier to acquire than phonemic contrasts with a low functional load (/e/-/ɛ/, /o/-/ɔ/), perhaps because its predictability and high frequency may attract attention and/or relieve cognitive resources, which could be conducive to phonological learning. These findings demonstrate that language dominance effects in the production of phonemic contrasts, widely researched in the literature on early bilingualism, do not guarantee the same effects on the implementation of phonological processes.

Phonological Learning Influences Label-Object Mapping in Toddlers.

Purpose Infants rapidly acquire the sound patterns that characterize their native language. Knowledge of native language phonological cues facilitates learning new words that are consistent with these patterns. However, little is known about how newly acquired phonological knowledge-regularities that children are in the process of learning-affects novel word learning. The current experiment was designed to determine whether exposure to a novel phonological pattern affects subsequent novel word learning. Method Two-year-olds ( n = 41) were familiarized with a list of novel words that followed a simple phonotactic regularity. Following familiarization, toddlers were taught 4 novel label-object pairs. Two of the labels were consistent with the novel regularity, and 2 of the labels were inconsistent with the regularity. Results Toddlers with smaller vocabularies learned all of the novel label-object pairings, whereas toddlers with larger vocabularies only learned novel label-object pairings that were consistent with the novel phonological regularity. Conclusion These findings demonstrate that newly learned phonological patterns influence novel word learning and highlight the role of individual differences in toddlers' representations of candidate word forms.

Similarity of referents influences the learning of phonological word forms: Evidence from concurrent word learning

Although it is well accepted that various components of words (e.g., phonological word forms, and semantics) interact with each other during processing, it is less clear whether semantics and phonology interact with each other during word learning in the sense of affecting each other’s learning. This study employed three behavioral experiments as well as computational simulations to shed light on this issue by examining whether semantic similarity, operationalized as visual referent similarity, influences the learning of phonological word forms. Experiment 1 demonstrated an effect that would typically be interpreted as an effect of similarity on phonological learning, employing the commonly used naming task. We discuss how such results are confounded by at-test competition effects that can arise directly from the explicit presentation of similar referents, or indirectly from their re-activation even without explicit presentation. Experiments 2 and 3 used a stem completion test and a recognition from mispronunciation test to control for direct effects of competition, and still found effects of similarity on performance. A neural network model of word learning simulated the behavioral results, with analysis of the model confirming a genuine effect of referent similarity on phonological learning even when controlling for both direct and indirect at-test similarity effects. Together these results provide converging evidence that phonological word form learning is affected by referent similarity, suggesting that semantics and phonology interact with each other during learning.

Fonem Deret Konsonan dalam Bahasa Indonesia

The existence of consonant series phonemes in Indonesian phonological learning is important, but strangely it has not received special attention, so it is interesting to be the object of study. Based on existing data, if we find a phoneme study of consonant series from several references, it turns out that the discussion is only a part / sub-section of the subject matter of the study. The application of theory is based on the linguistic theory of phonological branches, phonemic subcabang, because the study focuses on the phoneme of the consonant series itself and its ability to form consonant sequences. The implementation of the study starts at three strategic stages as in linguistic research in general, namely: 1. the stage of providing data, 2. the stage of classification and analysis of data, and 3. the stage of preparing the report. The phoneme data of consonant series is more secondary, so the existence of references is a data source. The results of the consonant phoneme data analysis almost apply to all consonant phonemes in Indonesian, including loan / absorption (foreign) phonemes. The basis for determining the consonant phoneme starts with: 1. a consonant series is a consonant series of two / or more phonemes in one word, but in different syllables; 2. consonant phoneme data departs from the kinds of vocabulary in Indonesian; and 3. that the question of syllable decapitation is based on decapitation of the word form (morphological), not on sound (phonological) elements. The types of vocabulary used as data include: 1) original Indonesian vocabulary; 2) loan / absorption vocabulary, especially from the process "received by adjustment"; and 3) the "new form" vocabulary.

Computational Modeling of Phonological Learning

Recent advances in computational modeling have led to significant discoveries about the representation and acquisition of phonological knowledge and the limits on language learning and variation. These discoveries are the result of applying computational learning models to increasingly rich and complex natural language data while making increasingly realistic assumptions about the learning task. This article reviews the recent developments in computational modeling that have made connections between fully explicit theories of learning, naturally occurring corpus data, and the richness of psycholinguistic and typological data possible. These advances fall into two broad research areas: ( a) the development of models capable of learning the quantitative, noisy, and inconsistent patterns that are characteristic of naturalistic data and ( b) the development of models with the capacity to learn hidden phonological structure from unlabeled data. After reviewing these advances, the article summarizes some of the most significant consequent discoveries.

The emergence of speech segmentation in adult L2 learners of French

AbstractThe beginning stages of speech segmentation in a second language (L2) have received little attention to date. The literature on L2 phonological acquisition tends to focus on learner populations who have access to discrete (orthographic) forms through exposure to the L2 in a classroom setting. Specifically, the existing literature on L2 acquisition of French liaison holds that the processing of liaison is greatly influenced by orthographic representations and that L1 and L2 phonological learning subsequently follow distinctly different developmental paths. We present data suggesting that more naturalistic L2 learners, who have had little formal L2 instruction and whose exposure is primarily oral, process liaison employing strategies previously observed only in children learning L1 French, calling into question the assumption that L1 and L2 phonological acquisition differ fundamentally and suggesting rather that phonological development depends on both the quality and quantity of the input to which the L2 learner is exposed.

An Application of Network Science to Phonological Sequence Learning in Children With Developmental Language Disorder.

Network science has been a valuable tool in language research for investigating relationships between complex linguistic elements but has not yet been applied to sound sequencing in production. In the present work, we used standard error-based accuracy and articulatory kinematic approaches as well as novel measures from network science to evaluate variability and sequencing errors in speech production in children with developmental language disorder (DLD; aka specific language impairment). Twelve preschoolers with DLD and 12 age-matched controls participated in a 3-day novel word learning study. Transcription and articulatory movement data were collected to measure accuracy and variability of productions, and networks of speech productions were generated to analyze syllable co-occurrence patterns. Results indicated that children with DLD were less accurate than children with typical language at the segmental level. Crucially, these findings did not align with performance at the articulatory level, where there were no differences in movement variability between children with DLD and those with typical language. Network analyses revealed characteristics that were not captured by standard measures of phonetic accuracy, including a larger inventory of syllable forms, more connections between the forms, and less consistent production patterns. Network science provides significant insights into phonological learning trajectories in children with DLD and their typically developing peers. Importantly, errors in word production by children with DLD do not surface as a result of weakness in articulatory control. Instead, results suggest that speech errors in DLD may relate to deficits in sound sequencing.

L1 Korean vocalic transfer in adult L2 Korean learners\u2019 production of Vietnamese monophthong vowels

This paper reports a study that investigated the role of prior native or first language (L1) phonological and phonetic learning on the integration of vowel quality features in the production of second language (L2) vowels by examining adult L2 Korean learners’ production of Vietnamese monophthong vowels in an imitation and a read aloud tasks. Three groups of participants took part in the study (11 control Vietnamese, 11 Korean learners of Vietnamese, and 10 control Korean). The stimuli consisted of 9 Vietnamese monophthongs /i, e, ɛ, a, ɔ, o, u, ɤ, ɯ/ and 8 Standard Korean vowels / i, ɛ, e, a, o, u, ʌ, ɨ /. The results showed that Vietnamese vowels /ɛ/ and /e/ produced by Korean learners merged in vowel space, proving how a phonemic merger in L1 can influence speakers’ perception and production of non-native vowels. Moreover, the three Vietnamese vowels /ɔ/, /o/ and/ ɤ/ produced by Korean learners in both tasks tend to cluster together. In general, the findings of this study showed that Korean learners transfer their L1 vowel quality features into the production of Vietnamese vowels.

Implementing Evidence-Based Practice: Selecting Treatment Words to Boost Phonological Learning.

Word selection has typically been thought of as an inactive ingredient in phonological treatment, but emerging evidence suggests that word selection is an active ingredient that can impact phonological learning. The goals of this tutorial are to (a) review the emerging single-subject evidence on the influence of word characteristics on phonological learning in clinical treatment, (b) outline hypotheses regarding the mechanism of action of word characteristics, and (c) provide resources to support clinicians incorporating word selection as an active ingredient in their approach to phonological treatment. Research demonstrating the influence of the word frequency, neighborhood density, age of acquisition, and lexicality of treatment stimuli on phonological learning is summarized. The mechanism of action for each characteristic is hypothesized. Methods from the research studies are used to create a free set of evidence-based treatment materials targeting most of the mid-8 and late-8 consonants. Clinicians have numerous evidence-based options to consider when selecting stimuli for phonological treatment including (a) high-frequency and high-density words, (b) low-frequency and high-density words, (c) high-frequency and mixed-density words, (d) low-frequency and late-acquired words, and (e) nonwords. Incorporating word characteristics into phonological treatment may boost phonological learning. http://hdl.handle.net/1808/24768.