Native English Subjects Research Articles

Speaking a foreign language and its effect on F0

This study investigated whether speaking a foreign language affects the fundamental frequency (F0) of speech in 16 native Finnish and 14 native English subjects reading a text in Finnish and in English. The speech samples were analyzed for the mean and range of F0. Speaking a foreign language caused a change in F0 for the Finnish subjects, while the result was not as unambiguous for the English subjects. The change in F0 may be a result of adaptation to a certain pitch level in the foreign environment. Experience in using the foreign language did not show significant correlation to the change in F0, which suggests either individual differences in sensitivity to adaptation or difficulty in quantifying the amount of experience.

A Study on Pitch Patterns in Japanese Speakers of English with Verification by Speech Re-Synthesis

Certain irregularities in the utterances of words or phrases often occur in English spoken by Japanese native subject, referred to in this article as Japanese English. Japanese English is linguistically presumed to reflect the phonetic characteristics of Japanese. We consider the prosodic feature patterns as one of the most common causes of irregularities in Japanese English, and that Japanese English would have better prosodic patterns if its particular characteristics were modified. This study investigates prosodic differences between Japanese English and English speakers' English, and shows the quantitative results of a statistical analysis of pitch. The analysis leads to rules that show how to modify Japanese English to have pitch patterns closer to those of English speakers. On the basis of these rules, the pitch patterns of test speech samples of Japanese English are modified, and then re-synthesized. The modified speech is evaluated in a listening experiment by native English subjects. The result of the experiment shows that on average, over three-fold of the English subjects support the proposed modification against original speech. Therefore, the results of the experiments indicate practical verification of validity of the rules. Additionally, the results suggest that irregularities of prominence lie in Japanese English sentences. This can be explained by the prosodic transfer of first language prosodic characteristics on second language prosodic patterns.

Talker‐specific accent: Can speech alignment reveal idiolectic influences during the perception of accented speech?

Listeners use talker‐specific (idiolectic) information to help them perceive and remember speech [e.g., Goldinger, J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. 22, 1166–1183 (1998)]. However, recent research has shown that idiolectic information is not as helpful when listeners hear accented speech [e.g., Sidaras et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 125, 5 (2009)]. It could be that listeners fail to encode idiolectic information when perceiving accented speech. To examine whether idiolectic is still encoded, experiments tested if subjects would display speech alignment to specific accented models. Speech alignment is the tendency to imitate another talker and can occur when shadowing heard speech [e.g., Goldinger, Psychol. Rev. 105, 251 (1998)]. Native English subjects were asked to shadow a Chinese‐ or Spanish‐accented model producing English words. Raters then judged whether the shadowed tokens were more similar in pronunciation to those of a shadowed model or of a different models with the same accent. In a second experiment, raters judged whether shadowed tokens were more similar in accent to those of (unshadowed) models with the same or a different accent. Preliminary results reveal that subjects align to the shadowed model, suggesting that idiolect is still encoded. Subjects also show moderate alignment to accent.

Query translation-based cross-language print defect diagnosis based on the fuzzy Bayesian model

This paper discusses a query-translation based cross-language diagnosis (Q-CLD) for print defects conducted by nonnative English users. The first step involved developing three fuzzy Bayesian models: one based on English descriptions provided by native English subjects (referred to as the native English model); the second on English des- criptions provided by Korean subjects (referred to as the nonnative English model); and the third on Korean descriptions provided by Korean subjects (referred to as the Korean model). Model performance was evaluated using five different types of input descriptions. The results showed that the keywords matching translations developed in this study were nearly as accurate as the native English descriptions which were the most accurate predictions of the tested models. Using the keywords matching translations, the native English model correctly predicted 37% of the print defects with its top prediction and, in 80% of the cases the actual defect was one of the top five predictions. Considering that the native English model correctly predicted 45% of the print defects with its top prediction, and in 87% of the cases the actual defect was one of the top five predictions, the result supported the idea that a Q-CLD could be a practical localization approach for a troubleshooting website.

Agreement and reliability using reference-matching paradigm in perceptual voice quality rating in Chinese and English

Perceptual voice judgment is commonly used in clinical voice quality evaluation. The use of a referencematching paradigm in perceptual ratings has been shown to improve both agreement and reliability (Yiu et al., in press). This study set out to investigate the agreement and reliability in rating Chinese and English dysphonic stimuli using the reference-matching paradigm. Experiment 1 aimed to synthesize Chinese and English dysphonic stimuli with different breathy and rough severity levels using the HLSyn Speech Synthesizer. Seven representative anchors (references) for each of the rough and breathy series in Chinese and English were chosen by three judges to be used in experiment 2. Acoustic analysis of the anchor series indicated they were of increasing severity. Experiment 2 recruited ten native Chinese and ten native English subjects to rate the quality of Chinese and English dysphonic voice samples using the synthesized anchor as references. Results showed that listeners achieved nearly 90% agreement in rating the Chinese stimuli and 80% agreement in rating the English stimuli regardless of their language background. The study showed that the reference-matching paradigm was a reliable method in rating dysphonic stimuli across listeners with different language backgrounds.

Temporal characteristics of Chinese-accented English: Preliminary findings

This study investigated several temporal features of English to determine the extent of their occurrence in the speech of talkers of Chinese-accented English who had relatively limited experience with spoken English. Specifically, the extent to which these speakers produced the following temporal contrasts was examined: (1) tense versus lax vowel duration, (2) vowel duration before voiced versus voiceless consonants, and (3) vowel and consonant duration in sentence-final versus nonfinal position. Preliminary data from sentences produced by eight non-native and eight native talkers indicates that the native English speakers and the Chinese-accented talkers did not differ in the extent to which they realized the inherent duration difference between tense and lax vowels. However, the native English subjects tended to show substantially greater vowel lengthening before voiced versus before voiceless consonants than the Chinese-accented talkers. In addition, while the two groups did not differ significantly in the extent to which they lengthened sentence-final consonants relative to nonfinal consonants, the native English talkers showed greater sentence-final vowel lengthening than the Chinese-accented talkers. When group differences for a given temporal parameter were found, 1 or 2 of the non-native subjects typically fell within the range of performance shown by the native speakers.

The influence of L1 on the acquisition of Swedish quantity by native speakers of Spanish, English and Estonian

This study examined the influence of the L1 phonetic system on the acquisition of Swedish quantity distinctions. The aim was to test the hypothesis that difficulty in acquiring an L2 contrastive category is related to the role in the L1 of the phonetic feature upon which the L2 category is based. Twenty native speakers each of American English, Latin American Spanish and Estonian participated. The phonologies of the subjects' L1 display three degrees of overall prominence of the duration feature. The subjects, who had all lived in Sweden for at least 10 years, were given a production and perception test to assess their mastery of Swedish quantity. The Estonian subjects performed much like Swedish controls. However, some native English, and even more Spanish subjects, differed from native speakers of Swedish. A follow-up experiment compared matched groups of native English and Spanish subjects. It showed that experienced and inexperienced groups of native English and Spanish adults were equally successful in learning to produce and perceive Swedish quantity distinctions, but that the native English subjects more closely matched native Swedish speakers than the native Spanish subjects did. Taken together, our results support the feature hypothesis in that these subjects' success in learning the Swedish quantity contrast seems to be related to the role of the duration feature in the L1.

The Production of English Vowels by Fluent Early and Late Italian-English Bilinguals

The primary aim of this study was to determine if fluent early bilinguals who are highly experienced in their second language (L2) can produce L2 vowels in a way that is indistinguishable from native speakers’ vowels. The subjects were native speakers of Italian who began learning English when they immigrated to Canada as children or adults (‘early’ vs. ‘late’ bilinguals). The early bilinguals were subdivided into groups differing in amount of continued L1 use (early-low vs. early-high). In experiment 1, native English-speaking listeners rated 11 English vowels for goodness. As expected, the late bilinguals’ vowels received significantly lower ratings than the early bilinguals’ vowels did. Some of the early-high subjects’ vowels received lower ratings than vowels spoken by a group of native English (NE) speakers, whereas none of the early-low subjects’ vowels differed from the NE subjects’ vowels. Most of the observed differences between the NE and early-high groups were for vowels spoken in a nonword condition. The results of experiment 2 suggested that some of these errors were due to the influence of orthography.

Identification of English voiceless fricatives by Japanese listeners: The influence of vowel context on sensitivity and response bias.

In order to examine the ability of native Japanese speakers to distinguish between English voiceless fricatives, a five-alternative, forced-choice (5AFC) test was administered to 104 Japanese students of English. The stimuli consisted of 75 nonsense syllables in which five fricatives (/f/, /s/, /∫/, /θ/, /h/) were presented in five vowel environments (/i e a o u/) and in three different consonant contexts, and were spoken by three native speakers of English. The identification rates were submitted to signal-detection-theoretic (SDT) analysis (measured by d′), multidimensional-scaling (MDS) analysis, and cluster analysis. Overall, identification rates ranged from a maximum of 88% for the /∫/ stimuli to 55% for the /θ/ stimuli. The results showed that both vowel environment and consonant context had an effect on the listeners’ perception of the stimuli in this study. A control group of six native English subjects took the same identification test using the same procedure. All of the control listeners had no difficulty in identifying the target fricatives except in the case of the /f/–/θ/ contrast.

The Identification of English Consonants by Native Speakers of Italian

This study examined the identification of English consonants in noise by native speakers of Italian. The effect of age of first exposure to English was evaluated by comparing three groups of subjects who continued to use Italian relatively often but differed according to their age of arrival (AOA) in Canada from Italy (early: 7, mid: 14, late: 19 years). The subjects in the late group made more errors identifying word-initial consonants than subjects in the early group did; however, the effect of AOA was nonsignificant for word-final stops. The effect of amount of native language (L1) use was evaluated by comparing two groups of early bilinguals who were matched for AOA (mean = 7 years) but differed according to self-reported percentage use of Italian (early: 32%, early-low: 8%). The early bilinguals who used Italian often (early) made significantly more errors identifying word-initial and word-final consonants than native English (NE) subjects did, whereas the early bilinguals who used Italian seldom (early-low) did not differ from the NE subjects. The subjects’ phonological short-term memory was estimated by having them repeat Italian non-words. This was done in an attempt to identify the source of individual differences. The nonword repetition scores were in fact found to independently account for 15% of the variance in subjects’ errors identifying word-final English consonants and 8% of the variance for word-initial consonants.

LEXICAL FACTORS AND SEGMENTAL ACCURACY IN SECOND LANGUAGE SPEECH PRODUCTION

Voice onset time (VOT) was measured in the production of /t/ in the initial position of 60 English words spoken by native English (NE) speakers and native Spanish (NS) speakers who began learning English before or after the age of 21 years. The subjects rated the words for familiarity, age of acquisition, imageability, and relatedness to word(s) in the Spanish lexicon. The subjects in all three groups showed two well-known phonetic effects: They produced longer VOT values in the context of high than nonhigh vowels, and longer VOT in one- than in two-syllable words. As expected, the NS subjects who learned English prior to the age of 21 years judged the English words to be more familiar and more like a Spanish word than did the subjects who began learning English later in life. Also, many but not all of the NS subjects produced /t/ with shorter VOT values than did the NE subjects. However, regression analyses showed that none of the lexical factors mentioned above or the text frequency of the 60 English words examined affected the NS subjects' VOT values. Thus, variation in the accuracy with which NS subjects produce English /t/ must be accounted for by factors other than the lexical status of the words in which /t/ occurs.

Sentence duration as an index of overall proficiency in an L2

Maximum reading rate in the native and second language has often been used to assess bilingual balance. In the present study, the duration of L2 sentences produced at a nonmaximal rate was measured. The subjects were 24 native English (NE) speakers and 240 native Korean (NK) speakers assigned to ten subgroups based on age of arrival in the US (2–22 yrs). The subjects repeated 21 aurally presented English sentences following a delay. The durations of sentences that were produced without pauses or repetitions were measured. The NK subjects who arrived in the US after the age of 9 years produced sentences that were significantly longer than did the NE subjects. Significant correlations were found to exist between the Koreans sentence durations and age of arrival in the US: (1) self-estimated use of both Korean and English; (2) the number of segmental errors produced in English sentences; and (3) knowledge of English morphosyntax (assessed by a 144-item Grammaticality Judgment Test). The correlation with amount of education in the US was nonsignificant. Taken together, these results suggest that sentence duration may serve as a useful index of overall proficiency in an L2. [Work supported by NIH.]

Nonnatives’ perception of English sentences presented in noise

This study built on earlier investigations of the effects of noise on speech identification by nonnative speakers. Oyama showed that the ability of native Italian subjects to identify speech in noise was inversely related to their age of arrival (AOA) in the United States [J. Psycholinguist. Res. 5, 261–283 (1976)]. Mayberry and Fischer showed that more phonological and fewer semantic errors are made the later sign language is acquired, indicating that late learners allocate more attention to bottom-up processes [Mem. Cognit. 17, 740–754 (1989)]. Subjects in the present study were native English (NE) and Italian/English bilinguals differing in their AOA in Canada. The stimuli were naturally produced, semantically unpredictable English sentences. Subjects repeated as much of each sentence as possible as it was presented at successively higher S/N ratios (−6, 0, 6, 12 dB). NE subjects outperformed the bilinguals, despite the latter’s lengthy residence in Canada (M=35.4 years). The bilinguals’ performance varied inversely as a function of AOA. Scores were also related to individual differences in phonological short term memory. Additional analyses will determine whether late learners allocate more attention to bottom-up processes than do NE subjects. [Work supported by NIH.]

Lexical familiarity and English-language experience affect Japanese adults’ perception of /ɹ/ and /l/

This study assessed the influence of subjective lexical familiarity and English-language experience on Japanese adults' accuracy in identifying singleton word-initial tokens of English [symbol: see text] and /l/. The inexperienced Japanese (IJ) subjects had lived in the U.S. for 2 years, whereas the experienced Japanese (EJ) subjects had lived there for 21 years, on average. The native Japanese subjects correctly identified English [symbol: see text] and /l/ tokens less often than did a group of native English (NE) subjects, but they did not differ from the NE subjects in identifying the control consonants /w/ and /d/. The NE subjects, who were at ceiling, showed no effect of subjective lexical familiarity. However, the EJ and IJ subjects correctly identified [symbol: see text] and /l/ tokens more often in words that were more familiar than their minimal pairs than in words that were less familiar than their minimal pairs. The EJ subjects identified liquids more often than did the IJ subjects, but usually less often than the NE subjects. However, the EJ subjects managed to identify [symbol: see text] tokens at rates comparable to the NE subjects' rates in words that wer matched in subjective familiarity to their minimal pair (experiment 1), and when identifying [symbol: see text] tokens that had been edited out of their original word or nonword context (experiment 2).

Effects of Speaking Rate Changes on Native and Nonnative Speech Production

Twenty monolingual English speakers and 40 native Spanish speakers, who were either relatively proficient or nonproficient in English, produced English /p/ at self-selected normal and fast speaking rates. The native English (NE) subjects showed much the same rate effect on voice onset time (VOT) seen in earlier studies. Native Spanish (NS) subjects who were relatively proficient in pronouncing English used fewer short-lag stops and showed an English-like rate effect on VOT. NS subjects who were relatively nonproficient in English, on the other hand, used more short-lag stops and did not show a significant speaking rate effect on VOT, although they did demonstrate speaking rate effects on vowel duration and phrase duration. Among the NS subjects were 21 whose VOT values closely matched those of the NE subjects at both speaking rates, and who showed a rate effect similar to that found for the NE subjects. Their ability to modify VOT across speaking rates suggested that these NS subjects may have established a phonetic category for English /p/.

Effects of age of second-language learning on the production of English consonants

This study examined the production of English consonants by native speakers of Italian. The 240 adult native Italian speakers of English who participated had begun learning English when they emigrated to Canada between the ages of 2 and 23 years. Word-initial, word-medial and word-final tokens of English stops and fricatives were assessed through forced-choice judgments made by native English-speaking listeners, and acoustically. The native Italian subjects' ages of learning (AOL) English exerted a systematic effect on their production of English consonants even though they had lived in Canada for an average of 32 years, and reported speaking English more than Italian. In all but two instances, one or more native Italian subgroup defined on the basis of AOL differed significantly from subjects in a native English (NE) control group. The AOL of the first native Italian subgroup to differ from the NE subjects varied across consonant and syllable position. The results are discussed in terms of hypotheses proposed in the literature concerning the basis of segmental errors in L2 speech production.

The interlingual identification of Spanish and English vowels.

Spanish/English bilinguals and English monolinguals (30 each) rated pairs of vowels separated by 1.2 s on a nine-point scale. The pairs consisted of two Spanish vowels (drawn from one of three tokens each of /i/, /e/, /a/), two English vowels (tokens of /i/, /i/, /ei/, /ε/, /æ/, /Λ/, /α/), or one Spanish and one English vowel. Both auditory and phonetic factors influenced the ratings. Native Spanish subjects judged pairs consisting of two Spanish vowels to be more dissimilar than the English subjects; conversely, the native English subjects judged pairs of English vowels to be more dissimilar than the Spanish subjects. As expected, both the Spanish and the English subjects judged pairs of vowels that were distant in an F1–F2 space to be more dissimilar than pairs of vowels that were closer together. The Spanish subjects seemed not to distinguish phonetically certain pairs of English vowels (e.g., (/i/–/i/, /α/–/Λ/)) and thus to have rated them as more similar than the English subjects. The study provided little evidence that the Spanish subjects−even those experienced in English−were developing phonetic categories for English /i/ or /æ/. It did provide evidence, however, that the Spanish subjects were learning to distinguish /ε/ from Spanish /e/ (which has an [ε] allophone). As expected, given the larger number of vowels in English than Spanish, the best MDS solution involved more dimensions for the English than the Spanish subjects (three versus two). Spanish subjects who pronounced English well gave greater weight to F1 formant movement than subjects who pronounced English poorly. They also judged pairs of English vowels to be more dissimilar than the nonproficient subjects, suggesting a possible auditory perceptual basis for individual differences in L2 speech learning ability. [Supported by NIH.]

Stress in silent reading: Effects of concurrent articulation on the detection of syllabic stress patterns in written words in english speakers

Abstract Concurrent articulation was found to impair native English subjects' ability to compare the internal stress pattern of written words. In one task, the subjects judged the stress-similarity of pairs of written words. Concurrent articulation impaired performance more than concurrent hearing. In a second study, the subjects marked written sentences for lexical and syllabic stress; concurrent articulation and chewing both caused performance to become less accurate than when it was performed silently, but the effects were somewhat more marked for concurrent articulation. Because movement of the articulators has such a specific effect on the analysis of stress within written words, we propose that the representations established by “inner speech” are sensitive to the internal stress structure of the word. Nothing in these results supports the possibility (Black & Byng, 1986) that a pre-lexical source is indicated for these effects. They are probably post-lexical and reflect off-line processing.

Compensating for a bite block in /s/ and /t/ production: Palatographic, acoustic, and perceptual data

Electropalatography was used to monitor linguapalatal contact patterns in /s/ and /t/. Talkers often compensated incompletely for a bite block, both immediately after its insertion (sample B1) and after 10 min of practice (sample B2). Significant differences in the number of sensors contacted were noted between normal and bite-block samples for both /s/ and /t/. Differences in length of constriction in /t/, and the A-P location and width of the groove in /s/ were also noted. The two native English subjects compensated better than three Arabic subjects, perhaps because English /s/ and /t/ are formed more posteriorily and with a smaller contact area than their Arabic counterparts. A significant correlation existed between the area and A-P location of linguapalatal contact. All five subjects formed a groove for /s/ in sample B2, but two often did not produce /t/ with complete constriction. This suggests a groove is critical for /s/, but complete constriction is not critical for /t/. The contact patterns in sample B2 more closely resembled normal speech than those in sample B1 in some instances, while in other instances the reverse was true. The conclusion that subjects sometimes overcompensated in sample B2 was supported by the results of detailed acoustic and perceptual analyses for one subject. Taken together, the results suggest that compensation for a bite block is not instantaneous, and that specific parameter values may be encoded in central phonetic representations.

A differential effect of release bursts on the stop voicing judgments of native French and English listeners

Removing the release burst from original word-final English /g/ tokens influenced the stop voicing judgments of native French but not native English subjects. The results suggest that the French subjects gave greater weight to release burst information because stops are usually released in the word-final position of French words.