Native Language Phonology Research Articles

Motor constellation theory: A model of infants' phonological development.

Every normally developing human infant solves the difficult problem of mapping their native-language phonology, but the neural mechanisms underpinning this behavior remain poorly understood. Here, motor constellation theory, an integrative neurophonological model, is presented, with the goal of explicating this issue. It is assumed that infants' motor-auditory phonological mapping takes place through infants' orosensory "reaching" for phonological elements observed in the language-specific ambient phonology, via reference to kinesthetic feedback from motor systems (e.g., articulators), and auditory feedback from resulting speech and speech-like sounds. Attempts are regulated by basal ganglion-cerebellar speech neural circuitry, and successful attempts at reproduction are enforced through dopaminergic signaling. Early in life, the pace of anatomical development constrains mapping such that complete language-specific phonological mapping is prohibited by infants' undeveloped supralaryngeal vocal tract and undescended larynx; constraints gradually dissolve with age, enabling adult phonology. Where appropriate, reference is made to findings from animal and clinical models. Some implications for future modeling and simulation efforts, as well as clinical settings, are also discussed.

Matched-accent processing: Bulgarian-English bilinguals do not have a processing advantage with Bulgarian-accented English over native English speech

The Interlanguage Speech Intelligibility Benefit (ISIB) hypothesis for Talkers suggests that there is a potential benefit when listening to one’s second language when it is produced in the accent of one’s first language (matched-accent processing). This study explores ISIB, considering listener proficiency. According to second language learning theories, the listener’s second language proficiency determines the extent to which they rely on their first language phonetics, hence the magnitude of ISIB may be affected by listener proficiency. The accuracy and reaction times of Bulgarian-English bilinguals living in the UK were recorded in a lexical decision task. The English stimuli were produced by native English speakers and Bulgarian-English bilinguals. Listeners responded more slowly and less accurately to the matched-accent stimuli than the native English stimuli. In addition, they adapted their reaction times faster to new speakers with a native English accent compared to a Bulgarian accent. However, the listeners with the lowest English proficiency had no advantage in reaction times and accuracy for either accent. The results offer mixed support for ISIB for Talkers, and are consistent with second language learning theories according to which listeners rely less on their native language phonology when their proficiency in the second language has increased.

The Influence of Accent Distance on Perceptual Adaptation in Toddlers and Adults

ABSTRACT Foreign accents can vary considerably in the degree to which they deviate from the listener’s native accent, but little is known about how the relationship between a speaker’s accent and a listener’s native language phonology mediates adaptation. Using an artificial accent methodology, we addressed this issue by constructing a set of three artificial accents (Near, Far, and Farther), varying in the number and magnitude of pronunciation deviations from standard Canadian English. These accents were presented to toddlers and adults in an eye-tracking task. Regardless of accent type, adults readily adapted to the exposed pronunciation change. Adults exposed to the Farther accent were also more willing to accept novel pronunciation changes. Young toddlers exposed to Far or Farther accents showed no evidence of acquiring the exposed pronunciation change and demonstrated worse word recognition for standard Canadian-accented words. These findings suggest that when a speaker’s accent deviates substantially from a young toddler’s native accent, this may lead to a significant decrement in their ability to recognize not only an unfamiliar accent but also native-accented speech. Overall, these findings provide a well-controlled test of competing models of accent adaptation and generate multiple hypotheses to be examined in the future using more ecologically valid stimuli.

Enseignement de la prononciation de l’anglais langue étrangère : le rôle des universaux et des traits spécifiques aux langues

This note considers two areas that may help teachers teach English pronunciation, namely the role of native language phonology and linguistic universals. The discussion is limited to sounds of English leaving suprasegmental issues aside and concentrates on French learners. Native language phonology constitutes a grid for the speech loop: L2 learners see the world of English through French glasses and they perceive/produce contrasts filtered by their L1 systemic properties. The second contribution of this note concerns the use of linguistic universals in the ESL classroom. Linguistic universals are features common to all languages; they are less marked, learned first and lost last in pathological speech loss. Sound systems and syllable structure all obey a universal markedness scale. Deeper understanding of these scales may help the design of L2 pronunciation teaching programmes.

The development of infants' responses to mispronunciations: A meta-analysis.

As they develop into mature speakers of their native language, infants must not only learn words but also the sounds that make up those words. To do so, they must strike a balance between accepting speaker-dependent variation (e.g., mood, voice, accent) but appropriately rejecting variation when it (potentially) changes a word's meaning (e.g., cat vs. hat). This meta-analysis focuses on studies investigating infants' ability to detect mispronunciations in familiar words, or mispronunciation sensitivity. Our goal was to evaluate the development of infants' phonological representations for familiar words as well as explore the role of experimental manipulations related to theoretical questions and of analysis choices. The results show that although infants are sensitive to mispronunciations, they still accept these altered forms as labels for target objects. Interestingly, this ability is not modulated by age or vocabulary size, suggesting that a mature understanding of native language phonology may be present in infants from an early age, possibly before the vocabulary explosion. These results support several theoretical assumptions made in the literature, such as sensitivity to mispronunciation size and position of the mispronunciation. We also shed light on the impact of data analysis choices that may lead to different conclusions regarding the development of infants' mispronunciation sensitivity. Our article concludes with recommendations for improved practice in testing infants' word and sentence processing online. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Lexical bias in second language perception: Word position, age of arrival, and native language phonology.

The study examines whether non-native listeners leverage their L2 lexicon during a phonetic identification task and whether lexical bias is influenced by word position and length. Native English and native Mandarin speakers were tested on English words where the natural sibilant was replaced by one member of a nine-step [s]/[ʃ] continuum. English speakers experience a lexical bias effect for longer words. No clear bias was observed for Mandarin participants, although age of arrival correlated with amount of lexical bias but only in the initial position of longer words. These results suggest that language proficiency and higher-order linguistic representations drive perception.

Analisis Kesalahan Penulisan Gairaigo pada Mahasiswa Tingkat II Tahun Ajaran 2017/2018 Program Studi Pendidikan Bahasa Jepang Universitas Negeri Padang

Gairaigo is one of the learning aspects that must be mastered by Japanese learners. The differences in gairaigo writing from the native language either phonology or morphology make Japanese learners often making mistakes. This papers focused on the form and type of errors in gairaigo writing for students on the second years of the academic 2017/2018 years of the Japanese Language Education study Program at Padang State University. The theory used in this paper was an error analysis method based on the theory of Tarigan (2011). The approach used in this paper was a quantitative and qualitative approach (combination method) with a sequential explanatory model (sequence of proof) proposed by Creswell (2009). Data were taken using test that was open-ended questions and non-test techniques that was interview in accordance with the location of errors in student writing. the form of errors in writing gairaigo of the students at the 2017/2018 on the first indicator was about 76 items with a percentage of 16.89% of phonological errors. On the other hand, the form of morphological errors can be identified as many as 40 items with a percentage of 8.89%. The Gairaigo error in the second indicator was about 26 errors with a percentage of 17.33%. While the error form was about 28 items with a percentage of 18.67%. The type of gairaigo writing errors found in the first indicator was about 131 errors with a percentage of 29.11% for mistake errors. Meanwhile, the lapses errors can be found in 5 errors with a percentage of 1.11%. The type of errors in the second indicator was about 59 errors with a percentage of 39.33%. On the contrary, the type of lapses errors can be found in 2 errors with a percentage of 1.33%.

Paradigm uniformity bias in the learning of Korean verbal inflections

This study explores the role of paradigm uniformity bias in the acquisition of Korean verbal inflections. Paradigm uniformity bias has been proposed in a constraint-based phonological framework, but has rarely been supported by experimental data. This paper provides experimental evidence for paradigm uniformity bias from four- to seven-year-old Korean children learning their native language phonology. Experiment 1 demonstrates that children alter morphological structures in order to produce non-alternating verb forms. Experiment 2 shows that the tendency to adjust morphological structures is rooted in children's preference for uniform paradigms, not in their ignorance of alternations. The results suggest that paradigm uniformity bias plays a role in determining children's preferred production patterns, which favour non-alternating forms even after they have acquired adult-like knowledge of the patterns of alternations.

Phonology modulates the illusory vowels in perceptual illusions: Evidence from Mandarin and English

Native speakers perceive illusory vowels when presented with sound sequences that do not respect the phonotactic constraints of their language (Dupoux, Kakehi, Hirose, Pallier, & Mehler, 1999; Kabak & Idsardi, 2007). There is, however, less work on the quality of the illusory vowel. Recently, it has been claimed that the quality of the illusory vowel is also modulated by the phonology of the language, and that the phenomenon of illusory vowels can be understood as a result of the listener reverse inferring the best parse of the underlying representation given their native language phonology and the acoustics of the input stream (Durvasula & Kahng, 2015). The view predicts that listeners are likely to hear different illusory vowels in different phonological contexts. In support of this prediction, we show through two perceptual experiments that Mandarin Chinese speakers (but not American English speakers) perceive different illusory vowels in different phonotactic contexts. Specifically, when presented with phonotactically illegal alveopalatal coda consonants, Mandarin speakers perceived an illusory /i/, but in illegal alveolar stop coda contexts, they perceived a /ə/.

Musical Sophistication and the Effect of Complexity on Auditory Discrimination in Finnish Speakers.

Musical experiences and native language are both known to affect auditory processing. The present work aims to disentangle the influences of native language phonology and musicality on behavioral and subcortical sound feature processing in a population of musically diverse Finnish speakers as well as to investigate the specificity of enhancement from musical training. Finnish speakers are highly sensitive to duration cues since in Finnish, vowel and consonant duration determine word meaning. Using a correlational approach with a set of behavioral sound feature discrimination tasks, brainstem recordings, and a musical sophistication questionnaire, we find no evidence for an association between musical sophistication and more precise duration processing in Finnish speakers either in the auditory brainstem response or in behavioral tasks, but they do show an enhanced pitch discrimination compared to Finnish speakers with less musical experience and show greater duration modulation in a complex task. These results are consistent with a ceiling effect set for certain sound features which corresponds to the phonology of the native language, leaving an opportunity for music experience-based enhancement of sound features not explicitly encoded in the language (such as pitch, which is not explicitly encoded in Finnish). Finally, the pattern of duration modulation in more musically sophisticated Finnish speakers suggests integrated feature processing for greater efficiency in a real world musical situation. These results have implications for research into the specificity of plasticity in the auditory system as well as to the effects of interaction of specific language features with musical experiences.

Modeling native phonology and non-native speech perception using electroencephalography signals

Studies of language learning in adulthood show that learners’ native language phonologies shape their non-native perception and production abilities. Nonetheless, listeners are able to learn to perceive new speech sound contrasts given training. The present study attempts to model how foreign consonants are perceived prior to training or second language study. Brain responses were recorded during passive listening using electroencephalography (EEG), using twelve monolingual English-native listeners and isolated consonant-vowel (CV) syllables read by speakers of several languages (Dutch, English, Hungarian, Hindi, Swahili). To model native-language phonology, EEG responses to native (English) syllables were used to train classifiers based on phonological feature labels for the consonants in each syllable. The trained classifiers were then applied to the EEG responses to foreign syllables, and the classifier outputs used to generate confusion probabilities between each pair of foreign and native consonants for each of the four foreign languages. Confusion matrices based on the EEG classifiers compare favorably to confusion matrices based solely on number of phonological feature mismatches. Ongoing work investigates whether optimal phonological features can be learned from the EEG data using clustering algorithms.

Abstraction of phonological representations in adult nonnative speakers

Perception of nonnative contrasts by adult second language (L2) learners is affected by native language phonology. The current study contrasted predictions from two models of L2 phonological acquisition that focus on different representational levels as the origin of native language transfer: the abstract categorization level from the Perceptual Assimilation Model for L2 learners (PAM-L2; Best & Tyler, 2007) and the phonetic level from the Automatic Selective Perception model (ASP; Strange, 2011). The target phonemes were pairs of Arabic consonants that were equally similar on the abstract categorization level but unequally similar on the phonetic level—voiced and voiceless pharyngeal fricatives /ʕ/, /ħ/ and uvular fricatives /χ/, /ʁ/. Twenty intermediate-level English-speaking Arabic L2 learners and 10 Arabic native speakers (NS) completed auditory identification and discrimination tasks. We first conducted a discriminant analysis (DA) to quantify ASP predictions based on phonetic variables. L2 learners were generally more accurate when perceiving the pharyngeal consonants compared to the uvulars and when perceiving the voiced phonemes compared to the voiceless. These findings, and L2 learners’ perceptual variation across contexts, predicted by the DA, suggest that L2 speakers were able to track phonetic cues during L2 perception and thus favor the ASP. These results support the interpretation that L2 learners attend to the phonetic detail in nonnative segments; however, they do not build nativelike phonological representations for the segments with weaker phonetic cues. This ability to process low-level phonetic cues opens the possibility for learners to create more robust phonological representations.

Interactions between musicality and native language for enhanced sound feature processing

Interactions between musicality and native language for enhanced sound feature processing

The Interlanguage Speech Intelligibility Benefit as Bias Toward Native-Language Phonology.

Two hypotheses have been advanced in the recent literature with respect to the so-called Interlanguage Speech Intelligibility Benefit (ISIB): a nonnative speaker will be better understood by a another nonnative listener than a native speaker of the target language will be (a) only when the nonnatives share the same native language (matched interlanguage) or (b) even when the nonnatives have different mother tongues (non-matched interlanguage). Based on a survey of published experimental materials, the present article will demonstrate that both the restricted (a) and the generalized (b) hypotheses are false when the ISIB effect is evaluated in terms of absolute intelligibility scores. We will then propose a simple way to compute a relative measure for the ISIB (R-ISIB), which we claim is a more insightful way of evaluating the interlanguage benefit, and test the hypotheses in relative (R-ISIB) terms on the same literature data. We then find that our R-ISIB measure only supports the more restricted hypothesis (a) while rejecting the more general hypothesis (b). This finding shows that the native language shared by the interactants biases the listener toward interpreting sounds in terms of the phonology of the shared mother tongue.

Rapid and automatic speech-specific learning mechanism in human neocortex

A unique feature of human communication system is our ability to rapidly acquire new words and build large vocabularies. However, its neurobiological foundations remain largely unknown. In an electrophysiological study optimally designed to probe this rapid formation of new word memory circuits, we employed acoustically controlled novel word-forms incorporating native and non-native speech sounds, while manipulating the subjects' attention on the input. We found a robust index of neurolexical memory-trace formation: a rapid enhancement of the brain's activation elicited by novel words during a short (~30min) perceptual exposure, underpinned by fronto-temporal cortical networks, and, importantly, correlated with behavioural learning outcomes. Crucially, this neural memory trace build-up took place regardless of focused attention on the input or any pre-existing or learnt semantics. Furthermore, it was found only for stimuli with native-language phonology, but not for acoustically closely matching non-native words. These findings demonstrate a specialised cortical mechanism for rapid, automatic and phonology-dependent formation of neural word memory circuits.

A quantitative model of first language influence in second language consonant learning

Theoretical models argue that listeners’ perception of second language sounds is heavily influenced by their native language phonology, a prediction borne out by behavioural studies. However, we lack quantitative models capable of making more precise predictions of the way in which the first and second language sound systems interact. The current study introduces a computational modelling framework that permits comparison of different second language learning strategies which vary both in the degree of first language influence as well as in the manner in which second language input is combined with existing first language knowledge. Six different model variants were evaluated by comparison with behavioural data on a task involving the identification of intervocalic consonants of Castilian Spanish by Mandarin Chinese listeners. All approaches demonstrated a similar pattern of rapid improvement with exposure to that observed in listeners. However, approaches that made use of independent first and second language models made the best predictions. An approach that excluded first language influence both predicted lower listener identification levels in the initial stages of learning and higher scores in later stages, demonstrating that first language experience helps to bootstrap second language sound learning but ultimately hinders identification. However, modelling outcomes also demonstrate that no single approach can account for the identification patterns for all consonants, suggesting that learners deploy different approaches to the learning of individual sounds.

Khalkha Mongolian speakers' vowel bias: L1 influences on the acquisition of non-adjacent vocalic dependencies

Native language (L1) phonology has been shown to play an important role in influencing humans' perception and production of novel speech. Yet research examining the conditions which trigger humans to calculate transitional probability between non-adjacent linguistic elements has not considered the potential influence of L1 phonology. For example, previous artificial grammar learning (AGL) literature has shown that participants acquire certain non-adjacent phonological dependencies only with difficulty. However, this previous research used only speakers of English or French, languages which do not exhibit such dependencies. This paper investigates how L1 phonology influences participants' acquisition of non-adjacent phonological dependencies in an AGL task. Five experiments were conducted with speakers of Khalkha Mongolian, a language which exhibits a non-adjacent dependency, vowel harmony and with speakers of American English, a language which exhibits no such dependencies. Khalkha Mongolian speakers successfully acquired non-adjacent vocalic dependencies while American English speakers failed to do so under identical statistical conditions. Besides providing further evidence that statistical learning is not limited to the acquisition of adjacent dependencies, these findings suggest that L1 phonology plays an important role in biasing speakers' attention towards certain aspects of language.

Range of variability in native and non-native spontaneous speech intervocalic stops

Speakers produce sounds differently in spontaneous vs careful speech, and how they do this shows both similarities and differences across languages. The current project examines spontaneous conversational speech and read speech among monolingual English speakers, Dutch-English bilinguals, and Spanish-English bilinguals (for Dutch and Spanish, in both their L1 and English). The phonology of intervocalic stops differs in these languages: Dutch has final devoicing, Spanish has approximation of /bdg/, and English has flapping of /td/. In our recordings, Dutch speakers often devoiced final stops in both Dutch and English in spontaneous speech, while native English speakers produced voiced stops or approximants. Speakers of all the languages produced some approximant realizations and some deletions. Through measurements of consonant duration, amplitude dip during the consonant, and cessation of voicing, this work shows the range of acoustic variability produced by speakers of three languages in their L1 and their L2, in spontaneous and careful speech. This allows a comparison of how much of speech variability stems from the native language phonology, from language-specific phonetics, and from language-general spontaneous speech reduction.

Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence for Early and Automatic Detection of Phonological Equivalence in Variable Speech Inputs

Speech sounds are not always perceived in accordance with their acoustic-phonetic content. For example, an early and automatic process of perceptual repair, which ensures conformity of speech inputs to the listener's native language phonology, applies to individual input segments that do not exist in the native inventory or to sound sequences that are illicit according to the native phonotactic restrictions on sound co-occurrences. The present study with Russian and Canadian English speakers shows that listeners may perceive phonetically distinct and licit sound sequences as equivalent when the native language system provides robust evidence for mapping multiple phonetic forms onto a single phonological representation. In Russian, due to an optional but productive t-deletion process that affects /stn/ clusters, the surface forms [sn] and [stn] may be phonologically equivalent and map to a single phonological form /stn/. In contrast, [sn] and [stn] clusters are usually phonologically distinct in (Canadian) English. Behavioral data from identification and discrimination tasks indicated that [sn] and [stn] clusters were more confusable for Russian than for English speakers. The EEG experiment employed an oddball paradigm with nonwords [asna] and [astna] used as the standard and deviant stimuli. A reliable mismatch negativity response was elicited approximately 100 msec postchange in the English group but not in the Russian group. These findings point to a perceptual repair mechanism that is engaged automatically at a prelexical level to ensure immediate encoding of speech inputs in phonological terms, which in turn enables efficient access to the meaning of a spoken utterance.

The development of a phonological illusion: a cross‐linguistic study with Japanese and French infants

In adults, native language phonology has strong perceptual effects. Previous work has shown that Japanese speakers, unlike French speakers, break up illegal sequences of consonants with illusory vowels: they report hearing abna as abuna. To study the development of phonological grammar, we compared Japanese and French infants in a discrimination task. In Experiment 1, we observed that 14-month-old Japanese infants, in contrast to French infants, failed to discriminate phonetically varied sets of abna-type and abuna-type stimuli. In Experiment 2, 8-month-old French and Japanese did not differ significantly from each other. In Experiment 3, we found that, like adults, Japanese infants can discriminate abna from abuna when phonetic variability is reduced (single item). These results show that the phonologically induced /u/ illusion is already experienced by Japanese infants at the age of 14 months. Hence, before having acquired many words of their language, they have grasped enough of their native phonological grammar to constrain their perception of speech sound sequences.