Native Speakers Of Polish Research Articles

Agreement under Case Matching in Polish co and który Relative Clauses Headed by Numerically Quantified Nouns*

This paper aims to describe subject-verb agreement patterns within Polish co and ktory relative clauses in which the relativized subject head noun (virile and nonvirile) modified by a higher numeral is assigned genitive case. Such subjects in Polish obligatorily induce default 3sg. neut. agreement on the main-clause verbal predicate. However, when the same subject is relativized while also being the relative-clause subject, various agreement options may occur depending on the type of relative marker as well as the grammatical gender of the head noun. In order to examine these agreement possibilities, a survey was conducted measuring Polish native speakers’ acceptability judgments. These patterns suggest that both co and ktory relatives could be derived via a matching analysis because they both allow optionality of agreement in certain environments. Furthermore, this optionality can be accounted for in terms of Case attraction and syncretism of case found in the paradigms of higher numerals and the relative pronoun ktory.

Границы синонимического ряда в обыденном сознании носителей польского языка (на материале синонимов лексемы “los”)

Границы синонимического ряда в обыденном сознании носителей польского языка (на материале синонимов лексемы “los”)

How Poles indicate people and objects, and what they think of certain forms of pointing gestures

Abstract The first gesture produced by children before they utter their first word has the form of an extended index finger. T his gesture is often described as a prototypical pointing gesture and is regarded as a universal display of intentional communication in most explored cultures (Volterra et al. 2011; Tomasello 2007). It is interesting, however, that in many cultures, a pointing gesture realized with index finger extended is regarded as rude, especially when made by adults or by children past the age of learning to speak. T he aim of this paper is to answer some questions concerning the form and usage of pointing gestures performed by native speakers of Polish. T his paper is focused on potential determinants of the form of pointing gestures, on the Polish cultural norms for indicating people and objects, as well as on the perception of pointing gestures. T he study is based on two experiments and a survey.

Spontaniczne nabywanie umiejętności wymowy wybranych elementów segmentalnych w języku hiszpańskim przez rodowitych użytkowników języka polskiego – studium przypadku

Spontaneous acquisition of pronunciation of selected segmental elements in Spanish, by native speakers of Polish. A case study
 A contrastive analysis of the phonology and phonetics of the native and a foreign tongue cannot foresee all pronunciation errors in the foreign language; their character needs to be established experimentally. The goal of this paper is to determine whether subjects can spontaneously acquire the pronunciation of selected sounds of Spanish, and whether the form of the stimulus (written vs. oral) influences the phonetic correctness of the result. The experiment was conducted on two students. The corpus was made up by an oral statement (reading of a series of sentences), and free answers to oral questions. The results show that correct pronunciation occurs when sounds are identical in both languages, and to a certain degree, when L2 sounds are absent from L1. Errors arise when sounds are similar but not identical in L1 and L2. The correctness of realization increases during free speech, and the increase is independent from the skill level of the subject.

ADULT L2 ACQUISITION OF REFLEXIVE VERBS IN RUSSIAN AND POLISH

From previous research, perceptual saliency and morphophonological and morphosyntactic regularity significantly contribute to a successful acquisition of morphemes (Goldschneider & DeKeyser 2001). This pilot study investigates if and to what extent these features are predictors in the acquisition of reflexive verbs in adult L2 Polish and Russian. Despite these languages being closely related, their reflexive verbs differ dramatically. Polish uses a particle siẹ that has a high sonority value and can be freely placed in a sentence. Russian uses a reflexive affix which is placed directly after the finite verb ending and has two phonetically reduced variants -sja and -s’ that depend on the phonological context. In this pilot study, we hypothesized that i) perceptual saliency (understood as higher sonority and a prominent position in a sentence) facilitated perception and sentence repetition; ii) morphosyntactic regularity and predictability positively affected written production. Two groups of Dutch first-year students learning Russian and Polish respectively as L2 at the University of Amsterdam were recruited. Russian and Polish native speakers served as controls. In order to test perception/comprehension and (re)production of reflexive verbs in L2, a sentence repetition task (SRT) was used. The task consisted of 15 target sentences and 10 distractors for each language (syllable length: 17–22), and was administered in e-prime. The sentence position of the target structure and semantic categories of reflexive verbs were controlled. In order to test written production, a sentence translation task (STT) was developed that contained 15 Dutch items. For the controls, accuracy in both tasks was at ceiling. The Dutch-L2 groups performed significantly worse. The accuracy scores on target structures in SRT were better in Polish (61% vs. 40%). In the STT, the Russian L2 students outperformed the Polish L2 participants (84% vs. 58%). The results of this study support the idea that perceptual saliency and morphophonological uniformity affect perception and (re)production, while morphosyntactic regularity and predictability (boundness) is relevant for written production.

The gradient effect of transitional magnitude: A source of the vowel context effect

Previous studies have shown that vocalic transitions play an important role in the identification of the consonantal places (e.g., Whalen 1981/1991, Nowak 2006, Babel & McGuire 2013). While it has been intermittantly reported that the contribution of transitions may depend on vowel contexts, the common methodology, i.e., C-V cross-splicing, is too coarse to precisely identify the nature of this effect. In the present study, vocalic transitions are systematically manipulated and used as a gradient variable by incrementally removing the transitional period of the three vowels /u a e/ following alveolopalatal sibilant /ɕ/ in Polish. In an identification task, native Polish speakers were given a choice between /ɕ/ and /ʂ/ for stimuli with varying levels of palatal transitions. The results showed that participants’ perception is gradient: greater transitions overall elicit more palatal responses in all vowel contexts. More importantly, it has been shown that the apparent vowel effect can be largely reduced to the relative magnitude of transitions that are specific to each vowel. The low and back vowels elicit greater palatal transitions providing more robust transitional cues in perception, while the high and front vowels elicit smaller or nearly zero palatal transitions providing less robust cues to the sibilants’ place.

Formulaic Sequences as Fluency Devices in the Oral Production of Native Speakers of Polish

In this paper we attempt to determine the nature and strength of the relationship between the use of formulaic sequences and productive fluency of native speakers of Polish. In particular, we seek to validate the claim that speech characterized by a higher incidence of formulaic sequences is produced more rapidly and with fewer hesitation phenomena. The analysis is based on monologic speeches delivered by 45 speakers of L1 Polish. The data include both the recordings and their transcriptions annotated for a number of objective fluency measures. In the first part of the study the total of formulaic sequences is established for each sample. This is followed by determining a set of temporal measures of the speakers' output (speech rate, articulation rate, mean length of runs, mean length of pauses, phonation time ratio). The study provides some preliminary evidence of the fluency-enhancing role of formulaic language. Our results show that the use of formulaic sequences is positively and significantly correlated with speech rate, mean length of runs and phonation time ratio. This suggests that a higher concentration of formulaic material in output is associated with faster speed of speech, longer stretches of speech between pauses and an increased amount of time filled with speech.

Phonetic Imitation of Vowel Duration in L2 Speech

This paper reports the results of a pilot study concerned with phonetic imitation in the speech of Polish learners of English. The purpose of the study was to investigate whether native speakers of Polish imitate the length of English vowels and to determine whether the extent of phonetic imitation may be influenced by the model talker being a native or a non-native speaker of English. The participants were asked to perform an auditory naming task in which they indentified objects and actions presented on a set of photos twice, with and without the imitation task. The imitation task was further sub-divided depending on the model talker being a native or non-native speaker of English (a native Southern British English speaker and a native Polish speaker fluent in English). As the aim was to investigate the variability in durational characteristics of English vowels, the series of front vowels /æ e ɪ iː/ were analysed in the shortening and lengthening b_t vs. b_d contexts. The results of the study show that the participants imitated the length of the investigated vowels as a result of exposure to the two model talkers. The data suggest that the degree of imitation was mediated both by linguistic and social factors and that the direction of convergence might have been affected by the participants’ attitude toward L2 pronunciation.

Roadrunners and Eagles

Our previous research on perception of gated casual English by university students suggests that ceteris paribus, Polish students are much more accurate than Greeks. A recent pilot study of casually-spoken Polish leads us to the conclusion that many shortcuts found in English are also common in Polish, so that similar perceptual strategies can be used in both languages, though differing in detail. Based on these preliminary results, it seems likely that perceptual strategies across languages tend towards the “eagle” approach - where a birds-eye view of the acoustic terrain without too much emphasis on detail is found - or the “roadrunner” approach, where phonetic detail is followed closely. In the former case, perceivers adjust easily to alternation caused by casual speech phonology while in the latter, perceivers expect little variation and possibly even find it confusing. Native speakers of Greek are “roadrunners”, since there is little phonological reduction in their language there is little difference, for example, between stressed and unstressed syllables. We suggest that native speakers of Polish join English speakers as “eagles”, which gives them a natural perceptual advantage in English. There is a conceptual similarity between this idea and that of the stress- or syllable-timed language, and we hypothesise that as in this case, there is a cline rather than a sharp division between eagles and roadrunners. As usual, more research is called for.

Prediction in language comprehension beyond specific words: An ERP study on sentence comprehension in Polish

Recently, several ERP studies have shown that the human language comprehension system anticipates words that are highly likely continuations of a given text. However, it remains an open issue whether the language comprehension system can also make predictions that go beyond a specific word. Here, we address the question of whether readers predict broad semantically defined classes of words. Event-related brain potentials were recorded, while native Polish speakers read short stories for comprehension. The stories were setting up a context that was very strongly biasing towards either an animate or an inanimate direct object noun in the story-final sentence. At the same time, the context was highly predictive for a specific direct object noun or not predictive for a specific direct object noun. The noun that was actually presented either did fit the animacy bias of the context or did not fit. The noun was preceded by an adjective. Polish has four classes of grammatical gender in the singular: feminine, neuter, masculine-animate, and masculine-inanimate. The prenominal adjective agrees with the direct object noun with respect to case and, in the case of masculine-animate and masculine-inanimate nouns, with respect to the in-/animacy of the noun. This allowed us to probe, at the adjective, whether the comprehension system predicts the in-/animacy of the direct object noun. Prediction-inconsistent adjectives elicited a negativity relative to prediction-consistent adjectives. This negativity was of the same size for contexts biasing towards a specific noun and for contexts not biasing towards a specific noun. These findings show that the comprehension system can predict semantically defined classes of words.

Alcune considerazioni sull’uso della traduzione nella didattica d’italiano come lingua straniera

For many years, the translation has not been recommended and has even been banned in language teaching and learning. Recently, it seems to regain some success at this field. In this article we briefly analyze how the role of this technique has changed throughout the years within the major language teaching theories so as to get to the reasons for its reassessment we can observe nowadays. Finally, we present some considerations on how we can use activities based on translation in the classroom with a particular regard to Italian language teaching to adult learners who are native speakers of Polish.

Phrasal Verbs in learner English: a semantic approach. A study based on a POS tagged spoken corpus of learner English

Phrasal Verbs (PVs), understood as a verb and a particle, though very common in native speech, are reportedly difficult to learn by non-native speakers (NNSs) of English (see Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman 1999). The hypothesis is therefore put forward that for Polish learners of English too the range of PVs is generally significantly smaller than for English native speakers (NSs) and that their degree of use of the semantic categories of PVs is inversely proportional to the PVs’ level of idiomaticity. In other words, Polish learners have little trouble with transparent verbs, more with semi-transparent and most with opaque ones (see Dagut and Laufer 1985). In order to verify this hypothesis, we have used the evidence from the PLINDSEI corpus, that is, the Polish part of the LINDSEI (Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage), containing advanced English as spoken by NSs of Polish, and from the LOCNEC (Louvain Corpus of Native English Conversation), which we have used as a reference corpus. The comparison of PV usage by Poles as NNSs of English and by English NSs has been performed employing the scheme of contrastive interlanguage analysis (Granger 1996). We show learner over- and underuse of items and illustrate the searches conducted for identifying patterns of use. The methodology applied consists in a partially automatic extraction and a subsequent manual filtering of PVs from a POS-tagged NNS corpus and its reference NS corpus. A semantic analysis of the extracted PVs based on the notion of compositionality (see Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman 1999; Armstrong 2004) has been performed and the hypotheses verified.

Stress “deafness” in a Language with Fixed Word Stress: An ERP Study on Polish

The aim of the present contribution was to examine the factors influencing the prosodic processing in a language with predictable word stress. For Polish, a language with fixed penultimate stress but several well-defined exceptions, difficulties in the processing and representation of prosodic information have been reported (e.g., Peperkamp and Dupoux, 2002). The present study utilized event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the factors influencing prosodic processing in Polish. These factors are (i) the predictability of stress and (ii) the prosodic structure in terms of metrical feet. Polish native speakers were presented with correctly and incorrectly stressed Polish words and instructed to judge the correctness of the perceived stress patterns. For some stress violations, an early negativity was found which was interpreted as a reflection of an error-detection mechanism. In addition, exceptional stress patterns (=antepenultimate stress) and post-lexical (=initial) stress evoked a task-related positivity effect (P300) whose amplitude and latency is correlated with the degree of anomaly and deviation from an expectation. In contrast, violations involving the default (=penultimate stress) did not produce such an effect. This asymmetrical result is interpreted to reflect that Polish native speakers are less sensitive to the default pattern than to the exceptional or post-lexical patterns. Behavioral results are orthogonal to the electrophysiological results showing that Polish speakers had difficulties to reject any kind of stress violation. Thus, on a meta-linguistic level Polish speakers appeared to be stress-“deaf” for any kind of stress manipulation, whereas the neural reactions differentiate between the default and lexicalized patterns.

Glottal variation in /t/ in non-native English speech

This paper explores the linguistic and social factors behind the acquisition of glottal variation in English /t/ by native Polish speakers living in Manchester, UK. It investigates the speech of 40 Polish adults of varying levels of English language proficiency, who have been in Manchester for varying lengths of time, in order to establish what might be encouraging or prohibiting the acquisition of this widespread linguistic feature. Using quantitative sociolinguistic methods, factors such as level of English, length of residence, age, gender, motivation and attitude are considered in accounting for the variation in acquisition. Findings suggest that in addition to level of English and length of residence effects there is a fairly robust gender difference, with women tending to use glottal variants more frequently than men. This gender difference is explored in more detail with reference to a gender as practice type approach.

Sound symbolism in vowels: Vowel quality, duration and pitch in sound-to-size correspondence

The study investigates sound symbolism, concentrating on vowel quality, duration, and pitch in sound-to-size correspondences. Thirty-one native speakers of Polish were asked to rate presented stimuli on a 1–7 point scale ranging from “small” to “big”. The stimuli consisted of /CVC/ sequences, with all six non-nasalized Polish vowels, blocked in three groups. In the first group, vowel quality was investigated, with duration and pitch unaltered. In the second group, vowel was manipulated to increase its duration by 50% relative to a baseline condition. In the third group, F0 of a vowel was linearly downshifted by a scaling factor of 0.8. The results revealed that neither vowel quality nor lowered pitch significantly influenced size ratings. Vowel duration, however, yielded significantly different ratings compared to a baseline condition. Longer durational values yielded “bigger” measures relative to normal duration. This result is taken as evidence that vowel duration has a relatively more robust effect on perception of size in Polish compared to vowel quality and pitch.

The Use of Speech Technology in Foreign Language Pronunciation Training

AbstractIn recent years the application of computer software to the learning process has been found to be an indisputably effective tool supporting the traditional teaching methods. Particular focus has been put on the application of techniques based on speech and language processing to the second language learning. Most of the commercial self-study programs, however, do not allow for introduction of an individualized learning course by the teacher and to concentrate on segmental features only. The paper discusses the use of speech technology in the training of foreign languages' pronunciation and prosody and defines pedagogical requirements for an effective training with CAPT systems. In this context, steps taken in the development of the intelligent tutoring system AzAR3.0 (German‘Automat for accent reduction’) in the scope of the Euronounce project (Cylwiket al., 2008) are described with the focus on creation of the linguistic content. In response to the European Union's call for promoting less widely spoken languages, the project focuses on German as a target language for native speakers of Polish, Slovak, Czech, and Russian, andvice versa. The paper presents the design of the speech corpus for the purpose of the tutoring system and the analysis of pronunciation errors. The results of the latter provide information which is important for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) training on the one hand, and for automatic error detection and feedback generation on the other hand. In the end, Pitch Line software for implementation in the prosody visualization and training module of AzAR3.0 tutoring system is described.

Processing interrogative sentence mood at the semantic-syntactic interface: an electrophysiological research in Chinese, German, and Polish.

BackgroundLanguages differ in the marking of the sentence mood of a polar interrogative (yes/no question). For instance, the interrogative mood is marked at the beginning of the surface structure in Polish, whereas the marker appears at the end in Chinese. In order to generate the corresponding sentence frame, the syntactic specification of the interrogative mood is early in Polish and late in Chinese. In this respect, German belongs to an interesting intermediate class. The yes/no question is expressed by a shift of the finite verb from its final position in the underlying structure into the utterance initial position, a move affecting, hence, both the sentence's final and the sentence's initial constituents. The present study aimed to investigate whether during generation of the semantic structure of a polar interrogative, i.e., the processing preceding the grammatical formulation, the interrogative mood is encoded according to its position in the syntactic structure at distinctive time points in Chinese, German, and Polish.Methodology/Principal FindingsIn a two-choice go/nogo experimental design, native speakers of the three languages responded to pictures by pressing buttons and producing utterances in their native language while their brain potentials were recorded. The emergence and latency of lateralized readiness potentials (LRP) in nogo conditions, in which speakers asked a yes/no question, should indicate the time point of processing the interrogative mood. The results revealed that Chinese, German, and Polish native speakers did not differ from each other in the electrophysiological indicator.Conclusions/SignificanceThe findings suggest that the semantic encoding of the interrogative mood is temporally consistent across languages despite its disparate syntactic specification. The consistent encoding may be ascribed to economic processing of interrogative moods at various sentential positions of the syntactic structures in languages or, more generally, to the overarching status of sentence mood in the semantic structure.

Selectivity of lexical-semantic disorders in Polish-speaking patients with aphasia: Evidence from single-word comprehension

Several neuropsychological studies have shown that patients with brain damage may demonstrate selective category-specific deficits of auditory comprehension. The present paper reports on an investigation of aphasic patients’ preserved ability to perform a semantic task on spoken words despite severe impairment in auditory comprehension, as shown by failure in matching spoken words to pictured objects. Twenty-six aphasic patients (11 women and 15 men) with impaired speech comprehension due to a left-hemisphere ischaemic stroke were examined; all were right-handed and native speakers of Polish. Six narrowly defined semantic categories for which dissociations have been reported are colors, body parts, animals, food, objects (mostly tools), and means of transportation. An analysis using one-way ANOVA with repeated measures in conjunction with the Lambda-Wilks Test revealed significant discrepancies among these categories in aphasic patients, who had much more difficulty comprehending names of colors than they did comprehending names of other objects ( F (5,21) = 13.15; p < .001). Animals were most often the easiest category to understand. The possibility of a simple explanation in terms of word frequency and/or visual complexity was ruled out. Evidence from the present study support the position that so called “global” aphasia is an imprecise term and should be redefined. These results are discussed within the connectionist and modular perspectives on category-specific deficits in aphasia.

Influence of music education on second language acquisition

To explore the extent to which music education influences second-language acquisition, two groups of native Polish speakers, musicians and non-musicians, were asked to reproduce sentences in six languages: English, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Belgian Dutch. The speech stimuli were developed with a text-to-speech application and differed phonemically, phonostylistically, and in length. The paper includes results of a general auditory analysis of subjects' productions as well as the results of a web-based listening test with a panel of native speakers of the involved languages. All collected data were also analyzed with statistical tools. The results revealed that music education exerted a measurable impact on speech perception and production. Musicians outperformed non-musicians in the study. From the results, it appears that the influence of musical expertise extends beyond music processing to speech processing, and the strength of this influence is connected not only to auditory training. Therefore, the superior performance of the musicians in the task may be interpreted as evidence that music education is an enabling factor in the successful acquisition of a second language. It also indicates that the impact of musical training is not a myth, but has a scientific basis.

The Recognition of Gender-Marked Nouns and Verbs in Polish-Speaking Aphasic Patients

In the present study, we investigated the on-line recognition of gender-marked lexical items by three aphasic patients and eighteen matched control participants, all native speakers of Polish. Polish is unique in that it allows investigating grammatical gender across the major categories of nouns and verbs. Patients and their controls were tested using a simple visual lexical decision paradigm in which gender, number and grammatical category were manipulated. Results show that, while response latencies were markedly slower for aphasic patients, gender did not yield differential results in either grammatical category, for both patients and control participants. Plural forms, on the other hand, showed significantly slower response latencies than singular forms in both brain-damaged and unimpaired participants, but only for nouns. We interpret these findings in terms of the inherent vs. contextual, i.e. underspecified, nature of gender and number in the two grammatical categories. This study suggests that while gender can be impaired in off-line performance in aphasia, on-line recognition patterns parallel the performance of non-brain-damaged individuals, confirming the preservation of access procedures in automatic word recognition.