Phonological Cues Research Articles

Prosodic focus marking in Seoul Korean-speaking children: the use of prosodic phrasing.

Prosodic focus marking in Seoul Korean is known to be achieved primarily through prosodic phrasing, different from the use of prosody for this purpose in many other languages. This study investigates how children use prosodic phrasing for focus-marking purposes in Seoul Korean, compared to adults. Using a picture-matching game, we elicited semi-spontaneous production of SOV sentences in various focus conditions from monolingual Seoul Korean-speaking children aged 4 to 11 years. We found that the children varied prosodic boundaries to distinguish narrow focus from pre-focus and broad focus in a largely adult-like manner at the age of 4 to 5; at this age, they did not distinguish narrow focus from post-focus or contrastive focus using prosodic boundaries, similar to the adults. Their use of the prosodic boundaries in distinguishing the focus conditions was not fully adult-like in terms of frequency until the age of 10 to 11. In conjunction with the findings of previous studies on the acquisition of focus marking in Germanic languages, performed using a similar experimental method, our findings suggest that Seoul Korean-speaking children acquire the use of prosodic phrasing earlier than Dutch-speaking children acquiring the use of pitch accent but slightly later than Stockholm Swedish-speaking children acquiring the use of a prominence-marking high tone. These findings imply that the rate of focus-marking acquisition depends on the transparency of the form-meaning mapping between the phonological cue and focus.

Looking beyond literacy and phonology: word learning and phonological cue use in children with and without dyslexia

IntroductionThis study investigated whether children with and without dyslexia differ in word learning and whether phonological cues to word class play a role. If children with dyslexia have difficulties with implicit learning, they might be less sensitive to such cues.MethodsA group of 89 Dutch primary school children from Grades 3 to 6 participated in a word learning experiment, consisting of children with dyslexia (n = 44) and typically developing children (n = 45). Test items were four monosyllabic ‘verb-like' nonwords (e.g., voek) and four bisyllabic ‘noun-like' nonwords (e.g., banijn). They were presented as novel verbs or nouns in a two word sentence frame (e.g., “I voek” or “a voek”), paired with pictures of unfamiliar actions or objects. Nonwords were either consistent (e.g., “I voek,” “a banijn”) or inconsistent (e.g., “I banijn,” “a voek”) with word class. The word learning experiment consisted of a repetition, identification, and naming phase.ResultsChildren with dyslexia showed lower word learning outcomes in the naming phase. However, phonological cues did not affect word learning in either group. Regression analyses indicated that phoneme awareness, receptive vocabulary, and nonword reading were predictors of word learning for all children.DiscussionThese findings indicate that Dutch children with dyslexia have more difficulty in recalling novel words, fitting in with their phonological difficulties. Phonological cues to word class did not contribute to word learning in either group.

“I don’t know who you are”: anomia for people’s names in Alzheimer’s disease

ABSTRACT It is well known that difficulty in the retrieval of people’s names is an early symptom of Alzheimer’s Disease Dementia (ADD), but there is a controversy about the nature of this deficit. In this study, we analyzed whether the nature of the difficulty in retrieving proper names in ADD reflects pre-semantic, semantic, or post-semantic difficulties. To do so, 85 older adults, 35 with ADD and 50 cognitively healthy (CH), completed a task with famous faces involving: recognition, naming, semantic questions, and naming with phonological cues. The ADD group scored lower than the CH group in all tasks. Both groups showed a greater capacity for recognition than naming, but this difference was more pronounced in the ADD group. Additionally, the ADD group showed significantly fewer semantic errors than the CH group. Overall results suggest that the difficulties people with ADD have in naming reflect a degradation at semantic level.

Disentangling cues of different domains in transfer and development in L3 acquisition: An investigation of L2/L3 Mandarin yes-no questions

Abstract This empirical study aims to shed light on L3 initial-stage transfer and later development by investigating Q-operations in L1 English–L2 Cantonese and L1 Cantonese–L2 English bilinguals’ L3 Mandarin and L1 English speakers’ L2 Mandarin at low and high proficiency levels. Data from an online cross-modal priming task and an offline acceptability judgement task found that structural similarity determines transfer source selection. Adopting a de-compositional approach to cues of different domains, we have found both facilitative and detrimental transfer effects from Cantonese, with the latter triggered by orthographic and phonological cues. Our data also suggest that detrimental transfer effects can persist at an advanced stage and that L3 development and acquisition results can be affected by various factors such as word frequency and the nature of learning situations.

German nominal number interpretation in an impaired mental lexicon

Abstract There is an ongoing debate on how speakers and listeners process and interpret information in a morphological system that is very complex and not very transparent. A well-known test case is the German nominal number system. In this paper we employ discriminative learning (e.g., Ramscar & Yarlett, 2007; Baayen et al., 2011, 2019) to test whether discriminative learning networks can be used to better understand the processing of German number. We analyse behavioral data obtained from a patient with primary progressive aphasia (Domahs et al., 2017), and the unimpaired system. We test a model that implements the traditional cues borrowed from the schema approach (Köpcke, 1988, 1993; Köpcke et al., 2021), and compare it to a model that uses segmental and phonotactic information only. Our results for the unimpaired system demonstrate that a model based on only biphones as cues is better able to predict the number of a given word-form than a model using structural phonological cues. We also test whether a discriminative learning model can predict the number decisions by the aphasic patient. The results demonstrate that a biphone-based discriminative model trained on the patient’s responses is superior to a structure-based model in approximating the patient’s behavior.

Memory, Emotion, and Quality of Life in Patients with Long COVID-19.

(1) Background: Persistent COVID is characterized by the presence of fatigue, mental fog, and sleep problems, among others. We aimed to study cognitive abilities (attention, executive functions, memory, language) and psychological and emotional factors in a group of participants of the population with persistent COVID-19 and asymptomatic or non-COVID-19-infected patients; (2) Methods: A total of 86 participants aged 18 to 66 years (X = 46.76) took part in the study, with 57 individuals (66.27%) in the experimental group and 29 (33.73%) in the control group. A comprehensive assessment included neuropsychological evaluations, evaluations of anxious and depressive symptomatology, assessments of the impact of fatigue, sleep quality, memory failures in daily life, and the perceived general health status of the participants; (3) Results: significant differences between groups were found in incidental learning within the Key Numbers task (U = 462.5; p = 0.001; p = 0.022) and in the Direct Digit Span (U = 562; p = 0.022), but not in the Inverse Digit Span (U = 632.5; p = 0.105). Differences were also observed in the prospective memory task of the Rivermead Prospective Memory Tasks (from the Rivermead Behavioural Memory Test) in the recall of quotations (U = 610; p = 0.020) as well as in the recall of objects (U = 681.5; p = 0.032). Concerning the task of verbal fluency, significant differences were found for both phonological cues (p- and s-) (t = -2.190; p = 0.031) and semantic cues (animals) (t = -2.277; p = 0.025). In terms of the psychological impact assessment, significant differences were found in the emotional impact across all variables studied (fatigue, quality of sleep, memory lapses, and the perceived general health status), except for quality of life; (4) Conclusions: Our results suggest that the sequelae derived from persistent COVID may have an impact on people's lives, with higher levels of anxiety and depression, worse sleep quality, a greater number of subjective memory complaints, and a greater feeling of fatigue and impact on quality of life. Furthermore, poorer performance was observed in memory and verbal fluency.

What cues do children use to infer the meaning of unknown words while reading? Empirical data from German-speaking third graders

Abstract During the development of reading skills in primary school, children begin to make guesses about unfamiliar words when reading a text. This process of lexical inference is an important source of new vocabulary acquisition. In the present study, 55 children with a wide range of reading skills and vocabulary knowledge were asked to infer the meaning of unknown words (i.e., pseudowords) inserted into a short story and to provide insight into their inferencing processes. The results show that children use a variety of cues. While learners with higher reading skills and vocabulary knowledge tend to be more successful inferencers and rely more on contextual cues, the evidence for the use of phonological cues is limited. Furthermore, in 20 percent of the cases, children were able to recall the meaning of a pseudoword already mentioned in the text.

Difference of phonemic restoration between professional and non-experts’ voices

It is generally thought that the voices of professional announcers are clearer and easier to hear than those of non-professional speakers. This study examined the perceptual mechanisms involved in the higher intelligibility of professional announcers’ voice with the focus on perceptual restoration. The intelligibility of the professional announcers was 10% to 30% higher than that of the non-professional speakers in noisy conditions. The effects of the formants on the higher intelligibility were experimentally examined using test words with one of the frequency bands corresponding to the first to third formants removed. When the formant component was removed, performance declined for both speakers, whereas that of the professional announcers was maintained with noise. An additional experiment showed that a missing component in a professional announcers’ voice is perceptually restored by adding noise. It is thus likely that the voices of professional announcers are rich in phonological cues, enabling phonological restoration to be achieved by adding noise. This may be one of the reasons why the higher intelligibility of their voices in noise.

Salience of Frequency Micro-modulations in Popular Music

Singing voices attract auditory attention in music unlike other sounds. In a previous study, we investigated the salience of instruments and vocals using a detection task in which cued target sounds were to be detected in musical mixtures. The presentation order of cue and mixture signals influenced the detection of all targets except the lead vocals, indicating that listeners focus on voices regardless of whether these are cued or not, highlighting a unique vocal salience in music mixtures. The aim of the present online study was to investigate the extent to which phonological cues, musical features of the main melody, or frequency micro-modulation (FMM) inherent in singing voices contribute to this vocal salience. FMM was either eliminated by using an autotune effect (Experiment 1) or transferred to other instruments (Experiment 2). Detection accuracy was influenced by presentation order for all instrumental targets and the autotuned vocals, but not for the unmodified vocals, suggesting that neither the phonological cues that could provide a facilitated processing of speech-like sounds nor the musical features of the main melody are sufficient to drive vocal salience. Transferring FMM from vocals to instruments or autotuned vocals reduced the magnitude of the order effect considerably. These findings suggest that FMM is an important acoustical feature contributing to vocal salience in musical mixtures.

Expressive recall and recognition as complementary measures to assess novel word learning ability in aphasia

Novel word learning ability has been associated with language treatment outcomes in people with aphasia (PWA), and its assessment could inform prognosis and rehabilitation. We used a brief experimental task to examine novel word learning in PWA, determine the value of phonological cueing in assessing learning outcomes, and identify factors that modulate learning ability. Twelve PWA and nineteen healthy controls completed the task, and recall and recognition tests of learning ability. Most PWA showed comparable learning outcomes to those of the healthy controls. Learning assessed via expressive recall was more clearly evidenced with phonological cues. Better single word processing abilities and phonological short-term memory and higher integrity of the left inferior frontal gyrus were related to better learning performance. Brief learning tasks like this one are clinically feasible and hold promise as screening tools of verbal learning in PWA once validated and evaluated for their capacity to predict treatment outcomes.

Pre-activation negativity (PrAN): A neural index of predictive strength of phonological cues

We propose that a recently discovered event-related potential (ERP) component—the pre-activation negativity (PrAN)—indexes the predictive strength of phonological cues, including segments, word tones, and sentence-level tones. Specifically, we argue that PrAN is a reflection of the brain’s anticipation of upcoming speech (segments, morphemes, words, and syntactic structures). Findings from a long series of neurolinguistic studies indicate that the effect can be divided into two time windows with different possible brain sources. Between 136–200 ms from stimulus onset, it indexes activity mainly in the primary and secondary auditory cortices, reflecting disinhibition of neurons sensitive to the expected acoustic signal, as indicated by the brain regions’ response to predictive certainty rather than sound salience. After ~200 ms, PrAN is related to activity in Broca’s area, possibly reflecting inhibition of irrelevant segments, morphemes, words, and syntactic structures

Damage to temporoparietal cortex is sufficient for impaired semantic control.

Semantic control allows us to focus semantic activation on currently relevant aspects of knowledge, even in the face of competition or when the required information is weakly encoded. Diverse cortical regions, including left prefrontal and posterior temporal cortex, are implicated in semantic control, however; the relative contribution of these regions is unclear. For the first time, we compared semantic aphasia (SA) patients with damage restricted to temporoparietal cortex (TPC; N=8) to patients with infarcts encompassing prefrontal cortex (PF+; N=22), to determine if prefrontal lesions are necessary for semantic control deficits. These SA groups were also compared with semantic dementia (SD; N=10), characterised by degraded semantic representations. We asked whether TPC cases with semantic impairment show controlled retrieval deficits equivalent to PF+cases or conceptual degradation similar to patients with SD. Independent of lesion location, the SA subgroups showed similarities, whereas SD patients showed a qualitatively distinct semantic impairment. Relative to SD, both TPC and PF+SA subgroups: (1) showed few correlations in performance across tasks with differing control demands, but a strong relationship between tasks of similar difficulty; (2) exhibited attenuated effects of lexical frequency and concept familiarity, (3) showed evidence of poor semantic regulation in their verbal output - performance on picture naming was substantially improved when provided with a phonological cue, and (4) showed effects of control demands, such as retrieval difficulty, which were equivalent in severity across TPC and PF+groups. These findings show that semantic impairment in SA is underpinned by damage to a distributed semantic control network, instantiated across anterior and posterior cortical areas.

Doubling up: The Influence of Native and Foreign Language Cues in Foreign Language Double Consonant Spelling

In this study, we investigated which spelling cues are used in word-medial consonant spelling by learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Previous research has shown that native speakers of English rely on different cues to decide whether a single (“diner”) or double consonant (“dinner”) needs to be used in word-medial consonant spelling. These cues include phonology, orthography, morphology and lexical frequency. We investigated whether these cues play a similar role in Dutch spellers who are EFL learners, next to similarity of the English target to Dutch. We analyzed dictation task data that was part of an unsupervised digital learning environment for EFL learning. The error analyses revealed that novice EFL spellers mainly used phonological and cross-linguistic cues in consonant doubling. In contrast, more proficient spellers relied less on phonological cues, and relied on morphological cues instead. The EFL spellers did not rely on orthographic cues. Furthermore, spelling difficulty was influenced by the frequency of a word and its similarity with the native-language equivalent, in terms of cognate status (non-cognate/cognate) and consonant doubling. Together, our findings indicate that a higher number of converging cues facilitates spelling for EFL spellers and that their reliance on cues changes as spelling proficiency increases.

The acquisition of L2 allophonic variants: The role of phonological distribution and lexical cues

Adult learners acquire second language (L2) allophones with experience. We examine two mechanisms which may support the acquisition of allophonic variants in second language acquisition. One of the mechanisms is based on the distribution of phones with respect to their phonological context (i.e. phonological distribution). The other is based on the role the phones play in contrasting words (i.e. lexical contrast). Experiment 1 established adult native English speakers’ baseline sensitivity to the novel [b]–[β] auditory contrast. In Experiment 2 we examined whether adult native English speakers infer the phonological status of [b] and [β] in an artificial language based only on their distributions to phonological contexts. We observed no evidence that these participants were able to do so. In Experiment 3 we investigated whether learners infer the phonological status of [b] and [β] from the role they play in lexical contrast and observed both perceptual and lexical processing evidence to suggest that adults may use meaning-based cues to the lack of contrast to learn that two phones are allophones of the same phoneme. Together our findings suggest that adult L2 learners may prioritize information about function (in this case, lexical contrast) over the phonological distribution of phones as they determine the phonological status of L2 sounds.

Morphosyntactic Features Versus Morphophonological Features in L2 Gender Acquisition: A Cross-Language Perspective

This paper aims to demonstrate the reliability of morphosyntactic versus morphophonological features in the acquisition of L2 gender of inanimate nouns across languages. Based on Anna Kibort study “Towards a typology of grammatical features”(2010), the current research proposes that the presence of a gendered determiner is more reliable than gendered noun-final morphemes in the process of adjective agreement within the Determiner Phrase (DP) across two gender transparency system languages. To test this hypothesis, the current research compares English second-language (L2) learners of Hebrew and Spanish. Both languages have a binary gender system for nouns; however, Hebrew lacks a determiner with gender value, but provides a plural ending morpheme that encodes both number and gender. In contrast, Spanish has a gendered article that facilitates gender acquisition, but lacks a plural ending morpheme that indicates gender. Thirty-two L1 English–L2 Spanish learners and thirty-two L1 English–L2 Hebrew learners with different proficiency levels completed an adjective-agreement forced-choice task and an adjective-agreement elicited-production task—in their respective target languages. The tasks contained Spanish opaque plural nouns and Hebrew plural transparent nouns, highlighting the role of the determiner in Spanish and the role of transparency plural-ending morphemes in Hebrew. The results revealed that Spanish L2 learners performed better on the tasks than L2 Hebrew learners, offering evidence for the relevance of syntactic agreement knowledge over phonological cues in gender acquisition.

Structural and phonological cues for gender assignment in monolingual and bilingual children acquiring German. Experiments with real and nonce words

We investigate the acquisition of grammatical gender marking in German by monolingual children as well as German-Russian bilingual children who grow up in Germany as heritage speakers of Russian. We ask to what extent monolingual and bilingual children use phonological and/or structural cues to assign nominal gender, and to what extent they rely on lexical knowledge. To this end, we designed three experiments. Experiment 1 tests gender assignment with real nouns; Experiment 2 tests gender assignment to nonce nouns with the same set of noun-internal phonological cues as in Experiment 1, and in Experiment 3 we compare gender assignment to nonce nouns based on phonological vs. structural (agreement) cues when both types of cues are provided. Results show that children are significantly less successful when assigning gender to nonce nouns as compared to real nouns, which highlights the importance of lexical learning. At the same, we observe sensitivity to noun-internal phonological cues for both mono- and bilingual children. Bilingual children show similar patterns as monolingual children but different default strategies. For the bilingual children, we discuss the possibility of cue transfer from Russian to German. Finally, we observe that the role of structural (agreement) cues increases with age, while the role of noun-internal phonological cues decreases with age for the bilingual children, in line with previous findings from other languages.

Voice quality and speaking rate in Icelandic rhetorical questions

AbstractIn this paper, we show that Icelandic uses the phonetic parameters of speaking rate, duration and voice quality (VQ) to distinguish between information-seeking questions (ISQs) and rhetorical questions (RQs). Specifically, durations are longer (speaking rate is slower) and nonmodal VQs are used more in RQs than in ISQs. Our findings for temporal parameters fit in with previous studies on the prosody of RQs in various languages. With respect to VQ, Icelandic differs, for example, from German and English in the location of breathy voice in the utterance (utterance-initial in German and English, utterance-final in Icelandic). We interpret the utterance-final position of breathiness in Icelandic RQs as a potential compensating strategy for the lack of phonological cues, i.e. boundary tones.

Facilitating Word Retrieval in Aphasia: Which Type of Cues for Which Aphasic Speakers?

Background: Even if both phonological and semantic cues can facilitate word retrieval in aphasia, it remains unclear if their respective effectiveness varies according to the underlying anomic profile.Aim: The aim of the present facilitation study is to compare the effect of phonological and semantic cues on picture naming accuracy and speed in different types of anomia.Methods: In the present within-subject design study, 15 aphasic persons following brain damage underwent picture naming paradigms with semantic cues (categorically- or associatively related) and phonological cues (initial phoneme presented auditorily, visually or both).Results: At the group level, semantic cueing was as effective as phonological cueing to significantly speed up picture naming. However, while phonological cues were effective regardless of the anomic profile, semantic cueing effects varied depending on the type of anomia. Participants with mixed anomia showed facilitation after both semantic categorical and associative cues, but individuals with lexical-phonological anomia only after categorical cues. Crucially, semantic cues were ineffective for participants with lexical-semantic anomia. These disparities were confirmed by categorical semantic facilitation decreasing when semantic/omission errors prevailed in the anomic profile, but increasing alongside phonological errors.Conclusion: The effectiveness of phonological vs semantic cues seems related to the underlying anomic profile: phonological cues benefit any type of anomia, but semantic cues only lexical-phonological or mixed anomia.

Interfered-Naming Therapy for Aphasia (INTA): behavioural and computational effects of a novel linguistic-executive approach

ABSTRACT Background and aims Executive functions recently have gained attention as important contributors to language performance in aphasia. Picture/word interference embraces both executive control and lexical processing through distracted confrontation naming. Thus, we created a novel approach that embedded interfered-naming into an established lexical therapy framework. We aimed to (1) investigate patients’ behavioural response to distractor types and treatment methods of interfered-naming and (2) determine specific therapy effects on linguistic versus executive processing and initial eligibility criteria. Methods Persons with word-finding difficulties in chronic aphasia received 4-week therapy in a block design with thorough pre-post-testing including computational modelling. During therapy, picture naming was distracted by auditory stimuli, which were primed by a preceding comprehension task and directly assisted by increasing semantic or phonological cues. Results Nineteen participants were included in the diagnostic study, 12 of which also completed the therapy study. Distractor types did not generally yield differential effects at baseline. The novel linguistic-executive treatment significantly improved pure naming in most (9 out of 12) cases, fostered generalisation to untrained items, increased semantic weights in the computational model, and reduced automated speech. Therapy gains correlated positively with initial distractor comprehension, lexical-semantics, and word discrimination and negatively with automated speech and conceptual-semantics. Conclusion The interference paradigm combined with computational modelling offers a useful tool for aphasia diagnosis, and the new treatment approach revealed to be effective. Semantic and executive processing appear to be the core source of improvements.

Resting-State Functional Connectivity following Phonological Component Analysis: The Combined Action of Phonology and Visual Orthographic Cues.

Anomia is the most frequent and pervasive symptom for people with aphasia (PWA). Phonological component analysis (PCA) is a therapy incorporating phonological cues to treat anomia. Investigations of neural correlates supporting improvements following PCA remain scarce. Resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) as a marker of therapy-induced neuroplasticity has been reported by our team. The present study explores the efficacy of PCA in French and associated therapy-induced neuroplasticity using whole-brain rsFC analysis. Ten PWA participated in a pre-/post-PCA fMRI study with cognitive linguistic assessments. PCA was delivered in French following the standard procedure. PCA led to significant improvement with trained and untrained items. PCA also led to changes in rsFC between distributed ROIs in the semantic network, visual network, and sub-cortical areas. Changes in rsFC can be interpreted within the frame of the visual and phonological nature of PCA. Behavioral and rsFC data changes associated with PCA in French highlight its efficacy and point to the importance of phonological and orthographic cues to consolidate the word-retrieval strategy, contributing to generalization to untrained words.