Phonological Cues Research Articles

Impaired perceptual normalization of lexical tones in Cantonese-speaking congenital amusics.

Human listeners perceive speech sounds relative to acoustic cues in context. In this study the authors examined how congenital amusia, a pitch-processing disorder, affects perceptual normalization of lexical tones according to the distribution of F0 cues in context. Sixteen Cantonese-speaking amusics and 16 controls were tested on the effects of shifting F0 level in four types of contexts on tone perception: nonspeech, reversed speech, semantically anomalous speech, and meaningful speech contexts. Performance of controls replicated previous studies, showing contrastive changes of tone perception according to the shifted F0 level of anomalous and meaningful contexts, which were native speech contexts with phonological cues to estimate a talker's tone space. Effects of nonspeech and reversed contexts were small and inconsistent, and tone perception performance varied depending on the typicality of a talker's F0 range. In contrast to controls, amusics showed reduced context effects in anomalous and meaningful contexts, but largely comparable context effects in nonspeech and reversed contexts, indicating a deficit of amusics in tone normalization through phonological cues in native speech contexts. These findings suggest that the ability to perceive speech sounds relative to acoustic cues in context is not a universal endowment, and that this ability is impaired substantially in amusics.

The role of distributional factors in learning and generalising affixal plural inflection: An artificial language study

ABSTRACTInflectional morphology has been intensively studied as a model of language productivity. However, little is known about how properties of the input affect the emergence of productive affixation. We examined effects of three factors on the learning and generalisation of plural suffixation by adults in an artificial language: affix type frequency (the number of words receiving an affix), affix predictability (based on phonological cues in the stem), and diversity (the number of distinct phonological cues predicting an affix). Higher type frequency and predictability facilitated the acquisition of trained inflections. Type frequency contributed to participants’ inflections of untrained words early during learning, while reliance on diversity emerged gradually, alongside knowledge of phonological cues. Diversity as well as type frequency contributed to the emergence of default-like inflections, including minority defaults. The results elucidate the role of affix diversity and its interaction with other factors in the emergence of productive linguistic processes.

Phonetic radicals, not phonological coding systems, support orthographic learning via self-teaching in Chinese

According to the self-teaching hypothesis (Share, 1995), phonological decoding is fundamental to acquiring orthographic representations of novel written words. However, phonological decoding is not straightforward in non-alphabetic scripts such as Chinese, where words are presented as characters. Here, we present the first study investigating the role of phonological decoding in orthographic learning in Chinese. We examined two possible types of phonological decoding: the use of phonetic radicals, an internal phonological aid, andthe use of Zhuyin, an external phonological coding system. Seventy-three Grade 2 children were taught the pronunciations and meanings of twelve novel compound characters over four days. They were then exposed to the written characters in short stories, and were assessed on their reading accuracy and on their subsequent orthographic learning via orthographic choice and spelling tasks. The novel characters were assigned three different types of pronunciation in relation to its phonetic radical – (1) a pronunciation that is identical to the phonetic radical in isolation; (2) a common alternative pronunciation associated with the phonetic radical when it appears in other characters; and (3) a pronunciation that is unrelated to the phonetic radical. The presence of Zhuyin was also manipulated. The children read the novel characters more accurately when phonological cues from the phonetic radicals were available and in the presence of Zhuyin. However, only the phonetic radicals facilitated orthographic learning. The findings provide the first empirical evidence of orthographic learning via self-teaching in Chinese, and reveal how phonological decoding functions to support learning in non-alphabetic writing systems.

The lexical or sub-lexical locus of facilitation by phonemic cueing in aphasic speakers: the effect of onset cohort size

ABSTRACTBackground: While the facilitation of word production by phonological cueing is used in clinical practice to evaluate the integrity of the lexical representations in anomia, the mechanisms by which phonological cueing facilitates oral production remain poorly understood. Most interpretations in psycholinguistic studies favor the phonological (sub-lexical) hypothesis, whereas results from studies on aphasia report evidence suggesting a lexical locus.Aims: This study aims to directly test the impact of phonological cues on lexical retrieval in participants with aphasia by manipulating the size of the cohort of nouns sharing the onset provided by the cue.Methods & Procedure: Fourteen aphasic participants presenting either a lexico-semantic or a phonological anomic profile performed a noun/object picture-naming task preceded by congruent or incongruent phonological cues. We manipulated the size of the lexical cohort of the words starting with the cue, reasoning that if phonological cues facilitate at the lexical level, a cue corresponding to a small number of words should be more effective than a cue compatible with a larger cohort.Outcomes & Results: The cue only improved accuracy in participants with lexico-semantic impairment, with a reduction of errors as a function of the cohort size (facilitation restricted to cues associated with a small onset cohort). In contrast, the cue onset cohort size only affects production latencies in participants with phonological impairment (shorter latencies for cues related to a small noun-onset cohort size).Conclusions: The observed effect of the cohort size associated with the cue favors a lexical locus of facilitation by phonological cueing. The fact that this effect is observed in different groups corresponding to different underlying impairments in error and in latencies suggests that the analyses of latencies reflect spared processes, whereas the analyses of errors tap into the impaired process.

French version of the Phonological Component Analysis: Preliminary results with three participants

French version of the Phonological Component Analysis: Preliminary results with three participants

ARBITRARINESS OF SOUND SYMBOLYSM IN ENGLISH AND JAPANESE

The article determines that the form of a word bears an arbitrary relation to its meaning accounts only partly for the attested relations between form and meaning in the world’s languages. A long history of research has considered the role of iconicity in language and the existence and role of non-arbitrary properties in language and the use of language. Recent research in English and Japanese suggests a more textured view of vocabulary structure, in which arbitrariness is complemented by iconicity (aspects of form resemble aspects of meaning) and systematicity (statistical regularities in forms predict function). Sound symbolism is the systematic and non-arbitrary link between word and meaning. Although a number of behavioral studies demonstrate that both children and adults are universally sensitive to sound symbolism in mimetic words, the neural mechanisms underlying this phenomenon have not yet been extensively investigated. Experimental evidence suggests these form to meaning correspondences serve different functions in language processing, development and communication: systematicity facilities category learning by means of phonological cues, iconicity facilitates word learning and communication by means of perceptuomotor analogies, and arbitrariness facilitates meaning individuation through distinctive forms. For one, there can be external reasons why a particular form would go with a given meaning, such as sound symbolism. Also, there are systematicities in English, as well as, in Japanese, where words with similar forms are more likely than chance to have similar meanings. The article also relates to a comparative methods used to test what it is that leads phonæsthemes to be mentally represented, measuring effects of frequency, cue validity, and sound symbolism.

Phonological properties of word classes and directionality in conversion

In the study of the word-formation process of conversion, one particularly difficult task is to determine the directionality of the process, that is, to decide which word represents the base and which the derived word. One possibility to inform this decision that has received only limited attention is to capitalize on word-class-specific phonological properties. This paper empirically investigates this option for English noun-verb conversion by building on recent findings on phonological differences between these two word classes. A large-scale study of phonological properties is carried out on CELEX data, employing the quantitative techniques of conditional inference trees and random forests. An important result of this analysis is that the accuracy of phonological cues varies widely across different subsamples in the data. Essentially this means that phonological cues can be used as a criterion to determine the directionality of words that are at least two syllables in length. When restricted to this part of the lexicon, phonological properties represent a fairly accurate indicator of source word class and are therefore a useful addition to the linguist's toolkit for determining directionality in conversion. Based on this result, the paper also discusses the relations of phonological properties to other criteria commonly employed to determine directionality.

Second Language Word Learning through Repetition and Imitation: Functional Networks as a Function of Learning Phase and Language Distance.

Introduction and Aim: Repetition and imitation are among the oldest second language (L2) teaching approaches and are frequently used in the context of L2 learning and language therapy, despite some heavy criticism. Current neuroimaging techniques allow the neural mechanisms underlying repetition and imitation to be examined. This fMRI study examines the influence of verbal repetition and imitation on network configuration. Integration changes within and between the cognitive control and language networks were studied, in a pair of linguistically close languages (Spanish and French), and compared to our previous work on a distant language pair (Ghazi-Saidi et al., 2013).Methods: Twelve healthy native Spanish-speaking (L1) adults, and 12 healthy native Persian-speaking adults learned 130 new French (L2) words, through a computerized audiovisual repetition and imitation program. The program presented colored photos of objects. Participants were instructed to look at each photo and pronounce its name as closely as possible to the native template (imitate). Repetition was encouraged as many times as necessary to learn the object’s name; phonological cues were provided if necessary. Participants practiced for 15 min, over 30 days, and were tested while naming the same items during fMRI scanning, at week 1 (shallow learning phase) and week 4 (consolidation phase) of training. To compare this set of data with our previous work on Persian speakers, a similar data analysis plan including accuracy rates (AR), response times (RT), and functional integration values for the language and cognitive control network at each measure point was included, with further L1-L2 direct comparisons across the two populations.Results and Discussion: The evidence shows that learning L2 words through repetition induces neuroplasticity at the network level. Specifically, L2 word learners showed increased network integration after 3 weeks of training, with both close and distant language pairs. Moreover, higher network integration was observed in the learners with the close language pair, suggesting that repetition effects on network configuration vary as a function of task complexity.

An Experimental Study of Labial/Velar Alternation in Korean

The purpose of this paper is to find triggering factors of labial/velar alternation in Korean. Labial/ velar shift in Korean was found in the 15th century, and traces of labial/velar shift still remain in some dialects. Interestingly, it is often found in the speech of infants and adults even in standard Korean. This study focuses on finding phonetic and phonological cues of labial/velar alternation in Modern Korean, especially Seoul and Gyeonggi dialects by measuring F2 transitions and vowel distances after and before two phonemes /p/ and /k/ and through performance of two perceptual tasks. In the results, F2 transitions in back vowels are found to be similar regardless of syllable positions, but vowel distances were not relevant. As for the discrimination index d-prime, it decreased when back vowels preceded /p/ and /k/ in one-syllable words. It can be inferred that a phonetic and phonological similarity is asymmetrical from the results.

Does facilitation by phonological cuing in picture naming depend on the modality of the cue?

ABSTRACTBackground: Phonological cuing in spoken picture naming is widely used to improve word production accuracy in aphasic participants and to investigate word planning processes in psycholinguistic experiments with healthy participants. However, different paradigms and different modalities have been used across studies and populations, with some contradictory results.Aims: Here, we investigate whether and how the modality in which a phonological cue is delivered impacts on word production in picture naming tasks using the exact same paradigm with healthy and with aphasic participants.Methods & Procedure: In experiment 1, behavioural and electroencephalographic event-related potential (ERP) responses to auditory, visual and audiovisual cues in a picture naming task were investigated in healthy participants. In experiment 2, the impact of the same cue modalities was studied on errors and latencies in 15 aphasic participants.Outcomes & Results: The modality in which the cue is delivered influenced phonological facilitation effects in both populations, the audio modality being the most facilitative on production latencies in healthy participants and in participants with mild aphasia. No further gains were obtained by a double modality audiovisual cue on production latencies, whereas the double cues interfered with production accuracy in aphasic participants. ERP results not only were compatible with facilitation of phonological encoding in all experimental conditions but also showed modulation of a late encoding time period for both the visual and audiovisual cues, likely reflecting interference of the visual modality during monitoring or motor speech encoding. The latter observation is indeed coherent with the interference of the audiovisual modality that was observed on error rates in the more severely impaired aphasic participants.Conclusions: These results suggest that unimodal auditory cuing is the facilitatory condition, while visual cues in unimodal or bimodal conditions give rise to both facilitation and interference which manifest behaviourally depending on the balance of these opposing effects.

Reliance on orthography and phonology in reading of Chinese: A developmental study

BackgroundDisruptions of reading processes due to text substitutions can measure how readers use lexical information.MethodsWith eye‐movement recording, children and adults viewed sentences with either identical, orthographically similar, homophonic or unrelated substitutions of the first characters in target words. To the extent that readers rely on orthographic or phonological cues, substitutions that contain such cues should cause less disruption reading than do unrelated substitutions.ResultsOn pretarget words, there was a reliable reduction in gaze duration due to homophonic substitution only for children. On target words, we observed reliable recovery effects due to orthographic similarity for adults. On post‐target words, adults had better orthographic‐based and phonological‐based recovery abilities than children.ConclusionsThe combination of eye movement recording and the error detection paradigm offers a novel implicit paradigm for studying reading development: during sentence reading, beginning readers of Chinese may rely on phonological mediation, while skilled readers have more direct access to semantics from orthography.What is already known about this topic There is little evidence for early phonological activation during the reading of Chinese sentences among skilled Chinese readers There is a rich body of evidence supporting the view that phonological information is activated very early in alphabetic scripts, as indexed by shorter fixation durations when useful phonological information is present. What this paper adds Chinese beginning readers have early parafoveal activation of phonology during the silent reading of Chinese sentences, as indexed by the parafovea‐on‐fovea effect in the homophonic substitution condition. The early activation of phonology diminishes with the development of reading skills. Implications for theory, policy or practice The phonological parafovea‐on‐fovea effect was revealed during the silent reading of Chinese sentences for beginning readers. Chinese children may rely on phonological codes while skilled readers have more direct access to semantics from orthography. The teaching of phonological aspects of Chinese orthography is very important for beginning readers

Language play facilitates language learning: Optimizing the input for gender-like category induction

Gender induction has been claimed to be virtually impossible unless nouns provide reliable semantic or phonological gender-relevant cues. However, learners might exploit syntactic cues, such as definite articles, to infer the gender of gender-unmarked nouns. In children’s poems and songs, such syntactic cues are presented in a highly structured fashion. We assessed gender-like category induction in an artificial language that provided exclusively syntactic cues for its gender-like subclasses. We trained participants with structured or unstructured input presented in a prose, a rhyming, a melodic, or a rhyming and melodic fashion. Input structuring significantly facilitated gender-like category induction. Participants trained in the Rhyme-and-Melody mode significantly outperformed participants trained in the Prose mode, especially when the input was structured. The Rhyme-only and Melody-only modes yielded intermediate results. Thus, a highly structured rhyming and melodic input substantially facilitates gender-like category induction, making a case for the use of children’s songs in language teaching.

French version of the Phonological Component Analysis: Stimuli selection and validation

Event Abstract Back to Event French version of the Phonological Component Analysis: Stimuli selection and validation Michele Masson-Trottier1, 2*, Karine Marcotte2, 3, Carol Leonard4, Elizabeth Rochon5 and Ana Inès Ansaldo1, 2 1 Institut Universitaire De Gériatrie De Montréal, Canada 2 Université de Montréal, École d'Orthophonie et d'Audiologie, Canada 3 Hopital Sacré-Coeur de Montréal, Canada 4 Université d'Ottawa, Health Sciences, Canada 5 University of Toronto, Department of Speech-Language Pathology, Canada Introduction: Anomia is the main symptom and most persistent aphasia sign. Among anomia therapy procedures Phonological Component Analysis (PCA) has been proven effective in improving the naming capacities persons with chronic aphasia [1]. PCA uses phonological cues associated with the target word to elicit naming. The present work describes the adaptation of the PCA stimuli and cues to Canadian French and discusses the specific challenges and particularities of the adaptation procedure. Method: First, the original list of 235 nouns used in Leonard et al. [1], as well as the cues, were translated into French by two experimented SLPs. For each target word, a picture was chosen from the Bank Of Standardized Stimuli (BOSS) [2]. The entire list of target words and cues were validated with 20 francophone participants, between 60 and 84 years old. A naming validation was also achieved, through a computerized questionnaire, administered to 13 additional francophone participants (between 22 and 70 years old). H-value was calculated for all the target images. The H-value is sensitive to the number and weight of alternative names [2]. Results: Items for which the cues did not reach 50% agreement were removed from the list (n=8). As for the naming, the average H-value was 0.5± 0.5. A hundred and sixteen pictures were named the same by all participants (H-value = 0), and 195 pictures were named the same by a strong majority of the participants (H value < 1). Alternative answers were considered, as well as the rate of the answer. Discussion: A French list of 235 nouns along with their phonological cues was developed and is now available for PCA therapy with Canadian French-speaking persons with aphasia. Two major challenges arise in the validation. First, considering that selected nouns will be treated in PCA therapy, it is essential to think that some pictures can lead to different and correct answers. Second, Canadian French is a language characterized by pronunciation particularities such as assimilation patterns, and variable pronunciations of consonants in word-final position and in clitic pronouns [3]. These particularities are taken into consideration in the cues to give during therapy. This validation constitutes the first step to study the effectiveness of the PCA amongst the French population in Canada.

Visual Context Enhanced: The Joint Contribution of Iconic Gestures and Visible Speech to Degraded Speech Comprehension

This study investigated whether and to what extent iconic co-speech gestures contribute to information from visible speech to enhance degraded speech comprehension at different levels of noise-vocoding. Previous studies of the contributions of these 2 visual articulators to speech comprehension have only been performed separately. Twenty participants watched videos of an actress uttering an action verb and completed a free-recall task. The videos were presented in 3 speech conditions (2-band noise-vocoding, 6-band noise-vocoding, clear), 3 multimodal conditions (speech + lips blurred, speech + visible speech, speech + visible speech + gesture), and 2 visual-only conditions (visible speech, visible speech + gesture). Accuracy levels were higher when both visual articulators were present compared with 1 or none. The enhancement effects of (a) visible speech, (b) gestural information on top of visible speech, and (c) both visible speech and iconic gestures were larger in 6-band than 2-band noise-vocoding or visual-only conditions. Gestural enhancement in 2-band noise-vocoding did not differ from gestural enhancement in visual-only conditions. When perceiving degraded speech in a visual context, listeners benefit more from having both visual articulators present compared with 1. This benefit was larger at 6-band than 2-band noise-vocoding, where listeners can benefit from both phonological cues from visible speech and semantic cues from iconic gestures to disambiguate speech.

Competition between phonological and semantic cues in noun class learning

Abstract Learning noun classification systems, like gender, involves inferring a language-particular set of (often probabilistic) cues to class membership. Previous work has shown that learners rely disproportionately on phonological cues (e.g., Gagliardi & Lidz, 2014; Karmiloff-Smith, 1981). Surprisingly, this occurs even when competing semantic cues are more reliable predictors of class. We investigate two possible explanations for this: first, that phonological cues are more salient to learners than semantic cues, and second that phonological cues are generally available earlier than semantic cues. We show that adult learners’ treatment of conflicting cues to noun class in a miniature artificial language depends on both cue saliency and early availability. Importantly, learners prioritize earlier-available cues even when they are less salient than competitor cues. Our findings suggest a possible mechanism for children’s over-reliance on phonology: children start building their classifications systems very early, when phonological information is available, but word meanings are not.

The neural bases of the learning and generalization of morphological inflection

Affixal inflectional morphology has been intensively examined as a model of productive aspects of language. Nevertheless, little is known about the neurocognition of the learning and generalization of affixal inflection, or the influence of certain factors that may affect these processes. In an event-related fMRI study, we examined the neurocognition of the learning and generalization of plural inflections in an artificial language, as well as the influence of both affix type frequency (the proportion of words receiving a given affix) and affix predictability (based on phonological cues in the stem). Adult participants were trained in three sessions, and were scanned after the first and last sessions while inflecting trained and untrained words. Untrained words yielded more activation than trained words in medial frontal (including pre-SMA) and left inferior frontal cortices, which have previously shown activation in compositional grammatical processing. A reliance on phonological cues for untrained word inflection correlated positively with pre-SMA activation, but negatively with activation in the pars triangularis. Thus, pre-SMA may be involved in phonological cue-based composition, while the pars triangularis underlies alternative processes. Inflecting trained items yielded activation in the caudate head bilaterally, only in the first session, consistent with a role for procedural memory in learning grammatical regularities. The medial frontal and left inferior regions activated by untrained items were also activated by trained items, but more weakly than untrained items, with weakest activation for trained-items taking the high-frequency affix. This suggests less involvement of compositional processes for inflecting trained than untrained items, and least of all for trained inflected forms with high-frequency affixes, consistent with the storage of such forms (e.g., in declarative memory). Overall, the findings further elucidate the neural bases of the learning and generalization of affixal morphology, and the roles of affix type frequency and affix phonological predictability in these processes. Moreover, the results support and further specify the declarative/procedural model, in particular in adult language learning.

Phonological and Semantic Cues to Learning from Word-Types.

Word-types represent the primary form of data for many models of phonological learning, and they often predict performance in psycholinguistic tasks. Word-types are often tacitly defined as phonologically unique words. Yet, an explicit test of this definition is lacking, and natural language patterning suggests that word meaning could also act as a cue to word-type status. This possibility was tested in a statistical phonotactic learning experiment in which phonological and semantic properties of word-types varied. During familiarization, the learning targets—word-medial consonant sequences—were instantiated either by four related word-types or by just one word-type (the experimental frequency factor). The expectation was that more word-types would lead participants to generalize the target sequences. Regarding semantic cues, related word-types were either associated with different referents or all with a single referent. Regarding phonological cues, related word-types differed from each other by one, two, or more phonemes. At test, participants rated novel wordforms for their similarity to the familiarization words. When participants heard four related word-types, they gave higher ratings to test words with the same consonant sequences, irrespective of the phonological and semantic manipulations. The results support the existing phonological definition of word-types.

The ventrolateral prefrontal cortex facilitates processing of sentential context to locate referents

Left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) has been implicated in both integration and conflict resolution in sentence comprehension. Most evidence in favor of the integration account comes from processing ambiguous or anomalous sentences, which also poses a demand for conflict resolution. In two eye-tracking experiments we studied the role of VLPFC in integration when demands for conflict resolution were minimal. Two closely-matched groups of individuals with chronic post-stroke aphasia were tested: the Anterior group had damage to left VLPFC, whereas the Posterior group had left temporo-parietal damage. In Experiment 1 a semantic cue (e.g., “She will eat the apple”) uniquely marked the target (apple) among three distractors that were incompatible with the verb. In Experiment 2 phonological cues (e.g., “She will see an eagle.”/“She will see a bear.”) uniquely marked the target among three distractors whose onsets were incompatible with the cue (e.g., all consonants when the target started with a vowel). In both experiments, control conditions had a similar format, but contained no semantic or phonological contextual information useful for target integration (e.g., the verb “see”, and the determiner “the”). All individuals in the Anterior group were slower in using both types of contextual information to locate the target than were individuals in the Posterior group. These results suggest a role for VLPFC in integration beyond conflict resolution. We discuss a framework that accommodates both integration and conflict resolution.

Combined linguistic-executive therapy of word processing in aphasia

Combined linguistic-executive therapy of word processing in aphasia

Is Chinese Special? Four Aspects of Chinese Literacy Acquisition that Might Distinguish Learning Chinese from Learning Alphabetic Orthographies

Some aspects of Chinese literacy development do not conform to patterns of literacy development in alphabetic orthographies. Four are highlighted here. First, semantic radicals are one aspect of Chinese characters that have no analogy to alphabetic orthographies. Second, the unreliability of phonological cues in Chinese along with the fact that word building relies heavily on lexical compounding in Chinese makes morphological awareness particularly important for early reading development. Third, two different scripts (simplified, traditional) have different characteristics and strengths and weaknesses in relation to teaching and learning Chinese. Fourth, learning Chinese may strengthen both segmental and suprasegmental phonological sensitivity and even promote basic visual skills, potential cognitive advantages. Collectively, these aspects of Chinese make it important to consider as a unique orthography for understanding universals and specifics in the process of learning to read and write.