Phonological Units Research Articles

Alinhamento e estratégias de relativização

RESUMO O objetivo deste trabalho é examinar a hipótese de que a seleção entre as diferentes estratégias de relativização disponíveis na gramática do português é motivada por um grau maior ou menor de transparência entre forma e conteúdo, o que implica, correlativamente, grau maior ou menor de facilidade no processamento cognitivo. Além disso, os diferentes graus de transparência permitem postular uma ordenação hierárquica das estratégias em correspondência a diferentes graus de facilidade no processamento cognitivo. Essa hipótese tem como base o princípio postulado por Comrie (1989), segundo o qual se uma língua dispõe de uma estratégia mais explícita e de uma estratégia menos explícita para a construção de relativas, o tipo mais explícito seria empregado para relativizar as posições mais baixas e o tipo menos explícito, para relativizar as posições mais altas. Um conceito que tem muita afinidade com esse princípio é o de alinhamento, postulado por Hengeveld e Mackenzie (2008) para representar o modo como unidades pragmáticas e semânticas não hierarquicamente relacionadas se projetam sobre as unidades morfossintáticas e fonológicas; em outros termos, como o processo de codificação reflete as motivações do processo de formulação.

The Effects of Training in Music and Phonological Skills on Phonological Awareness in 4- to 6-Year-Old Children of Immigrant Families.

Children of immigrant families often have great difficulties with language and disadvantages in schooling. Phonological problems appear especially common. Thus, the aim of this study was to determine whether music training has a positive effect on the phonological awareness in these children. The effects of a music program were compared with an established phonological skills program and with a sports control group. Preschoolers of immigrants (19 boys, 20 girls) were randomly assigned to one of the three groups. All groups were trained three times a week for 20 min each, over a period of 14 weeks. Phonological awareness was tested prior to the beginning of the training and after the training phase. At the pre-test, no differences between the groups were found regarding phonological awareness and control variables (age, gender, intelligence, socioeconomic status, language background, music experience). At the post-test, the music group and the phonological skills group showed a significant increase in phonological awareness of large phonological units. The effect size of the music training was larger compared to the phonological skills program. In contrast, the sports control group showed no significant increase in phonological awareness. The current results indicate that a music program could be used as an additional opportunity to promote phonological skills in children of immigrant families.

Vowels and Consonants in the Brain: Evidence from Magnetoencephalographic Studies on the N1m in Normal-Hearing Listeners

Speech sound perception is one of the most fascinating tasks performed by the human brain. It involves a mapping from continuous acoustic waveforms onto the discrete phonological units computed to store words in the mental lexicon. In this article, we review the magnetoencephalographic studies that have explored the timing and morphology of the N1m component to investigate how vowels and consonants are computed and represented within the auditory cortex. The neurons that are involved in the N1m act to construct a sensory memory of the stimulus due to spatially and temporally distributed activation patterns within the auditory cortex. Indeed, localization of auditory fields maps in animals and humans suggested two levels of sound coding, a tonotopy dimension for spectral properties and a tonochrony dimension for temporal properties of sounds. When the stimulus is a complex speech sound, tonotopy and tonochrony data may give important information to assess whether the speech sound parsing and decoding are generated by pure bottom-up reflection of acoustic differences or whether they are additionally affected by top-down processes related to phonological categories. Hints supporting pure bottom-up processing coexist with hints supporting top-down abstract phoneme representation. Actually, N1m data (amplitude, latency, source generators, and hemispheric distribution) are limited and do not help to disentangle the issue. The nature of these limitations is discussed. Moreover, neurophysiological studies on animals and neuroimaging studies on humans have been taken into consideration. We compare also the N1m findings with the investigation of the magnetic mismatch negativity (MMNm) component and with the analogous electrical components, the N1 and the MMN. We conclude that N1 seems more sensitive to capture lateralization and hierarchical processes than N1m, although the data are very preliminary. Finally, we suggest that MEG data should be integrated with EEG data in the light of the neural oscillations framework and we propose some concerns that should be addressed by future investigations if we want to closely line up language research with issues at the core of the functional brain mechanisms.

The proximate unit in the production of Korean words

An important issue in recent psycholinguistic research is whether the first selectable phonological units in spoken-word production vary across languages. Data from many Indo-European languages demonstrate that word-onset phonemes are first selected in production planning, whereas whole syllables and CV morae are selected in native Chinese and Japanese, respectively. To empirically test the languagespecific view of proximate units, we investigate the roles of syllables and onset phonemes as proximate units in Korean, using a picture-naming task (Li et al. 2015). This is based on the fact that both syllables and phonemes are salient units in Korean phonological and orthographic structures. A significant priming effect was found for syllables, and a marginally significant effect for onset segments. These results indicate that in Korean, syllables function as proximate units in spoken-word production planning, but onset phonemes also show facilitation effects, albeit less robust ones than syllables. Our findings suggest that the functional phonological unit in spoken-word production is language dependent.

Evaluation of a Motion-Based Platform for Practicing Phonological Awareness of Preschool Children

The aim of this study is to introduce a new platform, called En Plein, for the kinesthetic practice of phonological skills by preschool children and to examine its feasibility in combination with more traditional teaching methods. The rationale is that the manipulation of structural phonological units is important to train the necessary prerequisites for writing and reading and to help the identification of early learning disability precursors. The system includes a large number of phonological activities for children and allows interaction with a playful virtual environment via a cartoon-avatar controlled by a gesture-based natural user interface. En Plein relies on the Microsoft Kinect™ motion sensor. In the pilot study, the system has been placed in a classroom of an Italian kindergarten for 5 weeks of training. A test for assessing the phonological skills in Italian language for kindergarten (Valutazione delle Competenze Metafonologiche [CMF]) has been administered before and after training. Children who worked with the platform showed improvements in their phonological awareness (mean increase of CMF scores of 9%), while their peers who received only the traditional education had a mean increase of CMF scores of 1%. Results from this preliminary study show that children who used the system were more confident in manipulating structural phonological units, increased their awareness of words sound structures and generalized these skills by applying them to different tasks. The performance of En Plein is particularly encouraging for future large-scale applications in kindergartens and possible tests with children at risk of developing specific learning disabilities.

Syllabic encoding during overt speech production in Cantonese: Evidence from temporal brain responses

The time course of phonological encoding in overt Cantonese disyllabic word production was investigated using a picture-word interference task with concurrent recording of the event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Participants were asked to name aloud individually presented pictures and ignore a distracting Chinese character. Participants' naming responses were faster, relative to an unrelated control, when the distractor overlapped with the target's word-initial or word-final syllables. Furthermore, ERP waves in the syllable-related conditions were more positive-going than those in the unrelated control conditions from 500ms to 650ms post target onset (i.e., a late positivity). The mean and peak amplitudes of this late positivity correlated with the size of phonological facilitation. More importantly, the onset of the late positivity associated with word-initial syllable priming was 44ms earlier than that associated with word-final syllable priming, suggesting that phonological encoding in overt speech runs incrementally and the encoding duration for one syllable unit is approximately 44ms. Although the size of effective phonological units might vary across languages, as suggested by previous speech production studies, the present data indicate that the incremental nature of phonological encoding is a universal mechanism.

The Importance of a Distributional Approach to Categoriality in Autosegmental-Metrical Accounts of Intonation

When annotating a speech signal using an autosegmental-metrical model of intonation, transcribers associate portions of the F0 contour with labels from a finite inventory of tonal categories. In the models we are concerned with here, these categories have the status of phonological units (phonological form), bridging the intrinsic variability of the speech signal (substance) with the intrinsic fuzziness of post-lexical function (meaning). This, together with the relatively small size of the label inventory, precludes a one-to-one relationship between form and substance, and/or between form and function. A Neapolitan Italian corpus of read speech is used to investigate the distributional properties of two pitch accents that have been studied extensively with respect to substance (the alignment of F0 peaks) and meaning (sentence modality). Although there is a general consensus that peaks in this variety are aligned earlier in declaratives than in interrogatives, evidence is provided of contexts in which the converse is true, i.e., in which interrogative peaks are even earlier than their declarative counterparts. In this respect, interrogatives have a richer internal structure than declaratives. We argue that differences in how variably a prosodic category is encoded can be dealt with in an intonation transcription system, as long as this system relates phonological form (the choice of pitch accent in this case) both to phonetic substance and to meaning in a transparent way.

Predicting Perceptually Weak and Strong Unmarked Patterns: A Message-based Approach

Perceptual factors have been drawn on to provide insight into sound patterns and commonly serve as a diagnostic for markedness. However, a puzzling situation hasemerged: patterns associated with strong perceptual distinctiveness and those with weak distinctiveness are both described as unmarked. We propose that insight into the unmarked nature of these patterns can be gained when we take seriously the view of language as a system of information transmission. In particular, we suggest thatperceptually weak and strong unmarked patterns are those that effectively balance two competing properties of effective communication: (a) the contribution of the phonological unit in context to accurate message transmission, and (b) the resource cost of the phonological unit.

Editorial: Bridging Reading Aloud and Speech Production.

Editorial: Bridging Reading Aloud and Speech Production.

The primacy of abstract syllables in Chinese word production.

Convergent evidence suggests that syllables play a primary and distinctive role in the phonological phase of Mandarin Chinese word production. Specifically, syllables are selected before other phonological components and guide subsyllabic encoding. The proximity of phonological syllables to word representations in Chinese languages ensures that they are also activated automatically by word perception. Therefore, in contrast to Indo-European languages, syllables but not necessarily subsyllabic components such as initial consonants can be perceptually primed in production. We tested this prediction in 2 masked-priming experiments. To isolate relevant phonological activation originating in primes, we used single character masked primes whose corresponding tones and lexical meanings always differed from those of the targets' first morphemes. Related primes potentially activated the atonal first syllables or the first consonants of target words. To strongly engage production-specific processes, we used pictures as prompts for disyllabic target words. Facilitation relative to unrelated controls was observed only in the syllable sharing condition. If anything, sharing of initial consonants had a negative valence, perhaps indicative of competition among similar coactivated words or syllables. These findings corroborate the view that abstract syllables are the first selected, proximate phonological units in Chinese word production, and that phonemic segments play a subordinate role. (PsycINFO Database Record

Three Factors Are Critical in Order to Synthesize Intelligible Noise-Vocoded Japanese Speech.

Factor analysis (principal component analysis followed by varimax rotation) had shown that 3 common factors appear across 20 critical-band power fluctuations derived from spoken sentences of eight different languages [Ueda et al. (2010). Fechner Day 2010, Padua]. The present study investigated the contributions of such power-fluctuation factors to speech intelligibility. The method of factor analysis was modified to obtain factors suitable for resynthesizing speech sounds as 20-critical-band noise-vocoded speech. The resynthesized speech sounds were used for an intelligibility test. The modification of factor analysis ensured that the resynthesized speech sounds were not accompanied by a steady background noise caused by the data reduction procedure. Spoken sentences of British English, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese were subjected to this modified analysis. Confirming the earlier analysis, indeed 3–4 factors were common to these languages. The number of power-fluctuation factors needed to make noise-vocoded speech intelligible was then examined. Critical-band power fluctuations of the Japanese spoken sentences were resynthesized from the obtained factors, resulting in noise-vocoded-speech stimuli, and the intelligibility of these speech stimuli was tested by 12 native Japanese speakers. Japanese mora (syllable-like phonological unit) identification performances were measured when the number of factors was 1–9. Statistically significant improvement in intelligibility was observed when the number of factors was increased stepwise up to 6. The 12 listeners identified 92.1% of the morae correctly on average in the 6-factor condition. The intelligibility improved sharply when the number of factors changed from 2 to 3. In this step, the cumulative contribution ratio of factors improved only by 10.6%, from 37.3 to 47.9%, but the average mora identification leaped from 6.9 to 69.2%. The results indicated that, if the number of factors is 3 or more, elementary linguistic information is preserved in such noise-vocoded speech.

The Emergence of a Phoneme-Sized Unit in L2 Speech Production: Evidence from Japanese-English Bilinguals.

Recent research has revealed that the way phonology is constructed during word production differs across languages. Dutch and English native speakers are suggested to incrementally insert phonemes into a metrical frame, whereas Mandarin Chinese speakers use syllables and Japanese speakers use a unit called the mora (often a CV cluster such as “ka” or “ki”). The present study is concerned with the question how bilinguals construct phonology in their L2 when the phonological unit size differs from the unit in their L1. Japanese–English bilinguals of varying proficiency read aloud English words preceded by masked primes that overlapped in just the onset (e.g., bark-BENCH) or the onset plus vowel corresponding to the mora-sized unit (e.g., bell-BENCH). Low-proficient Japanese–English bilinguals showed CV priming but did not show onset priming, indicating that they use their L1 phonological unit when reading L2 English words. In contrast, high-proficient Japanese–English bilinguals showed significant onset priming. The size of the onset priming effect was correlated with the length of time spent in English-speaking countries, which suggests that extensive exposure to L2 phonology may play a key role in the emergence of a language-specific phonological unit in L2 word production.

Acoustic-Emergent Phonology in the Amplitude Envelope of Child-Directed Speech.

When acquiring language, young children may use acoustic spectro-temporal patterns in speech to derive phonological units in spoken language (e.g., prosodic stress patterns, syllables, phonemes). Children appear to learn acoustic-phonological mappings rapidly, without direct instruction, yet the underlying developmental mechanisms remain unclear. Across different languages, a relationship between amplitude envelope sensitivity and phonological development has been found, suggesting that children may make use of amplitude modulation (AM) patterns within the envelope to develop a phonological system. Here we present the Spectral Amplitude Modulation Phase Hierarchy (S-AMPH) model, a set of algorithms for deriving the dominant AM patterns in child-directed speech (CDS). Using Principal Components Analysis, we show that rhythmic CDS contains an AM hierarchy comprising 3 core modulation timescales. These timescales correspond to key phonological units: prosodic stress (Stress AM, ~2 Hz), syllables (Syllable AM, ~5 Hz) and onset-rime units (Phoneme AM, ~20 Hz). We argue that these AM patterns could in principle be used by naïve listeners to compute acoustic-phonological mappings without lexical knowledge. We then demonstrate that the modulation statistics within this AM hierarchy indeed parse the speech signal into a primitive hierarchically-organised phonological system comprising stress feet (proto-words), syllables and onset-rime units. We apply the S-AMPH model to two other CDS corpora, one spontaneous and one deliberately-timed. The model accurately identified 72–82% (freely-read CDS) and 90–98% (rhythmically-regular CDS) stress patterns, syllables and onset-rime units. This in-principle demonstration that primitive phonology can be extracted from speech AMs is termed Acoustic-Emergent Phonology (AEP) theory. AEP theory provides a set of methods for examining how early phonological development is shaped by the temporal modulation structure of speech across languages. The S-AMPH model reveals a crucial developmental role for stress feet (AMs ~2 Hz). Stress feet underpin different linguistic rhythm typologies, and speech rhythm underpins language acquisition by infants in all languages.

Electrophysiological evidence of sublexical phonological access in character processing by L2 Chinese learners of L1 alphabetic scripts.

While Chinese character reading relies more on addressed phonology relative to alphabetic scripts, skilled Chinese readers also access sublexical phonological units during recognition of phonograms. However, sublexical orthography-to-phonology mapping has not been found among beginning second language (L2) Chinese learners. This study investigated character reading in more advanced Chinese learners whose native writing system is alphabetic. Phonological regularity and consistency were examined in behavioral responses and event-related potentials (ERPs) in lexical decision and delayed naming tasks. Participants were 18 native English speakers who acquired written Chinese after age 5 years and reached grade 4 Chinese reading level. Behaviorally, regular characters were named more accurately than irregular characters, but consistency had no effect. Similar to native Chinese readers, regularity effects emerged early with regular characters eliciting a greater N170 than irregular characters. Regular characters also elicited greater frontal P200 and smaller N400 than irregular characters in phonograms of low consistency. Additionally, regular-consistent characters and irregular-inconsistent characters had more negative amplitudes than irregular-consistent characters in the N400 and LPC time windows. The overall pattern of brain activities revealed distinct regularity and consistency effects in both tasks. Although orthographic neighbors are activated in character processing of L2 Chinese readers, the timing of their impact seems delayed compared with native Chinese readers. The time courses of regularity and consistency effects across ERP components suggest both assimilation and accommodation of the reading network in learning to read a typologically distinct second orthographic system.

Creating the cognitive form of phonological units: The speech sound correspondence problem in infancy could be solved by mirrored vocal interactions rather than by imitation

Theories about the cognitive nature of phonological units have been constrained by the assumption that young children solve the correspondence problem for speech sounds by imitation, whether by an auditory- or gesture-based matching to target process. Imitation on the part of the child implies that he makes a comparison within one of these domains, which is presumed to be the modality of the underlying representation of speech sounds. However, there is no evidence that the correspondence problem is solved in this way. Instead we argue that the child can solve it through the mirroring behaviour of his caregivers within imitative interactions and that this mechanism is more consistent with the developmental data. The underlying representation formed by mirroring is intrinsically perceptuo-motor. It is created by the association of a vocal action performed by the child and the reformulation of this into an L1 speech token that he hears in return. Our account of how production and perception develop incorporating this mechanism explains some longstanding problems in speech and reconciles data from psychology and neuroscience.

Early literacy experiences constrain L1 and L2 reading procedures.

Computational models of reading posit that there are two pathways to word recognition, using sublexical phonology or morphological/orthographic information. They further theorize that everyone uses both pathways to some extent, but the division of labor between the pathways can vary. This review argues that the first language one was taught to read, and the instructional method by which one was taught, can have profound and long-lasting effects on how one reads, not only in one’s first language, but also in one’s second language. Readers who first learn a transparent orthography rely more heavily on the sublexical phonology pathway, and this seems relatively impervious to instruction. Readers who first learn a more opaque orthography rely more on morphological/orthographic information, but the degree to which they do so can be modulated by instructional method. Finally, readers who first learned to read a highly opaque morphosyllabic orthography use less sublexical phonology while reading in their second language than do other second language learners and this effect may be heightened if they were not also exposed to an orthography that codes for phonological units during early literacy acquisition. These effects of early literacy experiences on reading procedure are persistent despite increases in reading ability.

The influence of foreign scripts on the acquisition of a second language phonological contrast

Recent studies in the acquisition of a second language (L2) phonology have revealed that orthography can influence the way in which L2 learners come to establish target-like lexical representations (Escudero et al., 2008, 2014; Escudero and Wanrooij, 2010; Showalter, 2012; Showalter and Hayes-Harb, 2013). Most of these studies, however, involve language pairs relying on Roman-based scripts. In comparison, the influence of a foreign or unfamiliar written representation on L2 phonological acquisition remains understudied. The present study therefore considers the effects of three L2 scripts on the early acquisition of an Arabic consonantal contrast word-initially (e.g. /ħal/–/χal/). Monolingual native speakers of English with no prior knowledge of Arabic participated in a word-learning experiment where they were instructed to learn six pairs of minimally contrastive words, each associated with a unique visual referent. Participants were assigned to one of four learning conditions: no orthography, Arabic script, Cyrillic script, and Roman/Cyrillic blended script. After an initial learning phase, participants were then tested on their phonological knowledge of these L2 minimal pairs. The results show that the degree of script unfamiliarity does not in itself seem to significantly affect the successful acquisition of this particular phonological contrast. However, the presence of certain foreign scripts in the course of phonological acquisition can yield significantly different learning outcomes in comparison to having no orthographic representation available. Specifically, the Arabic script exerted an inhibitory effect on L2 phonological acquisition, while the Cyrillic and Roman/Cyrillic blended scripts exercised differential inhibitory effects based on whether grapheme–phoneme correspondences activated first language (L1) phonological units. Besides revealing, for the first time, that foreign written input can significantly hinder learners’ ability to reliably encode an L2 phonological contrast, this study also provides further evidence for the irrepressible hold of native orthographic rules on L2 phonological acquisition.

Structure, form, and meaning in the mental lexicon: evidence from Arabic

Does the organization of the mental lexicon reflect the combination of abstract underlying morphemic units or the concatenation of word-level phonological units? We address these fundamental issues in Arabic, a Semitic language where every surface form is potentially analyzable into abstract morphemic units – the word pattern and the root – and where this view contrasts with stem-based approaches, chiefly driven by linguistic considerations, in which neither roots nor word patterns play independent roles in word formation and lexical representation. Five cross-modal priming experiments examine the processing of morphologically complex forms in the three major subdivisions of the Arabic lexicon – deverbal nouns, verbs, and primitive nouns. The results demonstrate that root and word pattern morphemes function as abstract cognitive entities, operating independently of semantic factors and dissociable from possible phonological confounds, while stem-based approaches consistently fail to accommodate the basic psycholinguistic properties of the Arabic mental lexicon.

Correlation of Metrical and Phonological Units of Language

This paper was first published in Russian (Lekomceva 1969). Margarita Ivanovna Lekomceva (b. 1935) is a distinguished Russian linguist and semiotician, member of the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics. Her main research fields include Slavic, Baltic, Balkan and Indo-European phonology, rhetoric and poetics. A representative selection of her papers was published in 2007 and titled “Ustroenie jazyka” (“The Arrangement of Language”).

The Feedback Consistency Effect in Chinese Character Recognition: Evidence from a Psycholinguistic Norm

Researchers have demonstrated the importance of phonology in literacy acquisition and in visual word recognition. For example, the spelling-to-sound consistency effect has been observed in visual word recognition tasks, in which the naming responses are faster and more accurate for words with the same letters that also have the same pronunciation (e.g. -ean is always pronounced /in/, as in lean, dean, and bean). In addition, some studies have reported a much less intuitive feedback consistency effect when a rime can be spelled in different ways (e.g. /ip/ in heap and deep) in lexical decision tasks. Such findings suggest that, with activation flowing back and forth between orthographic and phonological units during word processing, any inconsistency in the mappings between orthography and phonology should weaken the stability of the feedback loop, and, thus, should delay recognition. However, several studies have failed to show reliable feedback consistency in printed word recognition. One possible reason for this is that the feedback consistency is naturally confounded with many other variables, such as orthographic neighborhood or bigram frequency, as these variables are difficult to tease apart. Furthermore, there are challenges in designing factorial experiments that perfectly balance lexical stimuli on all factors besides feedback consistency. This study aims to examine the feedback consistency effect in reading Chinese characters by using a normative data of 3,423 Chinese phonograms. We collected the lexical decision time from 180 college students. A linear mixed model analysis was used to examine the feedback consistency effect by taking into account additional properties that may be confounded with feedback consistency, including character frequency, number of strokes, phonetic combinability, semantic combinability, semantic ambiguity, phonetic consistency, noun-to-verb ratios, and morphological boundedness. Some typical effects were observed, such as the more frequent and familiar a character, the faster one can decide it is a real character. More importantly, the linear mixed model analysis revealed a significant feedback consistency effect while controlling for other factors, which indicated that the pronunciation of phonograms might accommodate the organization of Chinese orthographic representation. Our study disentangled the feedback consistency from the many other factors, and supports the view that phonological activation would reverberate to orthographic representation in visual word recognition.