Suprasegmental Information Research Articles

Swift Prosodic Modulation of Lexical Access: Brain Potentials From Three North Germanic Language Varieties.

According to most models of spoken word recognition, listeners probabilistically activate a set of lexical candidates, which is incrementally updated as the speech signal unfolds. Speech carries segmental (speech sound) as well as suprasegmental (prosodic) information. The role of the latter in spoken word recognition is less clear. We investigated how suprasegments (tone and voice quality) in three North Germanic language varieties affected lexical access by scrutinizing temporally fine-grained neurophysiological effects of lexical uncertainty and information gain. Three event-related potential (ERP) studies were reanalyzed. In all varieties investigated, suprasegments are associated with specific word endings. Swedish has two lexical "word accents" realized as pitch falls with different timings across dialects. In Danish, the distinction is in voice quality. We combined pronunciation lexica and frequency lists to calculate estimates of lexical uncertainty about an unfolding word and information gain upon hearing a suprasegmental cue and the segment upon which it manifests. We used single-trial mixed-effects regression models run every 4 ms. Only lexical uncertainty showed solid results: a frontal effect at 150-400 ms after suprasegmental cue onset and a later posterior effect after 200 ms. While a model including only segmental information mostly performed better, it was outperformed by the suprasegmental model at 200-330 ms at frontal sites. The study points to suprasegmental cues contributing to lexical access over and beyond segments after around 200 ms in the North Germanic varieties investigated. Furthermore, the findings indicate that a previously reported "pre-activation negativity" predominantly reflects forward-looking processing. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.25016486.

Interpreting experience and working memory effects on L1 and L2 morphological prediction

The human brain tries to process information as efficiently as possible through mechanisms like prediction. Native speakers predict linguistic information extensively, but L2 learners show variability. Interpreters use prediction while working and research shows that interpreting experience mediates L2 prediction. However, it is unclear whether advantages related to interpreting are due to higher working memory (WM) capacity, a typical characteristic of professional interpreters. To better understand the role of WM during L1 and L2 prediction, English L2 learners of Spanish with and without interpreting experience and Spanish monolinguals completed a visual-world paradigm eye-tracking task and a number-letter sequencing working memory task. The eye-tracking task measured prediction of verbal morphology (present, past) based on suprasegmental information (lexical stress: paroxytone, oxytone) and segmental information (syllabic structure: CV, CVC). Results revealed that WM mediates L1 prediction, such that higher WM facilitates prediction of morphology in monolinguals. However, higher WM hinders prediction in L2 processing for non-interpreters. Interestingly, interpreters behaved similarly to monolinguals, with higher WM facilitating L2 prediction. This study provides further understanding of the variability in L2 prediction.

Are goats chèvres, chévres, chēvres, and chevres? Unveiling the orthographic code of diacritical vowels.

An often overlooked but fundamental issue for any comprehensive model of visual-word recognition is the representation of diacritical vowels: Do diacritical and nondiacritical vowels share their abstract letter representations? Recent research suggests that the answer is "yes" in languages where diacritics indicate suprasegmental information (e.g., lexical stress, as in cámara ['ka.ma.ɾa] camera; Spanish), but "no" in languages where diacritics indicate segmental information such as a different phoneme (e.g., the German vowels ä /ɛ/ and a /a/). Here we examined this issue in French, a language that contains a complex set of diacritical vowels (e.g., for the letter e: é, è, ê, and ë). In Experiment 1, using a semantic categorization task, we compared the word identification times to intact diacritical words (e.g., chèvre, goat in English) with a condition with omitted diacritics (chevre). Results showed that the two conditions behaved similarly. In Experiments 2-4, we compared the intact diacritical words with a condition containing a mismatching diacritic, either existing in French (e.g., chévre, chêvre) or not (the macron sign, as in chēvre). We only found a reading cost when replacing the diacritic with an existing one. In Experiments 5-6, we compared the semantic categorization times to intact nondiacritical words (e.g., cheval, horse in English) versus a condition with an added diacritic, either existing (chèval) or not (chēval). We found a reading cost for the words with the added diacritical mark in both cases. We discuss how models of visual-word recognition can be modified to represent diacritical vowels. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Musical training alters neural processing of tones and vowels in classic Chinese poems

Long-term rigorous musical training promotes various aspects of spoken language processing. However, it is unclear whether musical training provides an advantage in recognizing segmental and suprasegmental information of spoken language. We used vowel and tone violations in spoken unfamiliar seven-character quatrains and a rhyming judgment task to investigate the effects of musical training on tone and vowel processing by recording ERPs. Compared with non-musicians, musicians were more accurate and responded faster to incorrect than correct tones. Musicians showed larger P2 components in their ERPs than non-musicians during both tone and vowel processing, revealing increased focused attention on sounds. Both groups showed enhanced N400 and LPC for incorrect vowels (vs. correct vowels) but non-musicians showed an additional P2 effect for vowel violations. Moreover, both groups showed enhanced LPC for incorrect tones (vs. correct tones) but only non-musicians showed an additional N400 effect for tone violations. These results indicate that vowel/tone processing is less effortful for musicians (vs. non-musicians). Our study suggests that long-term musical training facilitates speech tone and vowel processing in a tonal language environment by increasing the attentional focus on speech and reducing demands for detecting incorrect vowels and integration costs for tone changes.

Phonetic Cues in Auditory Identification of Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, and Russian Language of Origin.

This work presents the results of an auditory language of origin identification experiment. Disyllabic and trisyllabic logatomes were recorded by speakers of Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, and Russian, and presented to L1 speakers of the abovementioned Slavic languages. The goals of the test were to verify the ability of lay listeners to recognize the linguistic origin of speakers, based on spoken samples with limited segmental and suprasegmental information, and to correlate the signal features with the subjects' performance. It was found that position of word stress is not an important predictor in language recognition. However, inherent vowel characteristics such as duration and vowel space computed by the means of Pillai scores correlate with subjects' performance. Both the linguistic profile and the familiarity with closely related languages also appear to be relevant predictors of listeners' performance. Finally, the information-theoretic notion of surprisal applied on regular cross-linguistic sound correspondences was correlated with recognition scores; though, the correlations did not reach the threshold of statistical significance. We conclude that auditory identification of linguistic origin by lay persons, native speakers of closely related languages, is possible even when exposed to limited segmental information, which can serve as a cue in the identification of linguistic origin.

The Suprasegmental Analysis On Jokowi’s Speech Of “Lonjakan Kasus Covid-19 dan Penerapan PPKMMikro On 23rd Of June 2021”

The Suprasegmental Analysis On Jokowi’s Speech Of “Lonjakan Kasus Covid-19 dan Penerapan PPKMMikro On 23rd Of June 2021”

Perception of speaker sincerity in complex social interactions by cochlear implant users.

Understanding insincere language (sarcasm and teasing) is a fundamental part of communication and crucial for maintaining social relationships. This can be a challenging task for cochlear implant (CIs) users who receive degraded suprasegmental information important for perceiving a speaker’s attitude. We measured the perception of speaker sincerity (literal positive, literal negative, sarcasm, and teasing) in 16 adults with CIs using an established video inventory. Participants were presented with audio-only and audio-visual social interactions between two people with and without supporting verbal context. They were instructed to describe the content of the conversation and answer whether the speakers meant what they said. Results showed that subjects could not always identify speaker sincerity, even when the content of the conversation was perfectly understood. This deficit was greater for perceiving insincere relative to sincere utterances. Performance improved when additional visual cues or verbal context cues were provided. Subjects who were better at perceiving the content of the interactions in the audio-only condition benefited more from having additional visual cues for judging the speaker’s sincerity, suggesting that the two modalities compete for cognitive recourses. Perception of content also did not correlate with perception of speaker sincerity, suggesting that what was said vs. how it was said were perceived using unrelated segmental versus suprasegmental cues. Our results further showed that subjects who had access to lower-order resolved harmonic information provided by hearing aids in the contralateral ear identified speaker sincerity better than those who used implants alone. These results suggest that measuring speech recognition alone in CI users does not fully describe the outcome. Our findings stress the importance of measuring social communication functions in people with CIs.

Interpreting experience enhances the use of lexical stress and syllabic structure to predict L2 word endings

AbstractPrediction underlies many life’s situations including language. Monolinguals and advanced L2 learners use prosodic cues such as stress and tone in a word’s first syllable to predict the word’s suffix. To determine whether the same findings extend to words with non-morphological endings, we investigate whether Spanish monolinguals and advanced learners of Spanish with and without interpreting experience use stress (stressed, unstressed) and syllabic structure (CV, CVC) in a word’s initial syllable to predict its ending. This is crucial to understand whether associations underlying prediction are morphophonolexical associations or purely phonolexical. Interpreters were included due to their extensive experience predicting incoming speech. Participants completed an eye-tracking study where they listened to a sentence while seeing two words and selected the word they heard. Results revealed that monolinguals and interpreters predicted word endings under all conditions, but non-interpreters only predicted in the CVC oxytone condition. These findings are relevant for (1) prediction accounts, showing that phonolexical associations trigger prediction; (2) phonological models, revealing that stress and syllable information in the initial syllable are key for accessing and predicting meaning; and (3) L2 processing models, indicating that L2 learners with interpreting experience use suprasegmental information to access and predict lexical items similar to monolinguals.

Comparing Emotion Recognition and Word Recognition in Background Noise.

Purpose Word recognition in quiet and in background noise has been thoroughly investigated in previous research to establish segmental speech recognition performance as a function of stimulus characteristics (e.g., audibility). Similar methods to investigate recognition performance for suprasegmental information (e.g., acoustic cues used to make judgments of talker age, sex, or emotional state) have not been performed. In this work, we directly compared emotion and word recognition performance in different levels of background noise to identify psychoacoustic properties of emotion recognition (globally and for specific emotion categories) relative to word recognition. Method Twenty young adult listeners with normal hearing listened to sentences and either reported a target word in each sentence or selected the emotion of the talker from a list of options (angry, calm, happy, and sad) at four signal-to-noise ratios in a background of white noise. Psychometric functions were fit to the recognition data and used to estimate thresholds (midway points on the function) and slopes for word and emotion recognition. Results Thresholds for emotion recognition were approximately 10 dB better than word recognition thresholds, and slopes for emotion recognition were half of those measured for word recognition. Low-arousal emotions had poorer thresholds and shallower slopes than high-arousal emotions, suggesting greater confusion when distinguishing low-arousal emotional speech content. Conclusions Communication of a talker's emotional state continues to be perceptible to listeners in competitive listening environments, even after words are rendered inaudible. The arousal of emotional speech affects listeners' ability to discriminate between emotion categories.

The ontogeny of early language discrimination: Beyond rhythm

Infants can discriminate languages that belong to different rhythmic classes at birth. The ability to perform within-class discrimination emerges around the fifth month of life. The cues that infants use to discriminate between prosodically close languages remain elusive. Segmental information could be a potential cue, since infants notice vowel mispronunciations of their names, show the first signs of word recognition and the first signs of perceptual narrowing for vowels around 6 months of age. If infants have in place some proto-segmental information, most likely it is about vowels. Another potential cue infants may use to discriminate languages is intonation. We tested participants using sentences in Eastern Catalan, Western Catalan and Spanish. The two Catalan dialects and Spanish belong to the same rhythmic class, they are syllable-timed, but they differ in terms of vowel distribution, given that only Eastern Catalan has vocalic reduction. The vowel distributions of Western Catalan and Spanish are more comparable. However, they differ in terms of their intonational patterns. In Experiment 1, we tested the ability of 4.5-month-old infants learning Eastern Catalan and/or Spanish to discriminate between sentences in Eastern and Western Catalan and in Experiment 2 their ability to discriminate between sentences in Western Catalan and Spanish. In order to disentangle the contribution of segmental and suprasegmental information, we also tested infants using low-pass filtered sentences in the two dialects (Experiment 3) and low-pass filtered sentences in Western Catalan and Spanish (Experiment 4). Infants discriminated the two Catalan dialects only when the stimuli were natural sentences, whereas they were able to discriminate between Western Catalan and Spanish when the stimuli were either natural or low-pass filtered sentences. The research also provides evidence of equivalent language discrimination abilities in infants growing up in monolingual and bilingual environments.

The Role of Segmental Information in Syntactic Processing Through the Syntax-Prosody Interface.

In two experiments, it was investigated whether potentially contrastive segmental information in the form of an epenthetic glottal stop in Maltese can influence syntactic parsing decisions. The glottal stop in Maltese serves a dual function as a phoneme used for lexical contrast and a non-contrastive phone that may mark a prosodic juncture. In both experiments, participants perceived a larger prosodic boundary before the word u (Engl. "and") if the u was produced with an epenthetic glottal stop, showing the use of prosodically conditioned segmental information in syntactic parsing. Furthermore, listeners were generally unaware of the existence of the epenthetic glottal stop even though a glottal stop is used as a phoneme represented as a grapheme "q." They also perceived a larger prosodic juncture when the preceding syllable was lengthened before the word u ("and"). These findings were consistent regardless of whether the glottal stop reinforced a late-closure decision (Experiment 1) or an early-closure decision (Experiment 2). The results indicate that both segmental and suprasegmental information influences syntactic parsing decisions, demonstrating that the syntax-prosody interface is reflected along both the segmental and suprasegmental (duration) dimensions, which are mediated by the phonetics-prosody interface.

Bilingual and Multilingual Mental Lexicon: A Modeling Study With Linear Discriminative Learning

AbstractThis study addresses whether there is anything special about learning a third language, as compared to learning a second language, that results solely from the order of acquisition. We use a computational model based on the mathematical framework of Linear Discriminative Learning to explore this question for the acquisition of a small trilingual vocabulary, with English as L1, German or Mandarin as L2, and Mandarin or Dutch as L3. Our simulations reveal that when qualitative differences emerge between the learning of a first, second, and third language, these differences emerge from distributional properties of the particular languages involved rather than the order of acquisition per se, or any difference in learning mechanism. One such property is the number of homophones in each language, since within‐language homophones give rise to errors in production. Our simulations also show the importance of suprasegmental information in determining the kinds of production errors made.

Lateralization in the dichotic listening of tones is influenced by the content of speech

Cognitive functions, for example speech processing, are distributed asymmetrically in the two hemispheres that mostly have homologous anatomical structures. Dichotic listening is a well-established paradigm to investigate hemispherical lateralization of speech. However, the mixed results of dichotic listening, especially when using tonal languages as stimuli, complicates the investigation of functional lateralization. We hypothesized that the inconsistent results in dichotic listening are due to an interaction in processing a mixture of acoustic and linguistic attributes that are differentially processed over the two hemispheres. In this study, a within-subject dichotic listening paradigm was designed, in which different levels of speech and linguistic information was incrementally included in different conditions that required the same tone identification task. A left ear advantage (LEA), in contrast with the commonly found right ear advantage (REA) in dichotic listening, was observed in the hummed tones condition, where only the slow frequency modulation of tones was included. However, when phonemic and lexical information was added in simple vowel tone conditions, the LEA became unstable. Furthermore, ear preference became balanced when phonological and lexical-semantic attributes were included in the consonant-vowel (CV), pseudo-word, and word conditions. Compared with the existing REA results that use complex vowel word tones, a complete pattern emerged gradually shifting from LEA to REA. These results support the hypothesis that an acoustic analysis of suprasegmental information of tones is preferably processed in the right hemisphere, but is influenced by phonological and lexical semantic processes residing in the left hemisphere. The ear preference in dichotic listening depends on the levels of speech and linguistic analysis and preferentially lateralizes across the different hemispheres. That is, the manifestation of functional lateralization depends on the integration of information across the two hemispheres.

Slowly but surely: Interpreting facilitates L2 morphological anticipation based on suprasegmental and segmental information

AbstractNative speakers use suprasegmental information to predict words, but less is known about segmental information. Moreover, anticipatory studies with non-native speakers are scarce and mix proficiency with anticipatory experience. To address these limitations, we investigated whether Spanish monolinguals and advanced English learners of Spanish use suprasegmentals (stress: oxytone, paroxytone) and segmentals (syllabic structure: CVC, CV) to predict word suffixes, and whether increased anticipatory experience acquired via interpreting will facilitate anticipation in non-interpreting L2 situations. Eye-tracking data revealed that: (1) the three groups made use of the linguistic variables, and L2 groups did not anticipate in CV paroxytones; (2) everybody anticipated better with the less frequent conditions (oxytones, CVC) having fewer lexical competitors; (3) monolinguals anticipated earlier than L2 learners; and (4) interpreters anticipated at a faster rate in some conditions. These findings indicate that less frequent suprasegmental and segmental information and anticipatory experience facilitate native and non-native spoken word prediction.

The role of lexical stress in spoken English word recognition by listeners of English and Taiwan Mandarin

Abstract Two perceptual experiments investigated how the suprasegmental information of monosyllables is perceived and exploited in spoken English word recognition by listeners of English and Taiwan Mandarin (TM). Using an auditory lexical decision task in which correctly stressed English words and mis-stressed nonwords (e.g. camPAIGN vs. *CAMpaign) were presented for lexical decisions, Experiment I demonstrated that TM listeners could perceive the differences between stressed and unstressed syllables with native-like accuracy and rapidity. To examine how the perceived suprasegmental contrast would constrain English lexical access, Experiment II was conducted. It used a cross-modal fragment priming task in which a lexical decision had to be made for a visually presented English word or nonword following an auditory prime, which was a spoken word-initial syllable. The results showed that English and TM listeners recognized the displayed word (e.g. campus) faster both after a stress-matching (e.g. CAM-) prime and a stress-mismatching (e.g. cam-) prime than after a control prime (e.g. MOUN-, with mismatching segments). This indicates that suprasegmental information does not inhibit a segmentally matching but suprasegmentally mismatching word candidate for both the two groups, although TM is a language where lexical prosody is expressed syllabically and its listeners tend to interpret lexical stress tonally. Yet, the two groups’ responses were slower after the stressed primes than after the unstressed ones, presumably because the former generally had more possible continuations than the latter do. It is therefore concluded that when recognizing spoken English words, both the native and non-native (TM-speaking) listeners can exploit the suprasegmental cues of monosyllables, which, however, are not so effective that they will outweigh the segmental cues.

Using Eye-Movements to Track Bilingual Activation

Recent research found that the languages of bilingual listeners are active and interact, such that both lexical representations are activated by the spoken input with which they are compatible. However, the time course of bilingual activation and whether suprasegmental information further modulates this cross-language competition are still not well understood. This study investigates the effect of stress placement on the processing of English–Spanish cognates by beginner-to-intermediate Spanish-speaking second-language (L2) learners of English and intermediate-to-advanced English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish using the visual-world eye-tracking paradigm. In each trial, participants saw a target (asado, ‘roast’), one of two competitors (stress match: asados, ‘roast (pl)’; stress mismatch: asador, ‘rotisserie’), and two unrelated distracters, while hearing the target word. The experiment included a non-cognate condition (asado-asados-asador) and a cognate condition, where the stress pattern of the English word corresponding to the Spanish competitor in the stress-mismatch condition (inventor) instead matched that of the Spanish target (invento, ‘invent’). Growth-curve analyses revealed cognate-status and stress-mismatch effects for Spanish-speaking L2 learners of English, and cognate-status and stress-mismatch effects, and an interaction for English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish. This suggests that both groups use stress for word recognition, but the English stress pattern only affects the processing of Spanish words in the English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish.

The influence of tone language experience and speech style on the use of intonation in language discrimination.

This work tests whether listeners' use of suprasegmental information in speech perception is modulated by language background and speech style. Native Mandarin (tone language) and Malay (non-tone language) listeners completed an AX language discrimination task with four levels of signal degradation and two speech styles. Listeners in both groups showed more benefit from pitch information in read than in spontaneous speech. Mandarin listeners showed a greater benefit than Malay listeners from the inclusion of f0 information in a segmentally degraded signal, suggesting that experience with lexical tone may extend to increased attention and/or sensitivity to phrase-level pitch contours.

Three-year-old tone language learners are tolerant of tone mispronunciations spoken with familiar and novel tones

AbstractAn important issue in language acquisition is understanding the function of suprasegmental information (e.g., tones) in spoken word recognition. Recent research found that three-year-old mo...

Are tones in the expressive lexicon iconic? Evidence from three Chinese languages

Recent advances in the literature have focused on sketching phonosemantic mappings of imitative or iconic utterances by relying on vowels and consonants, leaving the suprasegmental information unexplored. To begin bridging this gap, this study looks at the interaction of lexical tone and iconicity by comparing sound symbolic (i.e., mimetic, expressive, ideophonic) strata and general (i.e., arbitrary, prosaic, non-iconic) strata from three Chinese languages (Mandarin, Taiwanese Southern Min, Hong Kong Cantonese) using corpus-based means. For all three languages the distribution of tones in the sound symbolic strata are skewed so that the majority of syllables are largely confined to two tonal categories per language, one of which is high level, while the general strata exhibit no such tonal bias. These results indicate that phonological systematicity at the prosodic level might play an important role in demarcating an iconic class of words. This cross-linguistic tendency towards high tone mappings may be derived from phonotactic strategies to facilitate prosodic foregrounding of iconic utterances as well as an embodiment of expressive voice and marked pitch use like that of Infant Directed Speech.

Suprasegmental information cues morphological anticipation during L1/L2 lexical access

Abstract We use visual-world eye-tracking and gating methods to investigate whether Spanish monolinguals and English late learners of Spanish use prosodic cues (lexical stress) to anticipate morphological information (suffixes) during spoken word recognition, and if they do, whether L2 proficiency and working memory (WM) mediate their anticipatory abilities. Our findings show that the monolinguals used prosodic information to predict word endings in both tasks, regardless of first-syllable stress (stressed, unstressed) and structure (CV, CVC). In contrast, the beginning learners did not use prosodic information to anticipate word suffixes in any task or condition. Importantly, the advanced learners mirrored the monolinguals, except in words with first-syllable CV structure, but were slower than the monolinguals. Finally, WM was not associated with anticipatory eye movements, though results were inconclusive for offline processing. Taken together, the present study shows that suprasegmental information facilitates morphological anticipation during spoken word recognition, and that adult learners can gain anticipatory processing patterns qualitatively, but not quantitatively, similar to monolinguals.