39 research outputs found

    Phonological issues in the production of prosody by francophone and sinophone learners of english as a second language

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    Un accent de non-natif peut mener Ă  une incomprĂ©hension ou Ă  la perception de degrĂ©s diffĂ©rents d'accent d'Ă©trangetĂ©. La prosodie, qui est maintenant reconnue comme un Ă©lĂ©ment important de l'impression d'Ă©trangetĂ©, est relativement peu abordĂ©e en recherche en acquisition des langues Ă©trangĂšres. Ceci contraste avec l'intĂ©rĂȘt grandissant envers la prosodie en tant qu'Ă©lĂ©ment de la langue maternelle. Dans cette thĂšse, la recherche phonologique est Ă©valuĂ©e quant Ă  sa pertinence dans la recherche sur la prosodie des langues Ă©trangĂšres. Deux aspects de la thĂ©orie phonologique sont Ă©tudiĂ©s: la typologie et l'organisation phonologique. Ce choix est justifiĂ© par la prĂ©somption gĂ©nĂ©rale que l'Ă©trangetĂ© prosodique est crĂ©Ă©e soit par une diffĂ©rence de typologie entre langue maternelle (L1) et langue Ă©trangĂšre (L2) soit par un transfert de traits prosodiques de la L1. La critique de la recherche en typologie phonologique conclut que, Ă  ce stade, aucun modĂšle de classification prosodique n'est applicable Ă  l'acquisition d'une L2. En particulier, l'Ă©tude dĂ©montre que certaines typologies, en particulier la thĂ©orie de l'isochronie accentuelle/l'isochronie syllabique de Pike, devraient ĂȘtre exclues parce qu'elles entravent les progrĂšs en recherche sur l'acquisition et la production de la prosodie des langues Ă©trangĂšres. Le second aspect de la thĂ©orie phonologique Ă©tudiĂ© dans cette thĂšse est l'organisation phonologique. La prĂ©misse est que les diffĂ©rences sous-jacentes Ă  l'organisation prosodique plutĂŽt que les diffĂ©rences phonologiques de surface sont transfĂ©rĂ©es de L1 Ă  L2. Les analyses approfondies de l'anglais nord amĂ©ricain, le français et le chinois standard rĂ©vĂšlent d'importantes diffĂ©rences phonologiques entre l'anglais nord amĂ©ricain et les deux autres langues. Quatre expĂ©riences Ă©valuent certaines de ces diffĂ©rences. La prosodie de l'anglais produite par des locuteurs natifs du français est analysĂ©e dans des phrases rythmiquement simples et des phrases rythmiquement plus complexes. Les rĂ©sultats dĂ©montrent que l'accentuation lexicale est moins problĂ©matique que l'accentuation prosodique supra-lexicale. En particulier, il est dĂ©montrĂ© que les montĂ©es de frĂ©quence fondamentale (F0) de dĂ©but et de fin de syntagme accentuel (SA), typiques du français, sont source d'erreur dans la prosodie de l'anglais langue seconde. Il est cependant montrĂ© que cette erreur, bien que remarquĂ©e par les locuteurs natifs de l'anglais, n'affecte pas la perception de placement d'accentuation par ces derniers. La prosodie de l'anglais produite par des locuteurs natifs du chinois est analysĂ©e en termes de transfert de ton et d'alignement de pic de F0. Les rĂ©sultats indiquent que les locuteurs du chinois utilisent les tons chinois quand ils produisent des tons accentuels de l'anglais; plus spĂ©cifiquement, la majoritĂ© des locuteurs utilisent le ton 2 (ton montant) quand ils produisent un ton accentuel montant. La derniĂšre expĂ©rience rĂ©vĂšle que les locuteurs natifs du chinois alignent le ton accentuel avec la syllabe accentuĂ©e Ă  laquelle elle correspond de maniĂšre plus stricte que les locuteurs natifs de l'anglais nord amĂ©ricain le font. Les rĂ©sultats de cette thĂšse gĂ©nĂšrent un aperçu de la progression de la performance de la prosodie d'une langue Ă©trangĂšre. Les conclusions comportent des implications sur le contenu pĂ©dagogique et le format de l'enseignement de la prononciation. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Phonologie, PhonĂ©tique, Phonologie prosodique, Prosodie, Rythme, ESL, Français du QuĂ©bec, Français de France, Chinois

    An ear for pitch: On the effects of experience and aptitude in processing pitch in language and music

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    Sequential grouping constraints on across-channel auditory processing

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    SĂžren Buus. Thirty years of psychoacoustic inspiration

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    Brain anatomical correlates of perceptual phonological proficiency and language learning aptitude

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    The present dissertation concerns how brain tissue properties reflect proficiency in two aspects of language use: the ability to use tonal cues on word stems to predict how words will end and the aptitude for learning foreign languages. While it is known that people differ in their language abilities and that damage to brain tissue cause loss of cognitive functions, it is largely unknown if differences in language proficiencies correlate with differences in brain structure. The first two studies examine correlations between cortical morphometry, i.e. the thickness and surface area of the cortex, and the degree of dependency on word accents for processing upcoming suffixes in Swedish native speakers. Word accents in Swedish facilitate speech processing by having predictive associations to specific suffixes, (e.g. flĂ€ckaccent1+en ‘spot+singular’, flĂ€ckaccent2+ar ‘spot+plural’). This use of word accents, as phonological cues to inflectional suffixes, is relatively unique among the world’s languages. How much a speaker depends on word accents in speech processing can be measured as the difference in response time (RT) between valid and invalid word accent-suffix combinations when asked to identify the inflected form of a word. This can be thought of as a measure of perceptual phonological proficiency in native speakers. Perceptual phonological proficiency is otherwise very difficult to study, as most phonological contrasts are mandatory to properly interpret the meaning of utterances. Study I compares the cortical morphometrical correlates in the planum temporale and inferior frontal gyrus pars opercularis in relation to RT differences in tasks involving real words and pseudowords. We found that thickness of the left planum temporale correlates with perceptual phonological proficiency in lexical words but not pseudowords. This could implicate that word accents are part of full-form representations of familiar words. Moreover, for pseudowords but not lexical words, the thickness of the inferior frontal gyrus pars opercularis correlates with perceptual phonological proficiency. This association could reflect a greater importance for decompositional analysis in which word accents are part of a set of rules listeners need to rely on during processing of novel words. In study II, the investigation of the association between perceptual phonological proficiency in real words with cortical morphometry is expanded to the entire brain. Results show that cortical thickness and surface area of anterior temporal lobe areas, known constituents of a ventral sound-to-meaning language-processing stream is associated with greater perceptual phonological proficiency. This is consistent with a role for word accents in aiding putting together the meaning of or accessing a whole word representation of an inflected word form. Studies III and IV investigate the cortical morphometric associations with language learning aptitude. Findings in study III suggest that aptitude for grammatical inferencing, i.e. the ability to analytically discern the rules of a language, is associated with cortical thickness in the left inferior frontal gyrus pars triangularis. Furthermore, pitch discrimination proficiency, a skill related to language learning ability, correlates negatively with cortical thickness in the right homologue area. Moreover, study IV, using improved imaging techniques, reports on a correlation between vocabulary learning aptitude and cortical surface area in the left inferior precuneus as well as a negative correlation between diffusional axial kurtosis and phonetic memory in the left arcuate fasciculus and subsegment III of the superior longitudinal fasciculus. However, the finding correlation between cortical thickness and grammatical inferencing skill from study III was not replicated in study IV.Taken together, the present dissertation shows that differences in some language proficiencies are associated with regionally thicker or larger cortex and more coherent white matter tracts, the nature and spatial locus of which depend on the proficiency studied. The studies add to our understanding of how language proficiencies are represented in the brain’s anatomy

    Sequential grouping constraints on across‐channel auditory processing

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    Papers in Southeast Asian Linguistics No. 8: Tonation

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    Integrating Information Technology in theTeaching/Learning of English Pronunciation in the Classroom: Designing and Implementing an Online Course to Teach Word and Sentence Stress to Tertiary Level Students.

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    Este estudio investiga el potencial del uso de la tecnologia en la ensenanza y el aprendizaje de la pronunciacion. El estudio explora el progreso de los estudiantes en la pronunciacion en ingles con respecto a la acentuacion de palabras y oraciones. El curso de pronunciacion era original, se creo especialmente para los participantes de este estudio, teniendo en cuenta los errores tipicos que cometen los hablantes de espanol / catalan como resultado de la interferencia del idioma materno. El estudio se llevo a cabo con dos grupos de 24 estudiantes universitarios de primer ano que actuaron como control y experimental. El grupo control recibio instruccion sobre la acentuacion de ingles por medios convencionales, mientras que el grupo experimental utilizo un entorno virtual para el aprendizaje de la pronunciacion. El estudio utilizo un diseno de prueba previa, intervencion y prueba posterior. Para evaluar los datos, se adoptaron tres enfoques diferentes. Las tareas de lectura fueron evaluadas mediante analisis acustico

    Word learning in the first year of life

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    In the first part of this thesis, we ask whether 4-month-old infants can represent objects and movements after a short exposure in such a way that they recognize either a repeated object or a repeated movement when they are presented simultaneously with a new object or a new movement. If they do, we ask whether the way they observe the visual input is modified when auditory input is presented. We investigate whether infants react to the familiarization labels and to novel labels in the same manner. If the labels as well as the referents are matched for saliency, any difference should be due to processes that are not limited to sensorial perception. We hypothesize that infants will, if they map words to the objects or movements, change their looking behavior whenever they hear a familiar label, a novel label, or no label at all. In the second part of this thesis, we assess the problem of word learning from a different perspective. If infants reason about possible label-referent pairs and are able to make inferences about novel pairs, are the same processes involved in all intermodal learning? We compared the task of learning to associate auditory regularities to visual stimuli (reinforcers), and the word-learning task. We hypothesized that even if infants succeed in learning more than one label during one single event, learning the intermodal connection between auditory and visual regularities might present a more demanding task for them. The third part of this thesis addresses the role of associative learning in word learning. In the last decades, it was repeatedly suggested that co-occurrence probabilities can play an important role in word segmentation. However, the vast majority of studies test infants with artificial streams that do not resemble a natural input: most studies use words of equal length and with unambiguous syllable sequences within word, where the only point of variability is at the word boundaries (Aslin et al., 1998; Saffran, Johnson, Aslin, & Newport, 1999; Saffran et al., 1996; Thiessen et al., 2005; Thiessen & Saffran, 2003). Even if the input is modified to resemble the natural input more faithfully, the words with which infants are tested are always unambiguous \u2013 within words, each syllable predicts its adjacent syllable with the probability of 1.0 (Pelucchi, Hay, & Saffran, 2009; Thiessen et al., 2005). We therefore tested 6-month-old infants with such statistically ambiguous words. Before doing that, we also verified on a large sample of languages whether statistical information in the natural input, where the majority of the words are statistically ambiguous, is indeed useful for segmenting words. Our motivation was partly due to the fact that studies that modeled the segmentation process with a natural language input often yielded ambivalent results about the usefulness of such computation (Batchelder, 2002; Gambell & Yang, 2006; Swingley, 2005). We conclude this introduction with a small remark about the term word. It will be used throughout this thesis without questioning its descriptive value: the common-sense meaning of the term word is unambiguous enough, since all people know what are we referring to when we say or think of the term word. However, the term word is not unambiguous at all (Di Sciullo & Williams, 1987). To mention only some of the classical examples: (1) Do jump and jumped, or go and went, count as one word or as two? This example might seem all too trivial, especially in languages with weak overt morphology as English, but in some languages, each basic form of the word has tens of inflected variables. (2) A similar question arises with all the words that are morphological derivations of other words, such as evict and eviction, examine and reexamine, unhappy and happily, and so on. (3) And finally, each language contains many phrases and idioms: Does air conditioner and give up count as one word, or two? Statistical word segmentation studies in general neglect the issue of the definition of words, assuming that phrases and idioms have strong internal statistics and will therefore be selected as one word (Cutler, 2012). But because compounds or phrases are usually composed of smaller meaningful chunks, it is unclear how would infants extracts these smaller units of speech if they were using predominantly statistical information. We will address the problem of over-segmentations shortly in the third part of the thesis
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