A Psycholinguistic Perspective on Development of Phonetic Category Formation in Bilingual Children

This chapter reviews theories and research about phonetic category formation in bilingual children. Investigating phonetic categories provides us with a way to answer one of the longstanding theoretical issues in bilingualism, that is, whether bilingual children possess one versus two linguistic systems in the learning of their respective languages. In this chapter, theoretical backgrounds of phonetic categories in bilingual adults and children are reviewed. Then, empirical evidence showing phonetic categories in bilingual children is summarized. Finally, a development model of phonetic category formation in simultaneous and sequential bilingual children is proposed. Based on the model, detailed phonetic categories do not form across-the-board and bilingual children may invoke multi-dimensional representations of phonetic categories

The phonological development of adult Japanese learners of English : a longitudinal study of perception and production.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN042757 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Phonetic drift

This chapter provides an overview of research on the phonetic changes that occur in one’s native language (L1) due to recent experience in another language (L2), a phenomenon known as phonetic drift. Through a survey of empirical findings on segmental and suprasegmental acoustic properties, the chapter examines the features of the L1 that are subject to phonetic drift, the cognitive mechanism(s) behind phonetic drift, and the various factors that influence the likelihood of phonetic drift. In short, virtually all aspects of L1 speech are subject to drift, but different aspects do not drift in the same manner, possibly due to multiple routes of L2 influence coexisting at different levels of L1 phonological structure. In addition to the timescale of these changes, the chapter discusses the relationship between phonetic drift and attrition as well as some of the enduring questions in this area.https://drive.google.com/open?id=1eQbh17Z4YsH8vY_XjCHGqi5QChfBKcAZhttps://drive.google.com/open?id=1eQbh17Z4YsH8vY_XjCHGqi5QChfBKcAZhttps://drive.google.com/open?id=1eQbh17Z4YsH8vY_XjCHGqi5QChfBKcAZAccepted manuscriptAccepted manuscrip

An acoustic investigation of the developmental trajectory of lexical stress contrastivity in Italian

We examined whether typically developing Italian children exhibit adult-like stress contrastivity for word productions elicited via a picture naming task (n=25 children aged 3\u20135 years and 27 adults). Stimuli were 10 trisyllabic Italian words; half began with a weak\u2013strong (WS) pattern of lexical stress across the initial 2 syllables, as in patata, while the other half began with a strong\u2013weak (SW) pattern, as in gomito. Word productions that were identified as correct via perceptual judgement were analysed acoustically. The initial 2 syllables of each correct word production were analysed in terms of the duration, peak intensity, and peak fundamental frequency of the vowels using a relative measure of contrast\u2014the normalised pairwise variability index (PVI). Results across the majority of measures showed that children\u2019s stress contrastivity was adult-like. However, the data revealed that children\u2019s contrastivity for trisyllabic words beginning with a WS pattern was not adult-like regarding the PVI for vowel duration: children showed less contrastivity than adults. This effect appeared to be driven by differences in word-medial gemination between children and adults. Results are compared with data from a recent acoustic study of stress contrastivity in English speaking children and adults and discussed in relation to language-specific and physiological motor-speech constraints on production

Finnish Children Producing English Vowels — Studying in an English Immersion Class Affects Vowel Production

The aim of this study was to examine how earlier second language teaching affects Finnish school children’s pronunciation of British English vowels. Two groups of Finnish children between the ages of eleven and thirteen were tested. The early learners studied in an English immersion class in a Finnish elementary school while the control group attended a regular Finnish speaking class at the same school. The task consisted of twenty three English stimulus words which included the twelve monophthong English target vowels in voiced and voiceless environments. The words were repeated seven times during the task. The participants produced the words after a native model and the target vowel qualities were then acoustically analysed. Statistical analysis revealed a group main effect. More specifically the analysis showed that the groups differed significantly in the way they produced target vowel second formant (F2) values. The F2 difference was only significant in the voiced context. Closer examination of the groups’ vowel qualities revealed that the control group tended to produce the F2 values higher than the early learner group in most of the target vowels. The higher F2 values can be an indication of more frontal tongue position or less lip rounding during vowel production

Master of Arts

thesisResearch has demonstrated that an early age of onset may be advantageous for second language acquisition. Generally, such studies use subjects who have learned the target language through naturalistic immersion. However, few studies explore the phonological acquisition of students in immersion education programs. This study investigates whether first graders with 1 year of German dual language immersion (DLI) (experiment subjects) are able to perform significantly better than their nonimmersion peers (control subjects) on an oddity vowel discrimination task contrasting the vowels /ʊ/ and the German /ʏ/. The experiment and control groups were tested using an “odd man out” paradigm with four options: vowel A, B, or C as the odd vowel in a change trial, or X indicating that all vowels in the trial were the same. The DLI group did not perform better than the nonimmersion group; however, the nonimmersion group was more likely to select “same” while the DLI group more often selected A, B, or C. These results may indicate that DLI students with 1 year of immersion experience have begun forming a new phonological category for the German vowel /ʏ/ but are not yet able to correctly distinguish it from their more established /ʊ/ category

Bilinguals' and second language learners' knowledge of Japanese syllable structure

The acquisition of second language phonology has been commanding researchers' attention in recent years. The aim of this thesis is to contribute to this area with a study on Japanese as a second language. The thesis explores both the development of phonological competence by post-puberty second language learners and the end state of pre-puberty bilingual acquisition. Reviewing the literature on the theoretical aspects of mora, syllables and syllable structure, we see that the mora is distinctive and plays vital role in Japanese phonology. We next look at the acquisition theories proposed in recent years, and adopt a Universal Grammar-based approach. Comparing first, bilingual and second language acquisition, three research hypotheses are presented: 1) the Mora Assignment Hypothesis, 2) L2 phonological Acquisition and Age Onset Hypothesis, and the 3) Quality and Quantity of Input Hypothesis. To test these hypotheses, a study was designed involving 24 bilingual children and adults, and 94 adult L2 learners of Japanese at varying levels of proficiency. The results provide evidence to support all three research hypotheses. First the data show that the both English-dominant bilinguals and second language learners at all levels deleted morae and all but the beginning second language learners added morae in oral and written production tasks, indicating non-native competence with respect to morae. In addition, learners attempt to preserve the overall mora count. Since English is not a mora sensitive language, the mora conservation exhibited here is from their Japanese. The learners, including English-dominant bilinguals, first become sensitive to the mora and only at a later stage assign segments to the correct mora slot. The difference in performance between English-dominant bilinguals and Japanese-dominant bilinguals was such that by the age of eight, those who had spent more years in Japan demonstrated native phonological competence, whereas the English-dominant bilinguals' performance pointed to non-native competence. With respect to the second and third hypotheses, results from the bilinguals indicate that in addition to age of onset, the amount of exposure to a second language must be taken into account as a factor influencing ultimate attainment. The study also reveals strong influence of literacy in both oral and written production of Japanese

Laryngeal stop systems in contact: connecting present-day acquisition findings and historical contact hypotheses

This article examines the linguistic forces at work in present-day second language and bilingual acquisition of laryngeal contrasts, and to what extent these can give us insight into the origin of laryngeal systems of Germanic voicing languages like Dutch, with its contrast between prevoiced and unaspirated stops. The results of present-day child and adult second language acquisition studies reveal that both imposition and borrowing may occur when the laryngeal systems of a voicing and an aspirating language come into contact with each other. A scenario is explored in which socially dominant Germanic-speaking people came into contact with a Romance-speaking population, and borrowed the Romance stop system

The phonetics of second language learning and bilingualism

This chapter provides an overview of major theories and findings in the field of second language (L2) phonetics and phonology. Four main conceptual frameworks are discussed and compared: the Perceptual Assimilation Model-L2, the Native Language Magnet Theory, the Automatic Selection Perception Model, and the Speech Learning Model. These frameworks differ in terms of their empirical focus, including the type of learner (e.g., beginner vs. advanced) and target modality (e.g., perception vs. production), and in terms of their theoretical assumptions, such as the basic unit or window of analysis that is relevant (e.g., articulatory gestures, position-specific allophones). Despite the divergences among these theories, three recurring themes emerge from the literature reviewed. First, the learning of a target L2 structure (segment, prosodic pattern, etc.) is influenced by phonetic and/or phonological similarity to structures in the native language (L1). In particular, L1-L2 similarity exists at multiple levels and does not necessarily benefit L2 outcomes. Second, the role played by certain factors, such as acoustic phonetic similarity between close L1 and L2 sounds, changes over the course of learning, such that advanced learners may differ from novice learners with respect to the effect of a specific variable on observed L2 behavior. Third, the connection between L2 perception and production (insofar as the two are hypothesized to be linked) differs significantly from the perception-production links observed in L1 acquisition. In service of elucidating the predictive differences among these theories, this contribution discusses studies that have investigated L2 perception and/or production primarily at a segmental level. In addition to summarizing the areas in which there is broad consensus, the chapter points out a number of questions which remain a source of debate in the field today.https://drive.google.com/open?id=1uHX9K99Bl31vMZNRWL-YmU7O2p1tG2wHhttps://drive.google.com/open?id=1uHX9K99Bl31vMZNRWL-YmU7O2p1tG2wHhttps://drive.google.com/open?id=1uHX9K99Bl31vMZNRWL-YmU7O2p1tG2wHAccepted manuscriptAccepted manuscrip

An exploration of the rhythm of Malay

In recent years there has been a surge of interest in speech rhythm. However we still lack a clear understanding of the nature of rhythm and rhythmic differences across languages. Various metrics have been proposed as means for measuring rhythm on the phonetic level and making typological comparisons between languages (Ramus et al, 1999; Grabe & Low, 2002; Dellwo, 2006) but the debate is ongoing on the extent to which these metrics capture the rhythmic basis of speech (Arvaniti, 2009; Fletcher, in press). Furthermore, cross linguistic studies of rhythm have covered a relatively small number of languages and research on previously unclassified languages is necessary to fully develop the typology of rhythm. This study examines the rhythmic features of Malay, for which, to date, relatively little work has been carried out on aspects rhythm and timing. The material for the analysis comprised 10 sentences produced by 20 speakers of standard Malay (10 males and 10 females). The recordings were first analysed using rhythm metrics proposed by Ramus et. al (1999) and Grabe & Low (2002). These metrics (∆C, %V, rPVI, nPVI) are based on durational measurements of vocalic and consonantal intervals. The results indicated that Malay clustered with other so-called syllable-timed languages like French and Spanish on the basis of all metrics. However, underlying the overall findings for these metrics there was a large degree of variability in values across speakers and sentences, with some speakers having values in the range typical of stressed-timed languages like English. Further analysis has been carried out in light of Fletcher’s (in press) argument that measurements based on duration do not wholly reflect speech rhythm as there are many other factors that can influence values of consonantal and vocalic intervals, and Arvaniti’s (2009) suggestion that other features of speech should also be considered in description of rhythm to discover what contributes to listeners’ perception of regularity. Spectrographic analysis of the Malay recordings brought to light two parameters that displayed consistency and regularity for all speakers and sentences: the duration of individual vowels and the duration of intervals between intensity minima. This poster presents the results of these investigations and points to connections between the features which seem to be consistently regulated in the timing of Malay connected speech and aspects of Malay phonology. The results are discussed in light of current debate on the descriptions of rhythm