3 research outputs found
Production, Perception, and Distribution of Breathy Sonorants in Marathi
Breathy sonorants are crosslinguistically rare, and while a small amount of existing work has focused on their acoustic properties much remains to be learned about their perception and their language-internal distribution. Herein, breathy sonorants in Marathi are investigated via instrumental acoustic analysis, a perception experiment, and corpus analysis. Results reveal that breathy sonorants are under-represented language-internally in addition to being typologically rare. The acoustic differences associated with sonorant phonation contrasts are less robust than those in obstruents. They are also prone to more perception errors than obstruents, and breathy sonorants are more heavily restricted phonotactically than breathy obstruents. These data contribute to a more nuanced understanding of breathy sonorants, and lend potential insight into their typology.
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Perception of American English Consonants /v/ and /w/ by Hindi Speakers of English
This study examined perception of the American English (AE) /v/-/w/ consonant contrast by Hindi speakers of English as a second language (L2). A
second aim was to determine whether residence in the US modulated perception of this difficult contrast for proficient bilingual Hindi-English
listeners. Two groups of Hindi-English bilinguals (the first resided in the US for more than five years, the second lived in India) and a group of AE-speaking listeners participated in the study. Listeners’ identification and discrimination of nonsense words (e.g., “vagag” vs. “wagag”) were examined. Hindi listeners performed significantly less accurately than AE controls. Accuracy by Hindi listeners was near chance for identification and higher-than-chance for discrimination. Exposure to AE in the US did not improve performance. These results are consistent with previous studies of late L2 learners and extend findings to a population that was proficient in an L2 before arriving in the L2 environment
Growing up in an immigrant community: the phonemic development of sequential bilingual children
The majority of bilingual speech research has focused on simultaneous bilinguals. Yet, in immigrant communities, children are often initially exposed to their heritage language (L1) before becoming gradually immersed in the host country’s language (L2) when they start full-time education. This is typically referred to as sequential bilingualism. These children are often exposed to differing amounts of the L1 and L2, as well as accented variants. To date, little is known about the developmental trajectories of such children. This thesis investigates the influence of this highly variable language environment on the acquisition of L2 phonemes. Specifically this thesis focuses on Sylheti-English speaking children from the London-Bengali community. To provide a baseline of the children’s speech environment, Study 1 investigated the speech production of Sylheti (L1) and English (L2) by adult speakers from the London-Bengali community. The results show differences in production of both the L1 and L2 depending on the speaker’s language background. Studies 2 and 3 tracked the acquisition of English vowel and plosive contrasts, both perception and production, by Sylheti-English bilingual children and their monolingual peers. Using a longitudinal design, children were tested at two time points: after seven months of English language experience in nursery (Time 1) and approximately one year later, when the children were in the first year of Primary school (Time 2). At Time 1 the bilingual children displayed difficulties with phonemic contrasts that do not exist in Sylheti. However, by Time 2, the bilingual children had rapidly changed to match that of their monolingual peers. Studies 4 and 5 explored the influence of language exposure and caregiver speech on the bilingual children’s English phoneme acquisition. The results suggest that sequential bilingual children are particularly sensitive to the amount of language exposure to each language as well as fine-grained phonetic differences in caregiver speech