DOES L2 WORD DECODING IMPLY L2 MEANING ACTIVATION? RELATIONSHIPS AMONG DECODING, MEANING IDENTIFICATION, ANDL2 ORAL LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY IN READING SPANISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

This study investigated the role of meaning activation and L2 oral language proficiency among Moroccan children learning to read in Spanish for the first time. Recent cross-linguistic research suggests that children learning to read in an L1 or L2 transparent orthography can achieve phonological decoding accuracy faster by relying on grapheme-phoneme strategies. In that case, it becomes extremely important to investigate the role of meaning and its relation to the development of phonological decoding and reading comprehension, especially when children are learning to read in an L2 transparent orthography. The main objective of this study was to discover whether phonological decoding and meaning identification can be considered to be two independent constructs or only one. The second objective was to expand the scope of L2 Spanish oral language proficiency by examining its influence on each of these constructs and on sentence reading comprehension. A battery of measures for assessing the various domains of phonological awareness, decoding, meaning identification and sentence comprehension, were administered to 140 Moroccan children with at least one year of literacy instruction in Spain. Letter knowledge and concept of print were used as control variables. Confirmatory analysis results demonstrated that decoding and word identification form different but dependent constructs. Structural equation modeling indicated that the contribution of L2 oral language proficiency depended on the exact nature of the dependent variable: L2 oral language proficiency does not directly predict decoding skills but is directly related to meaning identification skills and sentence comprehension. The findings provided an understanding of the roles of meaning and L2 oral language proficiency in isolated word reading and sentence comprehension, and clearly implied that decoding and comprehension are more independent when learning to read in an L2 transparent orthography. L2 decoding in Spanish can take place without comprehension. Possible theoretical, instructional and assessment implications related to L2 Spanish reading development are drawn based on the study's results

Identification of Code-Switched Sentences and Words Using Language Modeling Approaches

Globalization and multilingualism contribute to code-switching—the phenomenon in which speakers produce utterances containing words or expressions from a second language. Processing code-switched sentences is a significant challenge for multilingual intelligent systems. This study proposes a language modeling approach to the problem of code-switching language processing, dividing the problem into two subtasks: the detection of code-switched sentences and the identification of code-switched words in sentences. A code-switched sentence is detected on the basis of whether it contains words or phrases from another language. Once the code-switched sentences are identified, the positions of the code-switched words in the sentences are then identified. Experimental results show that the language modeling approach achieved an F-measure of 80.43% and an accuracy of 79.01% for detecting Mandarin-Taiwanese code-switched sentences. For the identification of code-switched words, the word-based and POS-based models, respectively, achieved F-measures of 41.09% and 53.08%

A study on reusing resources of speech synthesis for closely-related languages

This thesis describes research on building a text-to-speech (TTS) framework that can accommodate the lack of linguistic information of under-resource languages by using existing resources from another language. It describes the adaptation process required when such limited resource is used. The main natural languages involved in this research are Malay and Iban language. The thesis includes a study on grapheme to phoneme mapping and the substitution of phonemes. A set of substitution matrices is presented which show the phoneme confusion in term of perception among respondents. The experiments conducted study the intelligibility as well as perception based on context of utterances. The study on the phonetic prosody is then presented and compared to the Klatt duration model. This is to find the similarities of cross language duration model if one exists. Then a comparative study of Iban native speaker with an Iban polyglot TTS using Malay resources is presented. This is to confirm that the prosody of Malay can be used to generate Iban synthesised speech. The central hypothesis of this thesis is that by using a closely-related language resource, a natural sounding speech can be produced. The aim of this research was to show that by sticking to the indigenous language characteristics, it is possible to build a polyglot synthesised speech system even with insufficient speech resources

Integrating Language Identification to improve Multilingual Speech Recognition

The process of determining the language of a speech utterance is called Language Identification (LID). This task can be very challenging as it has to take into account various language-specific aspects, such as phonetic, phonotactic, vocabulary and grammar-related cues. In multilingual speech recognition we try to find the most likely word sequence that corresponds to an utterance where the language is not known a priori. This is a considerably harder task compared to monolingual speech recognition and it is common to use LID to estimate the current language. In this project we present two general approaches for LID and describe how to integrate them into multilingual speech recognizers. The first approach uses hierarchical multilayer perceptrons to estimate language posterior probabilities given the acoustics in combination with hidden Markov models. The second approach evaluates the output of a multilingual speech recognizer to determine the spoken language. The research is applied to the MediaParl speech corpus that was recorded at the Parliament of the canton of Valais, where people switch from Swiss French to Swiss German or vice versa. Our experiments show that, on that particular data set, LID can be used to significantly improve the performance of multilingual speech recognizers. We will also point out that ASR dependent LID approaches yield the best performance due to higher-level cues and that our systems perform much worse on non-native dat

The Shape of the Bilingual Mental Lexicon: Testing the Cognate Continuum

Items in the mental lexicon have three storage and processing strata, the concept, lemma, and lexeme, which equate to semantic, syntactic and phonological information. Lexical items relate to each other at each stratum. Bilingual lexicons, which contain items from all languages, may contain cognates, items sharing concepts and with overlapping lexemes. Because cognates likely relate at the lemma level also, this research proposed the Cognate Continuum, a categorization of cognates and noncognates in the bilingual mental lexicon. The Cognate Continuum includes three sets of cognates: (i) true cognates have the closest phonology and syntax. (ii) lemma cognates have close syntax with differing phonology. (iii) lexemic cognates have close phonology with differing syntax. The relationship of cognate pairs has been found to lead to differential speed and accuracy in processing, known as the cognate effect. Degree of phonological overlap has been shown to modulate the cognate effect, but degree of syntactic overlap has not previously been tested. Cognates’ perceived phonological similarity was tested in a Norming Study. In the language identification (LID) and self-paced listening (SPL) tasks, processing differences between these types of cognates was tested. In the LID, participants had to identify the language of real-word cognates and noncognates. Because all form representations are theoretically stored in a single lexicon, participants would have to suppress activation of one of the cognate pair’s lexemes. Thus, participants were expected to inhibit cognates, with greater inhibition for greater similarity, resulting in the following pattern: (a) noncognates \u3e\u3e lemma cognates \u3e\u3e lexemic cognates \u3e\u3e true cognates However, results indicated that only degree of phonological overlap affected cognate processing; further, facilitation was found instead of inhibition contra prior studies (Dijkstra et al., 2010). In the SPL task, participants listened to sentences presented in segments, pressing a button to advance. Facilitation was expected, and degree of overlap was again expected to mediate the effect, resulting in the following pattern: (b) true cognates \u3e\u3e lexemic cognates \u3e\u3e lemma cognates \u3e\u3e noncognates As expected, results indicated that both degree of syntactic and phonological overlap affected cognate processing. Overall, results suggest that syntactic overlap modulates the cognate effect in an intrasentential context, but not in isolation. Moreover, this suggests that words’ lemmas are not accessed without a syntactic context, highlighting the need for specification of lemmas in bilingual lexical comprehension models, with consideration given to task schema

Using verbal fluency tasks to investigate the lexicon in Greek-speaking children with literacy and language disorders

In this thesis, semantic and phonological fluency tasks were used to investigate the lexicon in sixty-six children with dyslexia and/or DLD (hereafter DDLD group) aged 7-12 years and in 83 typically-developing (TD) children aged 6-12 years, all monolingual Greek speakers. In semantic and phonological fluency tasks, responses are often produced in clusters of semantically- or phonologically-related items, respectively (e.g. “cat-dog” is a semantic cluster; “flag-flower” is a phonological cluster). Once the retrieval of items within a cluster slows down, children tend to switch to another cluster. In both groups, productivity in semantic and phonological fluency tasks correlated strongly with the number of clusters and the number of switches, but not with average cluster size. Regression analyses showed that the DDLD group retrieved significantly fewer correct items in semantic and phonological fluency tasks compared to the TD group, but average semantic and phonological cluster size did not differ significantly in the two groups. Furthermore, the two groups did not differ significantly on the number of correct designs generated in the design fluency task. Poorer semantic fluency performance in children with DDLD is attributed to slower retrieval processes while children’s semantic structure is intact, as proposed by the Slow-Retrieval Model. Consistent with the Deficient Phonological Access Hypothesis, children with DDLD showed impaired explicit access but intact implicit access to phonological representations. For both verbal fluency categories, slower retrieval processes originating from deficient access to intact semantic and phonological representations, and also inferior language and literacy skills, explain poorer verbal fluency performance in children with dyslexia and/or DLD. The specificity of DDLD children’s verbal fluency deficit is supported by evidence showing that children with DDLD showed poorer semantic and phonological fluency performance relative to their TD peers even after design fluency performance was controlled. The underlying causes of slow lexical retrieval still need further investigation

Phonological awareness skills of emergent bilingual Rumanyo-English learners

This thesis is an account of a cross-sectional study which focused on investigating Phonological Awareness (PA) in emergent Rumanyo/English bilingual learners. PA and its contribution to reading fluency were investigated among 47 third grade learners with an average age of 9. 19, at a Namibian School, for which Rumanyo is the language of instruction and English, the first additional language. This cross-sectional study examines two levels of PA: Syllable awareness and phoneme awareness. Measures included three subtasks: identification, segmenting and deletion. Reading fluency was measured through oral reading fluency and silent reading. The findings suggest that learners’ levels of PA are still developing with learners performing better on syllable awareness measures than on phoneme awareness. Reading fluency results evince low levels of proficiency in Rumanyo and in English, an average level of proficiency was recorded. To determine the relationship between PA and reading fluency, a Correlation Matrix was run and followed later with a linear regression. The findings demonstrate that syllable awareness predicted reading fluency in Rumanyo, whilst phoneme awareness did not show any association and as such, the model fit did not show any relationship either. With regards to English, neither syllables nor phonemes were a predictor of reading fluency. The study further examined to what extent the phonology of Rumanyo transferred to English.Thesis (MA) -- Faculty of Humanities, Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 202