Bidirectional perception of lexical prominence in Spanish and Japanese as second languages

Perception of novel phonetic contrasts in a second language has been studied extensively, but suprasegmentals have seen relatively little attention even though difficulties at this level can strongly impact comprehension. Available studies suggest that the perception of segmental and suprasegmental categories are subject to similar factors, but evidence is not entirely conclusive. Additionally, studies focusing on the perception of lexical prominence have suggested that perception across languages with different accent types might be particularly problematic, meaning that these effects in particular would be independent of the direction of language learning. This dissertation explores both of these questions by studying the perception of lexical prominence by second-language learners in Spanish (a stress-accent language) and Japanese (a pitch-accent language). Following a bidirectional approach, it examines whether the perception of phonologically different types of lexical prominence is subject to similar effects as those traditionally identified for cross-linguistic segmental perception, and how these relate to the direction of learning. A first set of studies provides a comparative acoustic description of prominence in both languages, and presents the results of an identification task with natural words in different positions within a sentence. Using multiple speakers, these tests showed that the difficulties seen by both groups are different and related to features in their L1, and that despite phonological differences, contexts existed in which high performance was possible. A second set of studies explored the sensitivity of non-native listeners to secondary acoustic cues and the development of new accentual categories, and showed effects of learning for both groups and a strong sensitivity to duration for learners of Spanish. Learners of Japanese showed extremely poor category development for unaccented words in particular. Overall results show that existing research on SLA is applicable to suprasegmental perception, and that the transfer effects affecting both groups have different domains and scope. The implications for language teaching and theories of L2 perception are discussed

Voicing in Contrast. Acquiring a Second Language Laryngeal System

Drawing on both rule-based and constraint-based approaches, Voicing in Contrast examines typological differences in the laryngeal systems of Dutch and English and investigates the extent to which native speakers of Dutch acquire English obstruent voicing. The analysis is based on a substantial new data collection of conversational Dutch and English speech by speakers of different varieties of Dutch. The results of the study show that the English interlanguage of advanced learners contains a mixed laryngeal system with elements from Dutch as well as from English. The book discusses how this system could emerge and analyses the extent to which learners succeeded in suppressing neutralizing processes of devoicing and voice assimilation. The results of the empirical analysis are examined in the light of existing theoretical approaches to laryngeal systems. Although the focus is on Dutch and English, the frequent references to other languages invite the reader to carry out comparable analyses for other languages with similar laryngeal systems. A detailed description of the methodology also makes the book of interest to scholars working with large databases of spoken first and second language speech. A sample of the data is available on a CD-rom accompanying the book

The effects of high versus low talker variability and individual aptitude on phonetic training of Mandarin lexical tones

High variability (HV) training has been found to be more effective than low variability (LV) training when learning various non-native phonetic contrasts. However, little research has considered whether this applies to the learning of tone contrasts. The only two relevant studies suggested that the effect of HV training depends on the perceptual aptitude of participants (Perrachione et al., 2011; Sadakata & McQueen, 2014). The present study extends these findings by examining the interaction between individual aptitude and input variability using natural, meaningful second language input (both previous studies used pseudowords). A total of 60 English speakers took part in an eight session phonetic training paradigm. They were assigned to high/low/high-blocked variability training groups and learned real Mandarin tones and words. Individual aptitude was measured following previous work. Learning was measured using one discrimination task, one identification task and two production tasks. All tasks assessed generalization. All groups improved in both the production and perception of tones which transferred to untrained voices and items, demonstrating the effectiveness of training despite the increased complexity compared with previous research. Although the LV group exhibited an advantage with the training stimuli, there was no evidence for a benefit of high-variability in any of the tests of generalisation. Moreover, although aptitude significantly predicted performance in discrimination, identification and training tasks, no interaction between individual aptitude and variability was revealed. Additional Bayes Factor analyses indicated substantial evidence for the null for the hypotheses of a benefit of high-variability in generalisation, however the evidence regarding the interaction was ambiguous. We discuss these results in light of previous findings

Parsing impoverished syntax

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal