Prediction in bilingual sentence processing: How prediction differs in a later learned language from a first language

This review provides an update on what we know about differences in prediction in a first and second language after several years of extensive research. It shows when L1/L2 differences are most likely to occur and provides an explanation as to why they occur. For example, L2 speakers may capitalize more on semantic information for prediction than L1 speakers, or possibly they do not make predictions due to differences in the weighting of cues. A different weighting of cues can be the result of prior experience from the L1 and/or the prior experience in an experiment which affects L1 and L2 processing to a different extent. Overall, prediction in L2 processing often emerges later and/or is weaker than in L1 processing. Because L2 processing is generally slower, L1/L2 differences are likely to occur at certain levels of prediction, most notably at the form level, in line with a prediction-by-production mechanism

Chinese Tones: Can You Listen With Your Eyes?:The Influence of Visual Information on Auditory Perception of Chinese Tones

CHINESE TONES: CAN YOU LISTEN WITH YOUR EYES? The Influence of Visual Information on Auditory Perception of Chinese Tones YUEQIAO HAN Summary Considering the fact that more than half of the languages spoken in the world (60%-70%) are so-called tone languages (Yip, 2002), and tone is notoriously difficult to learn for westerners, this dissertation focused on tone perception in Mandarin Chinese by tone-naïve speakers. Moreover, it has been shown that speech perception is more than just an auditory phenomenon, especially in situations when the speaker’s face is visible. Therefore, the aim of this dissertation is to also study the value of visual information (over and above that of acoustic information) in Mandarin tone perception for tone-naïve perceivers, in combination with other contextual (such as speaking style) and individual factors (such as musical background). Consequently, this dissertation assesses the relative strength of acoustic and visual information in tone perception and tone classification. In the first two empirical and exploratory studies in Chapter 2 and 3 , we set out to investigate to what extent tone-naïve perceivers are able to identify Mandarin Chinese tones in isolated words, and whether or not they can benefit from (seeing) the speakers’ face, and what the contribution is of a hyperarticulated speaking style, and/or their own musical experience. Respectively, in Chapter 2 we investigated the effect of visual cues (comparing audio-only with audio-visual presentations) and speaking style (comparing a natural speaking style with a teaching speaking style) on the perception of Mandarin tones by tone-naïve listeners, looking both at the relative strength of these two factors and their possible interactions; Chapter 3 was concerned with the effects of musicality of the participants (combined with modality) on Mandarin tone perception. In both of these studies, a Mandarin Chinese tone identification experiment was conducted: native speakers of a non-tonal language were asked to distinguish Mandarin Chinese tones based on audio (-only) or video (audio-visual) materials. In order to include variations, the experimental stimuli were recorded using four different speakers in imagined natural and teaching speaking scenarios. The proportion of correct responses (and average reaction times) of the participants were reported. The tone identification experiment presented in Chapter 2 showed that the video conditions (audio-visual natural and audio-visual teaching) resulted in an overall higher accuracy in tone perception than the auditory-only conditions (audio-only natural and audio-only teaching), but no better performance was observed in the audio-visual conditions in terms of reaction time, compared to the auditory-only conditions. Teaching style turned out to make no difference on the speed or accuracy of Mandarin tone perception (as compared to a natural speaking style). Further on, we presented the same experimental materials and procedure in Chapter 3 , but now with musicians and non-musicians as participants. The Goldsmith Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI) was used to assess the musical aptitude of the participants. The data showed that overall, musicians outperformed non-musicians in the tone identification task in both auditory-visual and auditory-only conditions. Both groups identified tones more accurately in the auditory-visual conditions than in the auditory-only conditions. These results provided further evidence for the view that the availability of visual cues along with auditory information is useful for people who have no knowledge of Mandarin Chinese tones when they need to learn to identify these tones. Out of all the musical skills measured by Gold-MSI, the amount of musical training was the only predictor that had an impact on the accuracy of Mandarin tone perception. These findings suggest that learning to perceive Mandarin tones benefits from musical expertise, and visual information can facilitate Mandarin tone identification, but mainly for tone-naïve non-musicians. In addition, performance differed by tone: musicality improves accuracy for every tone; some tones are easier to identify than others: in particular, the identification of tone 3 (a low-falling-rising) proved to be the easiest, while tone 4 (a high-falling tone) was the most difficult to identify for all participants. The results of the first two experiments presented in chapters 2 and 3 showed that adding visual cues to clear auditory information facilitated the tone identification for tone-naïve perceivers (there is a significantly higher accuracy in audio-visual condition(s) than in auditory-only condition(s)). This visual facilitation was unaffected by the presence of (hyperarticulated) speaking style or the musical skill of the participants. Moreover, variations in speakers and tones had effects on the accurate identification of Mandarin tones by tone-naïve perceivers. In Chapter 4 , we compared the relative contribution of auditory and visual information during Mandarin Chinese tone perception. More specifically, we aimed to answer two questions: firstly, whether or not there is audio-visual integration at the tone level (i.e., we explored perceptual fusion between auditory and visual information). Secondly, we studied how visual information affects tone perception for native speakers and non-native (tone-naïve) speakers. To do this, we constructed various tone combinations of congruent (e.g., an auditory tone 1 paired with a visual tone 1, written as AxVx) and incongruent (e.g., an auditory tone 1 paired with a visual tone 2, written as AxVy) auditory-visual materials and presented them to native speakers of Mandarin Chinese and speakers of tone-naïve languages. Accuracy, defined as the percentage correct identification of a tone based on its auditory realization, was reported. When comparing the relative contribution of auditory and visual information during Mandarin Chinese tone perception with congruent and incongruent auditory and visual Chinese material for native speakers of Chinese and non-tonal languages, we found that visual information did not significantly contribute to the tone identification for native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. When there is a discrepancy between visual cues and acoustic information, (native and tone-naïve) participants tend to rely more on the auditory input than on the visual cues. Unlike the native speakers of Mandarin Chinese, tone-naïve participants were significantly influenced by the visual information during their auditory-visual integration, and they identified tones more accurately in congruent stimuli than in incongruent stimuli. In line with our previous work, the tone confusion matrix showed that tone identification varies with individual tones, with tone 3 (the low-dipping tone) being the easiest one to identify, whereas tone 4 (the high-falling tone) was the most difficult one. The results did not show evidence for auditory-visual integration among native participants, while visual information was helpful for tone-naïve participants. However, even for this group, visual information only marginally increased the accuracy in the tone identification task, and this increase depended on the tone in question. Chapter 5 is another chapter that zooms in on the relative strength of auditory and visual information for tone-naïve perceivers, but from the aspect of tone classification. In this chapter, we studied the acoustic and visual features of the tones produced by native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. Computational models based on acoustic features, visual features and acoustic-visual features were constructed to automatically classify Mandarin tones. Moreover, this study examined what perceivers pick up (perception) from what a speaker does (production, facial expression) by studying both production and perception. To be more specific, this chapter set out to answer: (1) which acoustic and visual features of tones produced by native speakers could be used to automatically classify Mandarin tones. Furthermore, (2) whether or not the features used in tone production are similar to or different from the ones that have cue value for tone-naïve perceivers when they categorize tones; and (3) whether and how visual information (i.e., facial expression and facial pose) contributes to the classification of Mandarin tones over and above the information provided by the acoustic signal. To address these questions, the stimuli that had been recorded (and described in chapter 2) and the response data that had been collected (and reported on in chapter 3) were used. Basic acoustic and visual features were extracted. Based on them, we used Random Forest classification to identify the most important acoustic and visual features for classifying the tones. The classifiers were trained on produced tone classification (given a set of auditory and visual features, predict the produced tone) and on perceived/responded tone classification (given a set of features, predict the corresponding tone as identified by the participant). The results showed that acoustic features outperformed visual features for tone classification, both for the classification of the produced and the perceived tone. However, tone-naïve perceivers did revert to the use of visual information in certain cases (when they gave wrong responses). So, visual information does not seem to play a significant role in native speakers’ tone production, but tone-naïve perceivers do sometimes consider visual information in their tone identification. These findings provided additional evidence that auditory information is more important than visual information in Mandarin tone perception and tone classification. Notably, visual features contributed to the participants’ erroneous performance. This suggests that visual information actually misled tone-naïve perceivers in their task of tone identification. To some extent, this is consistent with our claim that visual cues do influence tone perception. In addition, the ranking of the auditory features and visual features in tone perception showed that the factor perceiver (i.e., the participant) was responsible for the largest amount of variance explained in the responses by our tone-naïve participants, indicating the importance of individual differences in tone perception. To sum up, perceivers who do not have tone in their language background tend to make use of visual cues from the speakers’ faces for their perception of unknown tones (Mandarin Chinese in this dissertation), in addition to the auditory information they clearly also use. However, auditory cues are still the primary source they rely on. There is a consistent finding across the studies that the variations between tones, speakers and participants have an effect on the accuracy of tone identification for tone-naïve speaker

Cross-generational linguistic variation in the Canberra Vietnamese heritage language community: A corpus-centred investigation

This dissertation investigates cross-generational linguistic differences in the Canberra Vietnamese bilingual community, with a particular focus on Vietnamese as the heritage language. Specifically, it documents the vernacular and considers key aspects of this data from different theoretical perspectives. Its main contribution is an insight into a rarely studied heritage language variety in a contact community that has never been examined. The dissertation consists of five core chapters, organised into two parts. In the first part (Chapters 2–3), I describe how I documented the vernacular and created the Canberra Vietnamese English Corpus (CanVEC), an original corpus compiled specifically for this study that is also the first to be freely available for research purposes. The corpus consists of over ten hours of spontaneous speech produced by 45 Vietnamese-English bilingual speakers across two generations living in Canberra. In the second part of the study (Chapters 4–6), I put the corpus to use and investigate aspects of the cross-generational differences in Vietnamese as the heritage language in this community. In particular, I first probe the Vietnamese heritage language via its participation in the code-switching discourse (Chapter 4). In doing so, I focus on the applicability of the Matrix Language Framework (MLF) (Myers-Scotton, 1993, 2002) and its associated Matrix Language (ML) Turnover Hypothesis (Myers-Scotton, 1998) to the code-switching data in CanVEC. Since support for this prominent model has mainly come from language pairs that have different clausal word order or vastly different inventories of inflectional morphology, Vietnamese-English as a pair in which both languages are SVO and essentially isolating offers a tantalising testing ground for its application. Results show that the universal claims of this model do not hold so straight-forwardly. CanVEC data challenges several assumptions of the MLF, with the model ultimately only being able to account for around half of the CanVEC code-switching data. I further demonstrate that even when the ML is putatively identifiable and a cross-generational ML ‘turnover’ is quantitatively observed, the predictions do not reflect the direction of structural influence that we see in CanVEC. The MLF approach therefore sheds only limited light on cross-generational language shift and variation in this community. Given that null elements emerge as a distinct area of difficulty in Chapter 4, I take this aspect as the focal point for the next part of the investigation (Chapter 5), where I use the variationist approach (Labov, 1972 et seq.) to explore three cases where null and overt realisation alternates in Vietnamese: subjects, objects, and copulas. In doing so, I move away from the bilingual portion of CanVEC to examine the monolingual heritage Vietnamese subset directly. Results show that Vietnamese null subjects vary significantly across generations, while null objects and copulas remain stable in terms of use. As speakers also overwhelmingly prefer overt forms over null forms (∼70:30) across all the three of the variables of interest, I appeal to the generative interface-oriented approach (Sorace & Filiaci, 2006 et seq.) to next examine the distribution of overt subjects, objects, copulas (Chapter 6). These results converge with what was found for null forms: cross-generational effects were observed for pronominal subjects, but not pronominal objects and copulas. This finding also supports the importance of a distinction drawn in previous works between internal (syntax-semantics) and external (syntax-discourse/pragmatics) interface phenomena, with the latter being seemingly more susceptible to change. Ultimately, this dissertation highlights the empirical and theoretical value of studying rarely considered contact varieties, while deploying an integrated approach that acknowledges the multi-faceted complexity of the contact communities where these varieties are spoken.Cambridge Trust International Scholarshi

Negative vaccine voices in Swedish social media

Vaccinations are one of the most significant interventions to public health, but vaccine hesitancy creates concerns for a portion of the population in many countries, including Sweden. Since discussions on vaccine hesitancy are often taken on social networking sites, data from Swedish social media are used to study and quantify the sentiment among the discussants on the vaccination-or-not topic during phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. Out of all the posts analyzed a majority showed a stronger negative sentiment, prevailing throughout the whole of the examined period, with some spikes or jumps due to the occurrence of certain vaccine-related events distinguishable in the results. Sentiment analysis can be a valuable tool to track public opinions regarding the use, efficacy, safety, and importance of vaccination

Formal approaches to number in Slavic and beyond (Volume 5)

The goal of this collective monograph is to explore the relationship between the cognitive notion of number and various grammatical devices expressing this concept in natural language with a special focus on Slavic. The book aims at investigating different morphosyntactic and semantic categories including plurality and number-marking, individuation and countability, cumulativity, distributivity and collectivity, numerals, numeral modifiers and classifiers, as well as other quantifiers. It gathers 19 contributions tackling the main themes from different theoretical and methodological perspectives in order to contribute to our understanding of cross-linguistic patterns both in Slavic and non-Slavic languages

Aspects of the Syntax, Production and Pragmatics of code-switching - with special reference to Cantonese-English

This dissertation argues for the position that code-switching utterances are constrained by the same set of mechanisms as those which govern monolingual utterances. While this thesis is in line with more recent code-switching theories (e.g. Belazi et al. 1994, MacSwan 1997, Mahootian 1993), this dissertation differs from those works in making two specific claims: Firstly, functional categories and lexical categories exhibit different syntactic behaviour in code-switching. Secondly, codeswitching is subject to the same principles not only in syntax, but also in production and pragmatics. Chapter 2 presents a critical review of constraints and processing models previously proposed in the literature. It is suggested that in view of the vast variety of data, no existing model is completely adequate. Nevertheless, it is argued that a model which does not postulate syntactic constraints (along the lines of Mahootian 1993, MacSwan 1997) or production principles (along the lines of de Bot 1992) specific to code switching is to be preferred on cognitive and theoretical grounds. Chapter 3 concerns word order between lexical heads and their complements in code-switching. It is shown that the language of a lexical head (i.e. noun or verb) may or may not determine the word order of its complement. Chapter 4 investigates word order between functional heads and their complements in code-switching. Contrary to the case with lexical categories, the language of functional heads (e.g. D, I and C) is shown to determine the word order of their complements in code-switching. It is proposed that word order between heads (lexical or functional) and complements is governed by head-parameters, and the difference between lexical heads and functional heads is due to their differential processing and production in terms of Levelt's (1989) algorithm. Chapter 5 investigates the selection properties of functional categories in codeswitching, with special reference to Cantonese-English. Contrary to the Functional Head Constraint (Belazi et al. 1994), it is shown that code-switching can occur freely between functional heads and their complements, provided that the c-selection requirements of the functional heads are satisfied. Chapter 6 investigates the selection properties of lexical categories in code-switching, again with special reference to Cantonese-English. It is shown that "language-specific" c-selection properties need not be observed: a Cantonese verb may take an English DP whereas an English verb may take a Cantonese demonstrative phrase (DemP). Similar phenomena are drawn from other language-pairs involving a language with morphological case and a language without morphological case. The difference between functional categories and lexical categories in their selection properties is again explained in terms of the different production processes they undergo. Chapter 7 is devoted to prepositions which have been problematic in terms of their status as a functional category or a lexical category. Based on the behaviour of prepositions in code-switching, it is suggested that prepositions display a dual character. It is proposed that prepositions may well point to the fact that the conventional dichotomy between functional categories and lexical categories is not a primitive one in the lexicon. Chapter 8 looks at code-switching in a wider perspective. and explores the pragmatic determinants of code-switching in the light of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995). It is argued that many types of code-switching (e.g. repetitions, quotations, etc.) are motivated by the desire to optimize the "relevance" of a message, with "relevance" as defined in Relevance Theory

Revisiting the Uniform Information Density Hypothesis

The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis posits a preference among language users for utterances structured such that information is distributed uniformly across a signal. While its implications on language production have been well explored, the hypothesis potentially makes predictions about language comprehension and linguistic acceptability as well. Further, it is unclear how uniformity in a linguistic signal -- or lack thereof -- should be measured, and over which linguistic unit, e.g., the sentence or language level, this uniformity should hold. Here we investigate these facets of the UID hypothesis using reading time and acceptability data. While our reading time results are generally consistent with previous work, they are also consistent with a weakly super-linear effect of surprisal, which would be compatible with UID's predictions. For acceptability judgments, we find clearer evidence that non-uniformity in information density is predictive of lower acceptability. We then explore multiple operationalizations of UID, motivated by different interpretations of the original hypothesis, and analyze the scope over which the pressure towards uniformity is exerted. The explanatory power of a subset of the proposed operationalizations suggests that the strongest trend may be a regression towards a mean surprisal across the language, rather than the phrase, sentence, or document -- a finding that supports a typical interpretation of UID, namely that it is the byproduct of language users maximizing the use of a (hypothetical) communication channel

Definiteness across languages

Definiteness has been a central topic in theoretical semantics since its modern foundation. However, despite its significance, there has been surprisingly scarce research on its cross-linguistic expression. With the purpose of contributing to filling this gap, the present volume gathers thirteen studies exploiting insights from formal semantics and syntax, typological and language specific studies, and, crucially, semantic fieldwork and cross-linguistic semantics, in order to address the expression and interpretation of definiteness in a diverse group of languages, most of them understudied