A Sound Approach to Language Matters: In Honor of Ocke-Schwen Bohn

The contributions in this Festschrift were written by Ocke’s current and former PhD-students, colleagues and research collaborators. The Festschrift is divided into six sections, moving from the smallest building blocks of language, through gradually expanding objects of linguistic inquiry to the highest levels of description - all of which have formed a part of Ocke’s career, in connection with his teaching and/or his academic productions: “Segments”, “Perception of Accent”, “Between Sounds and Graphemes”, “Prosody”, “Morphology and Syntax” and “Second Language Acquisition”. Each one of these illustrates a sound approach to language matters

Speling Successful Sucesfuly: Statistical Learning in Spelling

Many spelling errors in English are doubling errors, as when people are stumped by the double ‹l› in ‹trellis›. In Study 1, we tabulated statistical patterns with regards to doubling in English. In Study 2, we collected behavioral data to see if people were sensitive to these statistical patterns in doubling and to explore other factors that might influence doubling such as context, individual differences: language background and spelling ability), and task. We gave two nonword spelling tasks to US college students: N=68) and bilingual Singaporean college students from an English-based education system but with diverse language backgrounds: Mandarin: N=54), Malay: N=44), or Tamil: N=42). In the choice task, participants heard a nonword and chose between two spelling options, e.g. dremmib/dremib. In the free task, they wrote down its best spelling. We found a vowel length effect: more doubling after short vowels than long vowels) that was moderated by spelling ability: better spellers were more influenced by vowel length) and language background. Americans had the largest vowel length effect and Tamil Singaporeans had none, as they possibly associated consonant doubling with the lengthening of doubled consonants in Tamil instead of the preceding vowel. The Mandarin group spelled nonwords least accurately, and greater knowledge of pinyin, a phoneme-based writing system, was associated with higher nonword spelling accuracy. These and other findings reflect how linguistic factors and language background moderate the role of statistical learning and context in spelling

Context effects on second-language learning of tonal contrasts.

Studies of lexical tone  learning generally focus on monosyllabic contexts, while reports of phonetic learning benefits associated with input variability are based largely on experienced learners. This study trained inexperienced learners on Mandarin tonal contrasts to test two hypotheses regarding the influence of context and variability on tone  learning. The first hypothesis was that increased phonetic variability of tones in disyllabic contexts makes initial tone  learning more challenging in disyllabic than monosyllabic words. The second hypothesis was that the learnability of a given tone varies across contexts due to differences in tonal variability. Results of a word learning experiment supported both hypotheses: tones were acquired less successfully in disyllables than in monosyllables, and the relative difficulty of disyllables was closely related to contextual tonal variability. These results indicate limited relevance of monosyllable-based data on Mandarin learning for the disyllabic majority of the Mandarin lexicon. Furthermore, in the short term, variability can diminish learning; its effects are not necessarily beneficial but dependent on acquisition stage and other learner characteristics. These findings thus highlight the importance of considering contextual variability and the interaction between variability and type of learner in the design, interpretation, and application of research on phonetic learning

Language variation in teacher speech in a dual immersion preschool

This study investigates the language input provided for English-Mandarin emergent bilingual children in a California English-Mandarin dual immersion preschool. As illustrated in previous studies, teacher speech in foreign language classrooms often serves as the native standard of the target language, thus necessarily limiting students’ exposure to stylistic variation. The current research focused on the language input for emergent bilingual preschoolers who were Chinese heritage language learners and the use of sociolinguistic variables, including Mandarin lexical tones and word-initial sibilants, by their teachers. Results show that although the teachers perceived their classroom roles differently, they tried to provide clear and rich Mandarin input with tonal and sibilant variables that were used in consistent patterns. Except for the constraints of the linguistic environment, standard variables were preferred in classroom discourse. This implies that the particular needs of the English-dominant children to acquire Mandarin have been acknowledged and addressed by teachers. This type of modification in language input may affect children’s development of phonetic categories and their sociolinguistic competence

A reliable past or a reliable pest? Testing canonical stimuli in speech perception research

A growing body of research is exploring second language (L2) learners’ listening perception of vowel contrasts. Conventionally, researchers have estimated how well listeners differentiate between L2 vowels with isolated words (or syllables) in a fixed consonantal frame, such as b-vowel-t (e.g., beat-bit). However, there is a dearth of research that systematically examines how well results generalise beyond isolated frames or the suitability of employing more phonologically and sententially diverse listening prompt types for assessing L2 vowel perception. To address this gap, two studies investigated the effects of using b-vowel-t and more diverse prompt types for assessing intermediate-advanced adult L2 perception of English /i/-/ɪ/ and /ɛ/-/æ/ vowel pairs. Prompt performance was measured for internal consistency, congruence with the Perceptual Assimilation Model for L2 speech learning (Best & Tyler, 2007), and listeners’ subjective experiences with each prompt type. Mixed effects modelling investigated the predictive power of b-vowel-t performance on more diverse prompt types. Study 1 explored prompt performance using closed-set, forced choice tasks with first language (L1) Mandarin and Korean listeners. Study 2 investigated the effect of Mandarin and Spanish L1 listeners’ target word familiarity and associations with sentence prompts using transcription-response tasks and self-report surveys. Both studies found that diverse prompts had adequate internal consistency and aligned with PAM-L2 predictions. B-vowel-t prompts poorly generalised to diverse prompts and accorded less with PAM-L2 predictions. Survey results showed increased demands from more diverse prompt types based on participants’ ratings; however, this did not always correspond to lower performance. Collectively, results indicate utility in employing prompts beyond isolated words in a fixed consonantal frame for laboratory and at-home administrations. These findings contribute to the vowel perception literature by evaluating and extending the scope of prompts which may be used

A phonological study on English loanwords in Mandarin Chinese

The general opinion about the way English borrowings enter Mandarin is that English words are preferably integrated into Mandarin via calquing, which includes a special case called Phonetic-Semantic Matching (PSM) (Zuckermann 2004), meaning words being phonetically assimilated and semantically transferred at the same time. The reason for that is that Mandarin is written in Chinese characters, which each has a single-syllable pronunciation and a self-contained meaning, and the meaning achieved by the selection of characters may match the original English words. There are some cases which are agreed by many scholars to be PSM. However, as this study demonstrates, the semantics of the borrowing and the original word do not really match, the relation considered to be “artificial” by Novotná (1967). This study analyses a corpus of 600 established English loanwords in Mandarin to test the hypothesis that semantic matching is not a significant factor in the loanword adaptation process because there is no semantic relation between the borrowed words and the characters used to record them. To measure the phonological similarity between the English input and the Mandarin output, one of the models in adult second language perception, the Perceptual Assimilation Model (Best 1995a), is used as the framework to judge the phonemic matching between the English word and the adapted Mandarin outcome. The meanings of the characters used in recording the loanwords are referred in The Dictionary of Modern Chinese to see whether there are cases of semantic matching. The phonotactic adaptation of illicit sound sequences is also analysed in Optimality Theory (McCarthy 2002) to give an account of phonetic-phonological analysis of the adaptation process. Thus, the percentage of Phono-Semantic Matching is obtained in the corpus. As the corpus investigation shows, the loanwords that can match up both the phonological and the semantic quality of the original words are very few. The most commonly acknowledged phono-semantic matching cases are only phonetic loanwords. In conclusion, this paper argues that the semantic resource of Chinese writing system is not used as a major factor in the integration of loanwords. Borrowing between languages with different writing systems is not much different than borrowing between languages with same writing system or without a writing system. Though Chinese writing system interferes with the borrowing, it is the linguistic factors that determine the borrowing process and results. Chinese characters are, by a large proportion, conventional graphic signs with a phonetic value being the more significant factor in loanword integration process

Cantonese Loanwords : Conflicting Faithfulness in VC Rime Constraints

This paper focuses on the ways in which English loanwords are brought into line with four phonotactic constraints that restrict the possible combinations of nuclear vowels and coda consonants in Cantonese Chinese. It is found that three of the four constraints are strictly enforced in loans. Repairs change either the vowel or the coda consonant. Parallel to Mandarin, changes in vowel height features ([high], [ATR]) as opposed to changes in vowel backness are employed. Coda consonant changes obey a dorsal > coronal > labial faithfulness hierarchy that mirrors the typology of coda mergers discovered by Chen (1973) for many Chinese dialects. While changes in both the vowel and coda consonant occur, on-line adaptations favor changing the coda and preserving the vowel and suggest that the relative phonetic salience of the nuclear vowel to the coda consonant still plays a role in these adaptations.Aquest article se centra en la manera com els anglicismes del xinès cantonès conflueixen en l'adaptació a través de quatre condicions fonotàctiques que restringeixen les combinacions possibles de vocals i de consonants a la rima. Tres d'aquestes quatre condicions són estrictament inevitables. L'arranjament fa canviar la vocal del nucli o la consonant de la coda. Tal com passa en mandarí, s'utilitzen canvis en els trets d'altura de les vocals ([alt], [AA]) com a oposició als canvis en el tret de posterioritat. Els canvis en les consonants de la coda obeeixen una jerarquia de fidelitat dorsal > coronal > labial que reflecteix la tipologia de reducció o simplificació de codes descoberta per Chen (1973) per a molts dialectes xinesos. Encara que es produeixin canvis en la vocal i en la consonant de la coda, les adaptacions directes afavoreixen els canvis en la coda però no en la vocal. Això suggereix que la prominència relativa de la vocal del nucli respecte a la consonant de la coda encara juga un paper important en aquestes adaptacions