Cognate facilitation effects in bilingual children of varying language dominance

A widely accepted theory is that bilinguals activate both of their languages regardless of which is in use. Though there is abundant research on this phenomenon in bilingual adults, less research has focused on bilingual children. Cognates (i.e., words that share meaning and sound across languages) have frequently been used to explore language co-activation. The present study investigates cognate facilitation effects in child bilinguals of varying language dominance. Spanish-English bilingual children between 6 and 10 years old performed a picture-naming task that included pictures of cognates and non-cognates. Children who were more English-dominant experienced larger cognate facilitation effects when producing words in their non-dominant language but not in their dominant language. In contrast, children with more balanced dominance did not experience cognate facilitation effects in either language. The findings from this study may have implications for the development of the bilingual lexicon.Psycholog

The Influence of working memory on L2 oral fluency: an exploratory study

Màster de Lingüística Aplicada i Adquisició de Llengües en Contextos Multilingües, Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya, Universitat de Barcelona, Any: 2012, Supervisor: Dr. Roger GilabertThe goal of this exploratory study is to investigate the effect of working memory capacity on L2 oral fluency in 79 learners of English as a foreign language. Three tasks were used as measures of working memory (the reading span task, letter span task and an attention-switching task). Twelve measures of fluency were used spanning across speed, breakdown and repair fluency. Positive correlations were found with measures of repair fluency, specifically morphosyntactic, differency, and other repairs whereas negative correlations were found for lexical repairs. When participants were divided into groups based on proficiency, potential relationships were found between working memory and speed/breakdown fluency suggesting the possible existence of proficiency thresholds affecting the relationship between working memory and fluency. The results are discussed in light of previous research and De Bot’s (1992) model of L2 speech production

Sperry Univac speech communications technology

Technology and systems for effective verbal communication with computers were developed. A continuous speech recognition system for verbal input, a word spotting system to locate key words in conversational speech, prosodic tools to aid speech analysis, and a prerecorded voice response system for speech output are described

The presence, nature and role of formulaic sequences in English advanced learners of French : a longitudinal study

PhD ThesisThe present study is a longitudinal investigation of the presence, nature, and role of formulaic sequences (FS) in advanced English learners of French. The learners investigated are in their second year of an undergraduate degree in French at the onset of the study, and are tested before and after a seven-month stay in France. FS are defined psycholinguistically as multiword units which present a processing advantage for a given speaker, either because they are stored whole in his/her mental lexicon (Wray 2002) or because they are highly automatised. The construct of FS is particularly relevant to investigate key linguistic issues such as the dynamism of linguistic representations, their idiosyncratic nature as well as the relationship between the lexicon and grammar. FS have been shown to be frequent in the oral productions of native speakers. They also play an important role in first language acquisition as well as in the initial stages of instructed second language (L2) acquisition. However, very little is known about their presence and role in advanced L2 learners, as most studies dealing with them have not adopted a psycholinguistic approach and have focused on L2 learners’ knowledge and use of idioms and idiomatic expressions. Conversely, this study seeks to evaluate and characterise the presence of psycholinguistically-defined FS in advanced learners as well as examine their longitudinal development in relation to the development of the learners’ fluency and lexical diversity. It seeks to determine whether FS use can be said to play a role in the development of fluency and lexical diversity and if it does, describe the underlying mechanisms that account for this role. Data from five learners performing five oral tasks (an interview, a story retell and 3 discussion tasks), repeated before and after their stay in France, was elicited and transcribed. FS were identified through the hierarchical application of a range of criteria aiming to capture the holistic nature of the sequences. The necessary criterion used for identification was fluent pronunciation of the sequence, and additional criteria were applied such as irregularity, holistic mapping of form to meaning or holistic status of the sequence in the input. Fluency was operationalised through 4 measures (phonation-time ratio, speaking rate, mean length of runs and articulation rate) and lexical diversity was measured using D. The results show that psycholinguistically-defined FS represent about 27% of the language of advanced learners of French. The typology of the identified sequences shows that they are mostly grammatically regular but that despite the advanced level of the participants, some present non-nativelike characteristics. Individual differences in the learners’ repertoires of FS as well as task effects are also found. Between time 1 and time 2, across the group of 5 subjects, there is a general and statistically significant increase in FS use, fluency and lexical diversity. Significant correlations are found between FS use, fluency and lexical diversity. The qualitative analysis suggests that FS use plays a role in increasing fluency by allowing longer speech runs, contributing to the reduction of pausing time as well as the speeding up of the articulation rate. At the internal level of processing mechanisms, the results suggest that FS play a facilitating role not only in the formulation stage of speech production but also in the conceptualisation and articulation stages. Significant correlations are also found between FS use and lexical diversity, which suggests that FS, by lightening the processing burden and freeing some attentional resources, might facilitate the acquisition of new vocabulary. The analysis of the development of the learners across all variables shows a single developmental path with similar processes of automatisation but with different rates of acquisition, as the learners vary in how efficient they are at proceduralising their language. Because of this, it is suggested that the year abroad is more likely to be beneficial for a given subject if their language has already reached a certain level of automatisation pre-time abroad.Arts and Humanities Research Counci

Working memory capacity and L2 speech production: an exploration study /

Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão.Este estudo investiga se há relação entre a capacidade da memória operacional e produção oral em L2 e se esta relação é específica à tarefa de produção da fala ou de natureza geral, independente da tarefa que está sendo desempenhada. Os participantes deste estudo foram 13 alunos de inglês como segunda língua na Universidade de Minnesota. A capacidade de memória operacional foi medida através do speaking span test (Daneman, 1991) e do operation-word span test (Turner & Engle, 1989), ambos aplicados em inglês. Duas tarefas foram usadas para elicitar a produção oral em L2: descrição de uma gravura e narrativa. Quatro aspectos da produção oral foram medidos: fluência, precisão, complexidade e densidade lexical. Análises estatísticas mostram que a capacidade de memória operacional, quando medida pelo speaking span test, se correlaciona de forma positiva com fluência, precisão e complexidade e, de forma negativa, com a densidade lexical, em ambas as tarefas. As análises revelam, também, que o speaking span test pode prever o desempenho oral em L2 nos aspectos de fluência, precisão e complexidade gramatical, explicando parcialmente diferenças de desempenho nestes aspectos. As análises revelam, ainda, que há uma tendência para uma interação entre pausas e hesitações, e entre fluência, precisão, complexidade e densidade lexical durante a produção oral em L2. Por fim, as análises mostram que o operation-word span test sofreu um erro metodológico na sua aplicação, comprometendo, assim, os dados gerados pelo teste. Consequentemente, este estudo não apresenta dados adequados para determinar se a relação entre a capacidade de memória operacional e produção oral em L2 é específica à tarefa em questão ou se é de caráter geral. Para explicar a relação entre a capacidade de memória, quando medida pelo speaking span test, e produção oral em L2, propõe-se que a codificação gramatical é uma sub-tarefa complexa no processo hierárquico de produção da fala que exige o controle e regulação da atenção

Connectionist language production : distributed representations and the uniform information density hypothesis

This dissertation approaches the task of modeling human sentence production from a connectionist point of view, and using distributed semantic representations. The main questions it tries to address are: (i) whether the distributed semantic representations defined by Frank et al. (2009) are suitable to model sentence production using artificial neural networks, (ii) the behavior and internal mechanism of a model that uses this representations and recurrent neural networks, and (iii) a mechanistic account of the Uniform Information Density Hypothesis (UID; Jaeger, 2006; Levy and Jaeger, 2007). Regarding the first point, the semantic representations of Frank et al. (2009), called situation vectors are points in a vector space where each vector contains information about the observations in which an event and a corresponding sentence are true. These representations have been successfully used to model language comprehension (e.g., Frank et al., 2009; Venhuizen et al., 2018). During the construction of these vectors, however, a dimensionality reduction process introduces some loss of information, which causes some aspects to be no longer recognizable, reducing the performance of a model that utilizes them. In order to address this issue, belief vectors are introduced, which could be regarded as an alternative way to obtain semantic representations of manageable dimensionality. These two types of representations (situation and belief vectors) are evaluated using them as input for a sentence production model that implements an extension of a Simple Recurrent Neural network (Elman, 1990). This model was tested under different conditions corresponding to different levels of systematicity, which is the ability of a model to generalize from a set of known items to a set of novel ones. Systematicity is an essential attribute that a model of sentence processing has to possess, considering that the number of sentences that can be generated for a given language is infinite, and therefore it is not feasible to memorize all possible message-sentence pairs. The results showed that the model was able to generalize with a very high performance in all test conditions, demonstrating a systematic behavior. Furthermore, the errors that it elicited were related to very similar semantic representations, reflecting the speech error literature, which states that speech errors involve elements with semantic or phonological similarity. This result further demonstrates the systematic behavior of the model, as it processes similar semantic representations in a similar way, even if they are new to the model. Regarding the second point, the sentence production model was analyzed in two different ways. First, by looking at the sentences it produces, including the errors elicited, highlighting difficulties and preferences of the model. The results revealed that the model learns the syntactic patterns of the language, reflecting its statistical nature, and that its main difficulty is related to very similar semantic representations, sometimes producing unintended sentences that are however very semantically related to the intended ones. Second, the connection weights and activation patterns of the model were also analyzed, reaching an algorithmic account of the internal processing of the model. According to this, the input semantic representation activates the words that are related to its content, giving an idea of their order by providing relatively more activation to words that are likely to appear early in the sentence. Then, at each time step the word that was previously produced activates syntactic and semantic constraints on the next word productions, while the context units of the recurrence preserve information through time, allowing the model to enforce long distance dependencies. We propose that these results can inform about the internal processing of models with similar architecture. Regarding the third point, an extension of the model is proposed with the goal of modeling UID. According to UID, language production is an efficient process affected by a tendency to produce linguistic units distributing the information as uniformly as possible and close to the capacity of the communication channel, given the encoding possibilities of the language, thus optimizing the amount of information that is transmitted per time unit. This extension of the model approaches UID by balancing two different production strategies: one where the model produces the word with highest probability given the semantics and the previously produced words, and another one where the model produces the word that would minimize the sentence length given the semantic representation and the previously produced words. By combining these two strategies, the model was able to produce sentences with different levels of information density and uniformity, providing a first step to model UID at the algorithmic level of analysis. In sum, the results show that the distributed semantic representations of Frank et al. (2009) can be used to model sentence production, exhibiting systematicity. Moreover, an algorithmic account of the internal behavior of the model was reached, with the potential to generalize to other models with similar architecture. Finally, a model of UID is presented, highlighting some important aspects about UID that need to be addressed in order to go from the formulation of UID at the computational level of analysis to a mechanistic account at the algorithmic level.Diese Dissertation widmet sich der Aufgabe, die menschliche Satzproduktion aus konnektionistischer Sicht zu modellieren und dabei verteilte semantische Repräsentationen zu verwenden. Die Schwerpunkte werden dabei sein: (i) die Frage, ob die von Frank et al. (2009) definierten verteilten semantischen Repräsentationen geeignet sind, um die Satzproduktion unter Verwendung künstlicher neuronaler Netze zu modellieren; (ii) das Verhalten und der interne Mechanismus eines Modells, das diese Repräsentationen und rekurrente neuronale Netze verwendet; (iii) eine mechanistische Darstellung der Uniform Information Density Hypothesis (UID; Jaeger, 2006; Levy and Jaeger, 2007). Zunächst sei angenommen, dass die Repräsentationen von Frank et al. (2009), genannt Situation Vektoren, Punkte in einem Vektorraum sind, in dem jeder Vektor Informationen über Beobachtungen enthält, in denen ein Ereignis und ein entsprechender Satz wahr sind. Diese Repräsentationen wurden erfolgreich verwendet, um Sprachverständnis zu modellieren (z.B. Frank et al., 2009; Venhuizen et al., 2018). Während der Konstruktion dieser Vektoren führt ein Prozess der Dimensionsreduktion jedoch zu einem gewissen Informationsverlust, wodurch einige Aspekte verloren gehen. Um das Problem zu lösen, werden als Alternative Belief Vektoren eingeführt. Diese beiden Arten der Repräsentation werden ausgewertet, indem sie als Eingabe für ein Satzproduktionsmodell verwendet werden, welches als Erweiterung eines Simple Recurrent Neural Network (SRN, Elman, 1990) implementiert wurden. Dieses Modell wird unter verschiedenen Bedingungen getestet, die verschiedenen Ebenen der Systematizität entsprechen, d.h. der Fähigkeit eines Modells, von einer Menge bekannter Elemente auf eine Menge neuer Elemente zu verallgemeinern. Systematizität ist ein wesentliches Attribut, das ein Modell der Satzverarbeitung besitzen muss, wenn man bedenkt, dass die Anzahl der Sätze, die in einer bestimmte Sprache erzeugt werden können, unendlich ist und es daher nicht möglich ist, sich alle möglichen Nachrichten-Satz-Paare zu merken. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass das Modell in der Lage ist, unter allen Testbedingungen erfolgreich zu generalisieren und dabei ein systematisches Verhalten zeigt. Darüber hinaus weisen die verbleibenden Fehler starke Ähnlichkeit zu anderen semantischen Repräsentationen auf. Dies findet sich in der Literatur zu Sprachfehlern wider, wo es heißt, dass Fehler Elemente semantischer oder phonologischer Ähnlichkeit beinhalten. Dieses Ergebnis beweist das v systematische Verhalten des Modells, da es ähnliche semantische Repräsentationen in ähnlicher Weise verarbeitet, auch wenn sie dem Modell unbekannt sind. Zweitens wurde das Satzproduktionsmodell auf zwei verschiedene Arten analysiert. (i) Indem man sich die von ihm erzeugten Sätze ansieht, einschließlich der aufgetretenen Fehler, und dabei die Schwierigkeiten und Präferenzen des Modells hervorhebt. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass das Modell die syntaktischen Muster der Sprache lernt. Darüber hinaus zeigt sich, dass die verbleibenden Probleme im Wesentlichen mit sehr ähnlichen semantischen Repräsentationen zusammenhängen, die manchmal ungewollte Sätze produzieren, welche jedoch semantisch nah an den beabsichtigten Sätzen liegen. (ii) Indem die Verbindungsgewichte und Aktivierungsmuster des Modells analysiert und eine algorithmische Darstellung der internen Verarbeitung erzielt wird. Demnach aktiviert die semantische Eingangsrepräsentation jene Wörter, mit denen sie inhaltlich zusammenhängt. In diesem Zusammenhang wird ein Ranking erzeugt, weil Wörter, die wahrscheinlich früh im Satz erscheinen eine stärkere Aktivierung erfahren. Im nächsten Schritt aktiviert das zuvor produzierte Wort syntaktische und semantische Einschränkungen der nächsten Wortproduktionen. Derweil speichern Kontext-Einheiten Informationen für einen längeren Zeitraum, und ermöglichen es dem Modell so, längere Abhängigkeiten zu realisieren. Nach unserem Verständnis können diese Erkenntnisse als Erklärungsgrundlage für andere, verwandte Modelle herangezogen werden. Drittens wird eine Erweiterung des Modells vorgeschlagen, um die UID nachzubilden. Laut UID ist die Sprachproduktion ein effizienter Prozess, der von der Tendenz geprägt ist, linguistische Einheiten zu produzieren, die Informationen so einheitlich wie möglich verteilen, und dabei die Kapazität des Kommunikationskanals vor dem Hintergrund der sprachlichen Kodierungsmöglichkeiten ausreizt, wodurch die Menge der pro Zeiteinheit übertragenen Informationen maximiert wird. Dies wird in der Erweiterung umgesetzt, indem zwei verschiedene Strategien der Wortproduktion gegeneinander ausgespielt werden: Wähle das Wort (i) mit der höchsten Wahrscheinlichkeit unter den zuvor produzierten Wörtern; oder (ii) welches die Satzlänge minimiert. Durch die Kombination dieser beiden Strategien ist das Modell in der Lage, Sätze unter Vorgabe der Informationsdichte und -verteilung zu erzeugen, was einer ersten Modellierung der UID auf algorithmischer Ebene gleichkommt. Zusammenfassend zeigen die Resultate, dass die verteilten semantischen Repräsentationen von Frank et al. (2009) für die Satzproduktion verwendet werden können und dabei Systematizität beobachtet werden kann. Darüber hinaus wird eine algorithmische Erklärung der internen Mechanismen des Modells geliefert. Schließlich wird ein Modell der UID vorgestellt, das einen ersten Schritt zu einer mechanistischen Darstellung auf der algorithmischen Ebene der Analyse darstellt

The Effect of Attention to Self-Regulation of Speech Sound Productions on Speech Fluency in Oral Reading

Purpose: This study ultimately sought to test whether a condition of heightened attention to speech sound production during connected speech serves to trigger increased disfluencies. Disfluencies, or disruptions in the flow of speech, are highly variable in form and location, both within and across individuals and situations. Research to identify conditions that can predictably trigger disfluencies has the potential to provide insight into their elusive nature. A review of related literature covered the cognitive-linguistic theories related to speech fluency and stuttering. This review of previous literature also served as the foundation for why it was proposed that disfluencies would be triggered by heightened self-monitoring attention to how speech sounds are made during connected speech. Methods: Participants included 10 male and 10 female normally fluent adult college students. Their tasks included a baseline oral reading of a 330-word passage, learning of two new speech sounds, followed by an experimental reading of the same passage again. During the experimental reading, target sounds, which were indicated by highlighted locations within the passage, had to be replaced with the newly learned speech sounds. Participants indicated much greater attention was given to how speech sounds were produced during the experimental oral reading than in the baseline oral reading, to support and validate the nature of the task. Results: Disfluencies and oral reading rates were examined using descriptive statistics and analyzed by means of the negative binomial distribution model. Secondary analyses of oral reading rates were conducted with the Wilcoxon’s Signed Rank test. The results revealed that the experimental reading task was associated with a significant increase in Stuttering-Like Disfluency (SLD) and Other Disfluency (OD), and a significant decrease in oral reading rate. Furthermore, SLDs increased significantly more than ODs from the first to the second reading. Discussion: Results supported the hypothesis that disfluency, especially SLD, can be triggered by a condition of increased attention to self-monitoring how speech sounds are produced during connected speech. These findings support theories explaining disfluencies as a symptom of a speaker’s cognitive-linguistic speech planning processes being over-burdened. Implications are raised for specific populations that may be at risk-for more disfluencies: young children learning language, second-language learners, and children in speech therapy. Future research directions are recommended to better understand how to prevent disfluencies in at-risk populations and clarify the enigmatic relationship among attentional processes, phonological production planning, and stuttering