Lexical prosody beyond first-language boundary:Chinese lexical tone sensitivity predicts English reading comprehension

This 1-year longitudinal study examined the role of Cantonese lexical tone sensitivity in predicting English reading comprehension, and the pathways underlying their relation. Multiple measures of Cantonese lexical tone sensitivity, English lexical stress sensitivity, Cantonese segmental phonological awareness, general auditory sensitivity, English word reading and English reading comprehension were administered to 133 Cantonese-English unbalanced bilingual second graders. Structural equation modeling analysis identified transfer of Cantonese lexical tone sensitivity to English reading comprehension. This transfer was realized through a direct pathway via English stress sensitivity and also an indirect pathway via English word reading. These results suggest that prosodic sensitivity is an important factor influencing English reading comprehension and that it needs to be incorporated into theoretical accounts of reading comprehension across languages

Explaining L2 lexical learning in multiple scenarios : cross-situational word learning in L1 Mandarin L2 English speakers

Adults commonly struggle with perceiving and recognizing the sounds and words of a second language (L2), especially when the L2 sounds do not have a counterpart in the learner’s first language (L1). We examined how L1 Mandarin L2 English speakers learned pseudo English words within a cross‐situational word learning (CSWL) task previously presented to monolingual English and bilingual Mandarin‐English speakers. CSWL is ambiguous because participants are not provided with direct mappings of words and object referents. Rather, learners discern word‐object correspondences through tracking multiple co‐occurrences across learning trials. The monolinguals and bilinguals tested in previous studies showed lower performance for pseudo words that formed vowel minimal pairs (e.g., /dit/‐/dɪt/) than pseudo word which formed consonant minimal pairs (e.g., /bɔn/‐/pɔn/) or non‐minimal pairs which differed in all segments (e.g., /bɔn/‐/dit/). In contrast, L1 Mandarin L2 English listeners struggled to learn all word pairs. We explain this seemingly contradicting finding by considering the multiplicity of acoustic cues in the stimuli presented to all participant groups. Stimuli were produced in infant‐directed‐speech (IDS) in order to compare performance by children and adults and because previous research had shown that IDS enhances L1 and L2 acquisition. We propose that the suprasegmental pitch variation in the vowels typical of IDS stimuli might be perceived as lexical tone distinctions for tonal language speakers who cannot fully inhibit their L1 activation, resulting in high lexical competition and diminished learning during an ambiguous word learning task. Our results are in line with the Second Language Linguistic Perception (L2LP) model which proposes that fine‐grained acoustic information from multiple sources and the ability to switch between language modes affects non‐native phonetic and lexical development

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

Designing An Assistive Naming App for Mandarin-Speaking Anomic Aphasia Patients

This Major Research Project is motivated by my lived experiences with my grandfather, an anomic aphasia patient, who experienced embarrassment and frustration in his daily life due to lost ability to recollect names of things and people. Starting with a literature review of popular anomia apps and supported by a user persona built based on my grandfather’s profile, I derived a “vocabulary database” in consultation with a speech-language pathologist, and designed a prototype mobile application iRemember, to assist anomic aphasia patients speaking Mandarin and English in recollecting names of daily life objects independently. The app affords searching its database for any real life object by taking a picture using the app and also to add items to the database with audio and text descriptions. The app offers service in Mandarin and English and will be useful to Chinese aphasia patients living in Canada or other English speaking regions who have lost one or both languages. Future work includes developing the prototype into a full-fledged app through a user-centered process, and enabling it in other languages. Keywords: anomic aphasia, communication, vocabulary, mobile app, assistive technologies, augmentative and alternative communicatio

Low Resource Efficient Speech Retrieval

Speech retrieval refers to the task of retrieving the information, which is useful or relevant to a user query, from speech collection. This thesis aims to examine ways in which speech retrieval can be improved in terms of requiring low resources - without extensively annotated corpora on which automated processing systems are typically built - and achieving high computational efficiency. This work is focused on two speech retrieval technologies, spoken keyword retrieval and spoken document classification. Firstly, keyword retrieval - also referred to as keyword search (KWS) or spoken term detection - is defined as the task of retrieving the occurrences of a keyword specified by the user in text form, from speech collections. We make advances in an open vocabulary KWS platform using context-dependent Point Process Model (PPM). We further accomplish a PPM-based lattice generation framework, which improves KWS performance and enables automatic speech recognition (ASR) decoding. Secondly, the massive volumes of speech data motivate the effort to organize and search speech collections through spoken document classification. In classifying real-world unstructured speech into predefined classes, the wildly collected speech recordings can be extremely long, of varying length, and contain multiple class label shifts at variable locations in the audio. For this reason each spoken document is often first split into sequential segments, and then each segment is independently classified. We present a general purpose method for classifying spoken segments, using a cascade of language independent acoustic modeling, foreign-language to English translation lexicons, and English-language classification. Next, instead of classifying each segment independently, we demonstrate that exploring the contextual dependencies across sequential segments can provide large classification performance improvements. Lastly, we remove the need of any orthographic lexicon and instead exploit alternative unsupervised approaches to decoding speech in terms of automatically discovered word-like or phoneme-like units. We show that the spoken segment representations based on such lexical or phonetic discovery can achieve competitive classification performance as compared to those based on a domain-mismatched ASR or a universal phone set ASR

(Dis)connections between specific language impairment and dyslexia in Chinese

Poster Session: no. 26P.40Specific language impairment (SLI) and dyslexia describe language-learning impairments that occur in the absence of a sensory, cognitive, or psychosocial impairment. SLI is primarily defined by an impairment in oral language, and dyslexia by a deficit in the reading of written words. SLI and dyslexia co-occur in school-age children learning English, with rates ranging from 17% to 75%. For children learning Chinese, SLI and dyslexia also co-occur. Wong et al. (2010) first reported on the presence of dyslexia in a clinical sample of 6- to 11-year-old school-age children with SLI. The study compared the reading-related cognitive skills of children with SLI and dyslexia (SLI-D) with 2 groups of children …postprin

Uncovering the myth of learning to read Chinese characters: phonetic, semantic, and orthographic strategies used by Chinese as foreign language learners

Oral Session - 6A: Lexical modeling: no. 6A.3Chinese is considered to be one of the most challenging orthographies to be learned by non-native speakers, in particular, the character. Chinese character is the basic reading unit that converges sound, form and meaning. The predominant type of Chinese character is semantic-phonetic compound that is composed of phonetic and semantic radicals, giving the clues of the sound and meaning, respectively. Over the last two decades, psycholinguistic research has made significant progress in specifying the roles of phonetic and semantic radicals in character processing among native Chinese speakers …postprin

Student Language Use in a One-way Mandarin Immersion Classroom: A Sociolinguistic Perspective

The trend of expanding language immersion access to all students calls for further research in multiple contexts, especially those with a sociolinguistic lens. Potowski (2004), among a few systematic language use researchers, conducted an investigation in an upper-grade two-way Spanish immersion classroom and utilized the identity investment concept in interpreting language use data for the first time. Her study inspired me to conduct the present research that describes language use by four first-grade students during mathematics and Language Arts instruction in a oneway fifty-fifty Mandarin immersion classroom in an urban public school in the heart of an African-American community in the Northwest. As a seasoned immersion educator, I explored interactions among linguistic input (Krashen, 1982), output (Swain, 2000), transfer (Cummins, 1979), and sociocultural identity (Norton, 2006; Potowski, 2004). This qualitative research involved observations using video- and audio- recordings with four focal students wearing lapel microphones over five weeks, followed by a semi-structured focus group interview. A total of 3,090 speech turns were coded and analyzed under five categories: the number of speech turns, vocabulary, grammar, linguistic functions, and other themes that emerged from the interview. Overall, students used Mandarin 61% of the time, a higher percentage than in Potowski’s (56%) study. Findings support the use of diglossia though not all students exhibited this behavior. Data indicated that the time factor alone cannot account for target language outcomes. The African-American girl, Abelina (a pseudonym), with the least exposure to Mandarin prior to enrollment at the researched school outperformed her native English-speaking peers. Her motivation, learning strategies, social identity, and Creole background may have contributed to her success. Implications for changes in immersion curriculum and instruction as well as calls for future research on trilingual education are shared