Short-term accommodation of Hong Kong English speakers towards native English accents and the effect of language attitudes

Accommodation, also known as convergence, refers to a process whereby a speaker changes the way he or she speaks to be more similar to another speaker. This dissertation focuses on two themes: language attitudes and short-term accommodation. A study using the matched-guise method is conducted to examine Hong Kong people’s attitudes towards British English, American English and Hong Kong English (henceforth HKE). Results suggest that after the handover British English is still rated as the most prestigious English variety in Hong Kong. HKE is also found to have a high level of acceptance in terms of social attractiveness. For short-term accommodation, two studies are conducted to investigate the phonetic convergence of HKE speakers towards native English accents, and the effect of language attitudes on convergence. Study 2 consists of a group of HKE speakers completing separate map tasks with a Received Pronunciation speaker and a General American English speaker. Their pronunciations of the THOUGHT vowel, the PATH vowel, rhoticity, fricative /z/ and fricative /θ/ are examined before, during and after the map tasks. The results suggest that the HKE speakers produce more fricative [z] and converge on rhoticity after exposure to the native accents. However, divergence is found on the PATH vowel and fricative /θ/, and maintenance is found on the THOUGHT vowel. These findings suggest that the HKE speakers tend to converge on the linguistic features which are more salient to them. Study 3 examines the effect of language attitudes on speech convergence, and no correlation is found between language attitudes and the HKE speakers’ convergence on rhoticity. Finally, the hybrid exemplar-based model is proposed to explain the complex results of the three studies. It provides a framework for speech accommodation which covers speech perception and production, and includes social factors as important elements in the model

The Production of Russian Vowels /i/ and /ɨ/ by Russian-English Bilingual Children

This study is the first to investigate the production of the Russian vowel contrast /i/-/ɨ/ by Russian-English bilingual children living in New York City. This contrast is interesting because the vowel /ɨ/ is not unanimously recognized as an independent phoneme, based on e.g. its limited occurrence and distribution (Kodzasov & Krivnova, 2010; Matusevich, 1976). Additionally, Russian-speaking children acquire /ɨ/ relatively late in production. Therefore, this contrast’s acquisition may be particularly challenging for bilingual children with more limited exposure and variability in their input and is an interesting test case and contribution to the debate regarding the contrast’s phonological status. In this study, I collected production samples from 11 Russian-English bilingual children from New York City (mean age 10 years) as well as two 10-year-old Russian monolingual children from Russia. Participants completed a picture-naming and sentence-repetition task via Zoom while parents recorded their speech via iPhones. Productions of /i/ and /ɨ/ (~120 tokens per participant) were acoustically analyzed focusing on formant frequencies at 5 points in time. Results showed that overall bilingual children’s formant values were similar to monolinguals, although bilinguals tended to produce high mid vowel /ɨ/ with higher F2 values than monolinguals. Moreover, differences were observed within the bilingual group: participants with more Russian input showed patterns of production more similar to monolinguals than children with less Russian input

The Processing of Emotional Sentences by Young and Older Adults: A Visual World Eye-movement Study

Carminati MN, Knoeferle P. The Processing of Emotional Sentences by Young and Older Adults: A Visual World Eye-movement Study. Presented at the Architectures and Mechanisms of Language and Processing (AMLaP), Riva del Garda, Italy

Examining variability in Spanish monolingual and bilingual phonotactics: A look at sC-clusters

Current models of generative phonology have failed to address the variability that is observed in bilingual language patterns patterns. This dissertation addresses exactly that issue by examining the perception of Spanish sC-clusters in Spanish monolinguals and English-Spanish bilinguals. Surface sC-clusters in onset position are prohibited in Spanish and are repaired by inserting a prothetic /e/ (sC $\rightarrow$ esC). English differs in that it allows sC-cluster onsets, and the structure of the sC-cluster has been shown to differ based on the sonority profile (i.e., s+stop clusters are bisyllabic, s+liquid clusters are tautosyllabic). A batch version of a Harmonic Grammar Gradual Learning Algorithm (HG-GLA) was given Spanish input and predicted that Spanish sC-clusters may be syllabified differently based on the sonority of the sC-cluster. It predicted that s+stop clusters are more likely to instantiate /e/ prothesis than s+liqud clusters, but that s+liquid clusters are most likely to be syllabified as a true branching onset like in English. This led to the hypothesis that s+stop and s+liquid clusters may show observable differences in perception in Spanish. Furthermore, studies in bilingualism have shown strong evidence for bilingual variability, or non-monolingual-like language behavior, particularly in areas where there is non-identical structural overlap, as is the case with sC-clusters in Spanish and English. The perception of s+stop and s+liquid clusters was thus also analyzed with respect to the following language-external variables that affect bilingual variability: language profile (monolingual versus bilingual), age of exposure to bilingualism, and bilingual dominance. To test these hypotheses, two experiments were performed. The first was a replication of an AX task that has been shown to exhibit variability in Spanish sC-cluster perception in past studies. In this task, native Spanish speakers (monolingual and bilingual) listened to stimuli pairs that differed in the duration and quality of the initial vowel preceding the sC-cluster and were asked to respond if they were the same or different. The second was a nonce word judgment task where participants were presented with Spanish-like nonce words beginning with sC-clusters and had to give them acceptability ratings of how `Spanish-like\u27 they sounded. The results did not show evidence of a language-internal effect. s+stop and s+liquid clusters were treated the same in perception by Spanish native speakers, contrary to the predictions of the HG-GLA. Regarding the language-external variables, there was a strong effect of language profile on perception of sC-clusters in Spanish: monolinguals showed a strong dis-preference for sC-initial words, whereas bilinguals were more accepting of such clusters. However, the bilingual variability observed was not affected by age of exposure to bilingualism or by language dominance. Finally, a sketch of a proposal is made for how generative theories of phonology, like Harmonic Grammar, could potentially be adapted to accommodate the observed differences between the phonotactics of monolinguals and bilinguals, particularly for the case of sC-clusters in English-Spanish bilinguals

Attention Restraint, Working Memory Capacity, and Mind Wandering: Do Emotional Valence or Intentionality Matter?

Attention restraint appears to mediate the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC) and mind wandering (Kane et al., 2016). Prior work has identifed two dimensions of mind wandering—emotional valence and intentionality. However, less is known about how WMC and attention restraint correlate with these dimensions. Te current study examined the relationship between WMC, attention restraint, and mind wandering by emotional valence and intentionality. A confrmatory factor analysis demonstrated that WMC and attention restraint were strongly correlated, but only attention restraint was related to overall mind wandering, consistent with prior fndings. However, when examining the emotional valence of mind wandering, attention restraint and WMC were related to negatively and positively valenced, but not neutral, mind wandering. Attention restraint was also related to intentional but not unintentional mind wandering. Tese results suggest that WMC and attention restraint predict some, but not all, types of mind wandering

The Emergence Of Phonological Categories

While phonological features are often assumed to be innate and universal (Chomsky and Halle, 1968), recent work argues for an alternative view that phonological features are emergent and acquired from linguistic input (e.g., Dresher, 2004; Mielke, 2008; Clements and Ridouane, 2011). This dissertation provides support for the emergent view of phonological features and proposes that the structure of the lexicon is the primary driving force in the emergence of phonological categories. Chapter 2 reviews the relevant developmental and theoretical literature on phonological acquisition and offers a reconsideration of the experimental findings in light of a clear distinction between phonetic and phonological knowledge. Chapter 3 presents a model of phonological category emergence in first language acquisition. In this model, the learner acquires phonological categories through creating lexically meaningful divisions in the acoustic space, and phonological categories adjust or increase in number to accommodate the representational needs of the learner\u27s increasing vocabulary. A computational experiment was run to test the validity of this model using acoustic measurements from the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus as the input. To provide evidence in support of a lexically based acquisition model, Chapter 4 uses the Providence Corpus to investigate developmental patterns in phonological acquisition. This corpus study shows that lexical contrast, not frequency, contributes to the development of production accuracy on both the word and phoneme levels in 1- to 3-year-old English-learning children. Chapter 5 extends the phonological acquisition model to study the role of lexical frequency and phonetic variation in the initiation and perpetuation of sound change. The results indicate that phonological change is overwhelmingly regular and categorical with little frequency effects. Overall, this dissertation provides substantive evidence for a lexically based account of phonological category emergence

Language Profiles Of Thai Children With Autism: Lexical, Grammatical, And Pragmatic Factors

This dissertation is a linguistically-motivated investigation into different areas of language in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), compared to typically developing (TD) children. Fine distinctions between linguistic units were used in designing tasks on language production and comprehension in seven experiments. The focus of each chapter of this dissertation was on three main hypotheses respectively, namely (1) the Abstract Representation Difficulty Hypothesis that children with ASD (perhaps limited to the subgroup with co-morbid language impairments) have difficulties activating abstract lexical representations as effectively as TD children, due to their hyperattention to phonetic details of speech, (2) the Pragmatic over Grammatical Deficit Hypothesis that pragmatics is particularly difficult for all the ASD children, while morphological and semantic aspects of language are relatively intact, and (3) the Cognitive Factor Hypothesis that cognitive factors such as nonverbal intelligence quotient (NVIQ) and nonverbal working memory play a greater role in the ASD than the TD performance on linguistic tasks. Chapter 2 investigates the morpho-phonological and semantic aspects of the lexical processing of Thai compound and simplex words. Results suggest that morphological facilitation effects can be obtained independently of phonological and semantic relatedness in the processing of Thai compounds. While children with ASD with lower task performance display hyper-attention to the acoustic differences between primes and targets, children with ASD in the higher performance group have enhanced morphological effects, compared to their TD peers, and the effects appear to be independent of the presence of phonological effects and enhanced semantic effects. The lack of phonological effects in the first set of experiments was explored further in the later experiments. Children with ASD were found to be slower in processing natural-sounding surface phonological forms, suggesting that a deeper processing of neutralized forms than full forms. The similar performance on the next task with the integration of visual information suggests that the slower processing may result from their slower lexical semantic processing. The Abstract Representation Difficulty Hypothesis, thus, holds for a subgroup of children with ASD, while other children with ASD display intact phonological representation, enhanced morphological processing compared to TD controls, and intact but slower lexical processing. Chapter 3 explores the Pragmatic over Grammatical Deficits Hypothesis. Using fine distinctions within the personal reference terms, consistently replicated results suggest that while grammatical person phi-features are intact in children with ASD\u27s representation of pronouns, these children are less sensitive to deictic information in their interpretation of pronouns and tend to avoid using the first-person pronoun, with high deictic level, when they have freedom to choose personal names to refer to themselves. Children with ASD also performed more poorly on the comprehension of unmarked pronouns which requires implicated presupposition, suggesting that even with minimal comparisons among the pronouns, lexically-encoded core grammatical features and pragmatic ones are distinguished in children\u27s language processing. Chapter 3 also adds to the literature on lexical presuppositions, scalar implicature, and implicated presuppositions that not only adolescents, but also children with ASD are age-appropriate in deriving scalar implicatures and that not all kinds of pragmatic inferences are equally challenging for children with ASD. The most indicative difference between the children with ASD and the TD group lies in the children with ASD\u27s heavier reliance on literal, logical meaning when other semantically- and pragmatically-inferred meanings are violated. Chapter 4 partly contributes to the Cognitive Factor Hypothesis, suggesting a possibility that cognitive factors, as opposed to developmental factors, correlates more with children with ASD\u27s performance on linguistic tasks. Additionally, children in both groups displayed correlations in their performance across all of the experiment in the dissertation. Individual language profiles were compiled with the results from the previous chapters. Two subgroups of children with ASD were identified through k-means cluster analysis. The children with ASD in Cluster 1 have globally better performance across experiments than children with ASD in Cluster 2, supporting that ASD children may be able to be classified into subgroups based on their performance on linguistic tasks alone. Even with globally better linguistic task performance, the children with ASD in Cluster 1 still appear to be less sensitive to social-deictic information, confirming that certain types of pragmatics are indeed more challenging than the others. In sum, this dissertation advances our understanding on morphological, semantic, and pragmatic abilities of children with autism through carefully-designed linguistically-motivated experiments

Re-examining Phonological and Lexical Correlates of Second Language Comprehensibility:The Role of Rater Experience

Few researchers and teachers would disagree that some linguistic aspects of second language (L2) speech are more crucial than others for successful communication. Underlying this idea is the assumption that communicative success can be broadly defined in terms of speakers’ ability to convey the intended meaning to the interlocutor, which is frequently captured through a listener-based rating of comprehensibility or ease of understanding (e.g. Derwing & Munro, 2009; Levis, 2005). Previous research has shown that communicative success – for example, as defined through comprehensible L2 speech – depends on several linguistic dimensions of L2 output, including its segmental and suprasegmental pronunciation, fluency-based characteristics, lexical and grammatical content, as well as discourse structure (e.g. Field, 2005; Hahn, 2004; Kang et al., 2010; Trofimovich & Isaacs, 2012). Our chief objective in the current study was to explore the L2 comprehensibility construct from a language assessment perspective (e.g. Isaacs & Thomson, 2013), by targeting rater experience as a possible source of variance influencing the degree to which raters use various characteristics of speech in judging L2 comprehensibility. In keeping with this objective, we asked the following question: What is the extent to which linguistic aspects of L2 speech contributing to comprehensibility ratings depend on raters’ experience

A Neurocognitive Approach

One of the most important hallmarks of human language is the use of symbolic signs in that words just “symbolically” represent the objects they refer to. That is, neither the written word ‘tree’ nor the spoken sequence of sounds /triː/ has any inherent similarity or analogy to a real tree. This is a core assumption of classic linguistics, which states that words are paired with objects, mental images, or concepts in an arbitrary fashion. Thus, the sound of a word per se has no inherent semantic content, nor does it play any contributing role in shaping the meaning of words. The goal of this dissertation is to contemplate, to rethink, and to examine the aforementioned statement, which has dominated language research throughout the last century. Indeed, there are a vast number of counterexamples showing how meaningful single phonemes, or their combination—as in nonwords—can be. Consider the standalone role of sound in poetry, or the use of single syllables or phonemes in various sacred rituals, or the prevalence of onomatopoetic words, i.e., words that sound similar to what they mean (e.g., click, zigzag), across all of the languages in the world, or the tendency of language users toward using harsh-sounding words as swear words, or cross-linguistic phenomena such as a preference to match the nonword BOUBA with a curvy round shape and KIKI with a spiky angular shape: These all constitute excellent examples that could potentially falsify the radical assumption of the sound of words being per se meaningless. The present dissertation now wants to shed new empirical light on this old debate, which dates back to Greek antiquity, yet faces a number of unanswered questions regarding the cognitive and neuropsychological mechanisms underlying the potential effect of sound on the processes of meaning making. More specifically, my focus is on the existence of sound-meaning relationships in the affective domain, termed affective iconicity, and on the investigation of different aspects of this phenomenon in both everyday language and poetry. By taking an interdisciplinary approach, the present work combines a variety of methods and techniques, such as behavioral and neuroimaging experiments, phonological and acoustic analysis of a large-scale lexicon, computational modelling, and corpus analysis, in order to provide comprehensive answers for this multi-faceted phenomenon. The theoretical part of the dissertation explores and integrates linguistic perspectives on the iconic mappings, explaining how a linguistic sign can acquire meaning based on similarities between its form and the object it refers to. A surprising neglect of the role of emotion in empirical models of language in general, and in previous investigations of iconicity in particular, is discussed. Specific hypotheses are formulated via the predictions made by the recently proposed Neurocognitive Poetics Model (NCPM), and through reviewing the previous works on the topic. Accordingly, three main questions are formulated that the present dissertation aims to address: i) Does the sound of words evoke affective responses observable at the behavioral and neural level? ii) Does the sound of words influence the processes of meaning making in the affective domain? iii) Does the sound of words in a poem contribute to its global affective meaning as perceived by readers? Six empirical studies attempt to address these questions which are subdivided into six more precise research questions. Results of the empirical part provide a comprehensive picture of the interplay between sound and meaning at different levels of processing (i.e., rating, semantic decision, and passive listening) for different presentation modalities (i.e., visual, and auditory) and for different textual levels (i.e., single word, and entire text). In short, results of Study 1 and Study 2 indicated a high similarity between the affective potential of the sound of words and other types of affective sounds (e.g., nonverbal emotional vocalization and affective prosody) at both the level of psychological perception (Study 1) and the level of neural correlates and substrates (Study 2). Furthermore, when giving their affective judgments (valence and arousal) about the meaning of words, participants, as shown in Study 1, were implicitly influenced by the sound of words even when words were presented visually and read silently. These results were extended in Study 3 in which iconic words, as operationalized by congruence between affective sound and affective meaning, were evaluated more quickly and more accurately than their non-iconic counterparts, suggesting that a similarity between the form and meaning of a word may help language users to more readily access its meaning through direct form-meaning mappings. Study 4 investigated the neural mechanisms underlying the facilitative effect observed in Study 3. Results showed an enhanced fMRI signal in the left amygdala, known for its role in multimodal emotion integration, for both a comparison between iconic and non-iconic words, as well as functional connectivity between two seed regions representing the sound (superior temporal gyrus) and meaning (inferior frontal gyrus) of words modulated by iconic condition. Lastly, results of Study 5 and Study 6 emphasize the role of foregrounded phonological units in the affective and aesthetic processes of literary reading. This clearly supports the initial hypotheses that iconicity is a feasible indicator of the affective qualities of a literary text as evoked by particular phonemic structures. The presented method for measuring the basic affective tone of the poems investigated could account for a considerable part of the variance in the ratings of their general affective meaning. In summary, this dissertation provides strong psychological and neuroimaging evidence for a device that has long been deployed in poetry and the arts, i.e., evoking affective (and aesthetic) responses by the use of certain words with specific sound patterns. The results were used to upgrade the standard models of visual word processing by conceiving corresponding modules responsible for the evaluation of affective sound and its interaction with the evaluation of the affective meaning of words. Lastly, at the more complex level of the whole text, the findings of this dissertation confirm the central assumption of the NCPM regarding the role of foregrounded elements in enhancing affective perception, although the Panksepp-Jakopson hypothesis might need to be extended to human-specific brain regions which originally evolved for other, more simple, tasks. Also, the literary model of reading may need to be updated by adding feedback loops from resulting reading behavior (e.g., fluent reading) to the perceived emotions (e.g., lust and play) based on the findings concerning the facilitative role of iconicity in language processing