2,443 research outputs found
Reverse production effect: Children recognize novel words better when they are heard rather than produced
This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Tania S. Zamuner, Stephanie Strahm, Elizabeth Morin-Lessard, and Michael P. A. Page, 'Reverse production effect: children recognize novel words better when they are heard rather than produced', Developmental Science, which has been published in final form at DOI 10.1111/desc.12636. Under embargo until 15 November 2018. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.This research investigates the effect of production on 4.5- to 6-year-old children’s recognition of newly learned words. In Experiment 1, children were taught four novel words in a produced or heard training condition during a brief training phase. In Experiment 2, children were taught eight novel words, and this time training condition was in a blocked design. Immediately after training, children were tested on their recognition of the trained novel words using a preferential looking paradigm. In both experiments, children recognized novel words that were produced and heard during training, but demonstrated better recognition for items that were heard. These findings are opposite to previous results reported in the literature with adults and children. Our results show that benefits of speech production for word learning are dependent on factors such as task complexity and the developmental stage of the learner.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio
Phoneme Recognition Using Acoustic Events
This paper presents a new approach to phoneme recognition using nonsequential
sub--phoneme units. These units are called acoustic events and are
phonologically meaningful as well as recognizable from speech signals. Acoustic
events form a phonologically incomplete representation as compared to
distinctive features. This problem may partly be overcome by incorporating
phonological constraints. Currently, 24 binary events describing manner and
place of articulation, vowel quality and voicing are used to recognize all
German phonemes. Phoneme recognition in this paradigm consists of two steps:
After the acoustic events have been determined from the speech signal, a
phonological parser is used to generate syllable and phoneme hypotheses from
the event lattice. Results obtained on a speaker--dependent corpus are
presented.Comment: 4 pages, to appear at ICSLP'94, PostScript version (compressed and
uuencoded
Stochastic phonological grammars and acceptability
In foundational works of generative phonology it is claimed that subjects can
reliably discriminate between possible but non-occurring words and words that
could not be English. In this paper we examine the use of a probabilistic
phonological parser for words to model experimentally-obtained judgements of
the acceptability of a set of nonsense words. We compared various methods of
scoring the goodness of the parse as a predictor of acceptability. We found
that the probability of the worst part is not the best score of acceptability,
indicating that classical generative phonology and Optimality Theory miss an
important fact, as these approaches do not recognise a mechanism by which the
frequency of well-formed parts may ameliorate the unacceptability of
low-frequency parts. We argue that probabilistic generative grammars are
demonstrably a more psychologically realistic model of phonological competence
than standard generative phonology or Optimality Theory.Comment: compressed postscript, 8 pages, 1 figur
Spanish epenthesis: Formal and performance perspectives
published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe
Phonotactic probability and phonotactic constraints :processing and lexical segmentation by Arabic learners of English as a foreign language
PhD ThesisA fundamental skill in listening comprehension is the ability to recognize words. The ability to accurately locate word boundaries(i . e. to lexically segment) is an important contributor to this skill. Research has shown that English native speakers use various cues in the signal in lexical segmentation. One such cue is phonotactic constraints; more specifically, the presence of illegal English consonant sequences such as AV and MY signals word boundaries. It has also been shown that phonotactic probability (i. e. the frequency of segments and sequences of segments in words) affects native speakers' processing of English. However, the role that phonotactic probability and phonotactic constraints play in the EFL classroom has hardly been studied, while much attention has been devoted to teaching listening comprehension in EFL.
This thesis reports on an intervention study which investigated the effect of teaching
English phonotactics upon Arabic speakers' lexical segmentation of running speech in
English. The study involved a native English group (N= 12), a non-native speaking
control group (N= 20); and a non-native speaking experimental group (N=20). Each
of the groups took three tests, namely Non-word Rating, Lexical Decision and Word
Spotting. These tests probed how sensitive the subjects were to English phonotactic
probability and to the presence of illegal sequences of phonemes in English and
investigated whether they used these sequences in the lexical segmentation of English.
The non-native groups were post-tested with the -same tasks after only the
experimental group had been given a treatment which consisted of explicit teaching of relevant English phonotactic constraints and related activities for 8 weeks. The gains made by the experimental group are discussed, with implications for teaching both pronunciation and listening comprehension in an EFL setting.Qassim University, Saudi Arabia
Words cluster phonetically beyond phonotactic regularities
Recent evidence suggests that cognitive pressures associated with language acquisition and use could affect the organization of the lexicon. On one hand, consistent with noisy channel models of language (e.g., Levy, 2008), the phonological distance between wordforms should be maximized to avoid perceptual confusability (a pressure for dispersion). On the other hand, a lexicon with high phonological regularity would be simpler to learn, remember and produce (e.g., Monaghan et al., 2011) (a pressure for clumpiness). Here we investigate wordform similarity in the lexicon, using measures of word distance (e.g., phonological neighborhood density) to ask whether there is evidence for dispersion or clumpiness of wordforms in the lexicon. We develop a novel method to compare lexicons to phonotactically-controlled baselines that provide a null hypothesis for how clumpy or sparse wordforms would be as the result of only phonotactics. Results for four languages, Dutch, English, German and French, show that the space of monomorphemic wordforms is clumpier than what would be expected by the best chance model according to a wide variety of measures: minimal pairs, average Levenshtein distance and several network properties. This suggests a fundamental drive for regularity in the lexicon that conflicts with the pressure for words to be as phonologically distinct as possible. Keywords: Linguistics; Lexical design; Communication;
Phonotactic
Loanword adaptation as first-language phonological perception
We show that loanword adaptation can be understood entirely in terms of phonological and phonetic comprehension and production mechanisms in the first language. We provide explicit accounts of several loanword adaptation phenomena (in Korean) in terms of an Optimality-Theoretic grammar model with the same three levels of representation that are needed to describe L1 phonology: the underlying form, the phonological surface form, and the auditory-phonetic form. The model is bidirectional, i.e., the same constraints and rankings are used by the listener and by the speaker. These constraints and rankings are the same for L1 processing and loanword adaptation
Sublexical influences on lexical development in children
Previous experimental research has found that adults and infants are sensitive to the likelihood of occurrence of sequences of segments, or probabilistic phonotactics, in the ambient language. One hypothesis that emerges from this finding is that probabilistic phonotactics, a sublexical factor, may influence rate of lexical acquisition. Preliminary results are reported from a study involving 21 typically developing preschool children. Children participated in a multi-trial word learning task involving eight nonwords of varying phonotactic probability. Each nonword was paired with a picture of an unusual object having no apparent corresponding label in English. Referent and item identification tasks were used to monitor lexical acquisition during learning and retention trials. Results indicated that high probability nonwords were learned with fewer exposures than low probability nonwords across both test measures. This finding suggests that sublexical representations influence lexical development in children.National Institutes of Health DC00433, RR7031K, DC00076, DC001694 (PI: Gierut
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Rules from Words: A Dynamic Neural Basis for a Lawful Linguistic Process
Listeners show a reliable bias towards interpreting speech sounds in a way that conforms to linguistic restrictions (phonotactic constraints) on the permissible patterning of speech sounds in a language. This perceptual bias may enforce and strengthen the systematicity that is the hallmark of phonological representation. Using Granger causality analysis of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)- constrained magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG) data, we tested the differential predictions of rule-based, frequency–based, and top-down lexical influence-driven explanations of processes that produce phonotactic biases in phoneme categorization. Consistent with the top-down lexical influence account, brain regions associated with the representation of words had a stronger influence on acoustic-phonetic regions in trials that led to the identification of phonotactically legal (versus illegal) word-initial consonant clusters. Regions associated with the application of linguistic rules had no such effect. Similarly, high frequency phoneme clusters failed to produce stronger feedforward influences by acoustic-phonetic regions on areas associated with higher linguistic representation. These results suggest that top-down lexical influences contribute to the systematicity of phonological representation
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