Effects of rhythm and phrase-final lengthening on word-spotting in Korean

A word-spotting experiment was conducted to investigate whether rhythmic consistency and phrase-final lengthening facilitate performance in Korean. Listeners had to spot disyllabic and trisyllabic words in nonsense strings organized in phrases with either the same or variable syllable count; phrase-final lengthening was absent, or occurring either in all phrases or only in the phrase immediately preceding the target. The results show that, for disyllabic targets, inconsistent syllable count and lengthening before the target led to fewer errors. For trisyllabic targets, accuracy was at ceiling, but final lengthening in all phrases reduced reaction times. The results imply that both rhythmic consistency (i.e. regular syllable count) and phrase-final lengthening play a role in word-spotting and, by extension, in speech processing in Korean, as in other languages. However, the results also reflect the language specific role of prosodic cues. First, the cues here were used primarily with disyllabic targets, which were cognitively more demanding to process partly due to their high phonological neighborhood density. Second, the facilitating effect of rhythmic consistency was weak, possibly because strict consistency is not present in spoken Korean. Overall, rhythmic consistency facilitated spotting when targets mapped onto phrases, confirming the importance of phrasal organization in Korean speech processing

강세 단서가 한국인 영어 학습자의 영어 단어 인지에 미치는 영향

학위논문 (석사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 외국어교육과, 2015. 2. 안현기.This study investigates the effects of the stress pattern (trochaic vs. iambic) on English word recognition by Korean learners of English. Speech segmentation, more specifically word recognition, has been known to be affected by the language-specific cues. In the present study, stress is of main concern as a word recognition cue because English and Korean have different prosodic characteristics in terms of stress. While stress has a contrastive function and seems to constrain lexical access in English, Korean is known to have no stress system on the word level and little has been studied about its role in Korean word recognition. As a result, three research questions were proposed as follows: (a) can Korean learners of English use an initial-stressed syllable of a word as a cue in word recognition of an English connected speech?(b) are there any differences in the performance by Korean learners of English at different proficiency levels?(c) is there any interaction between the stress pattern and the other factors including the syllable count and the word class? In order to answer these questions, the word spotting task was conducted with a total of 42 university students, who were born and raised in Seoul or Gyeonggi-do province. They were divided into two groups, the advanced and the intermediate-low group. The participants were asked to detect a real English word from a stream of nonsense syllables. To examine the effects of the stress pattern and its interaction with the other factors including syllable count and word class, the materials used in the task were carefully selected, including disyllabic and trisyllabic nouns or verbs. The task was followed by a word knowledge test containing the list of the target words in order to confirm that they target words were highly familiar to the participants. The findings of the study suggest that the Korean learners did not seem to use the trochaic pattern to set a word boundary. They responded faster and more accurately to the target words with the iambic stress pattern. Furthermore, there was no difference between the groups, suggesting that the L2 prosodic cues like stress are hard to be acquired. The other factors of concern in the present study such as syllable count and word class did not show any interaction with the stress pattern. In conclusion, Korean learners of English do not seem to use the frequent distributional stress cue in English when recognizing a word from a sequence of nonsense syllables. These findings not only provide some understanding on the speech segmentation by Korean L2 listeners, but also shed light on the significance and necessity of the instruction on stress in teaching English listening.TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................... i TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................... iii LIST OF TABLES ................................................................................................ v LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................ vi CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ....................................................................... 1 1.1. Purpose of the Study ................................................................................ 1 1.2. Research Questions .................................................................................. 4 1.3. Organization of the Thesis ....................................................................... 5 CHAPTER 2. LITERATURE REVIEW ........................................................... 6 2.1. Word Recognition in Speech Perception .................................................. 6 2.2. Segmental and Suprasegmental Factors in Word Recognition .............. 11 2.3. Stress as a Crucial Cue for English Word Recognition .......................... 15 2.4. Stress Cue in L2 Word Recognition ....................................................... 19 CHAPTER 3. METHODOLOGY .................................................................... 25 3.1. Word Spotting Task ................................................................................ 25 3.2. Method ................................................................................................... 27 3.2.1. Participants ................................................................................... 27 3.2.2. Materials ....................................................................................... 29 3.2.3. Procedures .................................................................................... 34 iv 3.3. Data Collection and Analysis ................................................................. 36 CHAPTER 4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION ................................................ 38 4.1. Effects of Stress Pattern and Proficiency Level ..................................... 38 4.2. Effects of Stress Pattern and Other Factors ............................................ 48 4.2.1. Interaction between Syllable Count and Stress Pattern ................ 48 4.2.2. Interaction between Word Class and Stress Pattern ...................... 53 CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSION .......................................................................... 56 5.1. Major Findings and Pedagogical Implications ....................................... 56 5.2. Limitations and Suggestions for Further Research ................................ 59 REFERENCES ................................................................................................... 61 APPENDICES .................................................................................................... 68 국 문 초 록........................................................................................................... 75Maste

Linguistically Motivated Sign Language Segmentation

Sign language segmentation is a crucial task in sign language processing systems. It enables downstream tasks such as sign recognition, transcription, and machine translation. In this work, we consider two kinds of segmentation: segmentation into individual signs and segmentation into phrases, larger units comprising several signs. We propose a novel approach to jointly model these two tasks. Our method is motivated by linguistic cues observed in sign language corpora. We replace the predominant IO tagging scheme with BIO tagging to account for continuous signing. Given that prosody plays a significant role in phrase boundaries, we explore the use of optical flow features. We also provide an extensive analysis of hand shapes and 3D hand normalization. We find that introducing BIO tagging is necessary to model sign boundaries. Explicitly encoding prosody by optical flow improves segmentation in shallow models, but its contribution is negligible in deeper models. Careful tuning of the decoding algorithm atop the models further improves the segmentation quality. We demonstrate that our final models generalize to out-of-domain video content in a different signed language, even under a zero-shot setting. We observe that including optical flow and 3D hand normalization enhances the robustness of the model in this context.Comment: Accepted at EMNLP 2023 (Findings

Do syllables play a role in German speech perception? Behavioral and electrophysiological data from primed lexical decision.

Copyright © 2015 Bien, Bölte and Zwitserlood. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.We investigated the role of the syllable during speech processing in German, in an auditory-auditory fragment priming study with lexical decision and simultaneous EEG registration. Spoken fragment primes either shared segments (related) with the spoken targets or not (unrelated), and this segmental overlap either corresponded to the first syllable of the target (e.g., /teis/ - /teisti/), or not (e.g., /teis/ - /teistləs/). Similar prime conditions applied for word and pseudoword targets. Lexical decision latencies revealed facilitation due to related fragments that corresponded to the first syllable of the target (/teis/ - /teisti/). Despite segmental overlap, there were no positive effects for related fragments that mismatched the first syllable. No facilitation was observed for pseudowords. The EEG analyses showed a consistent effect of relatedness, independent of syllabic match, from 200 to 500 ms, including the P350 and N400 windows. Moreover, this held for words and pseudowords that differed however in the N400 window. The only specific effect of syllabic match for related prime-target pairs was observed in the time window from 200 to 300 ms. We discuss the nature and potential origin of these effects, and their relevance for speech processing and lexical access