The influence of second language vowels on foreign language vowel perception

This paper examines the limits of feature abstraction and the influence of second language vowels on foreign vowel perception (cf. Pajak and Levy 2014). Perception of Dutch vowels by Polish students of English and French and Dutch was assessed using categorization tasks with goodness ratings. Dutch front rounded vowels were identified predominantly as front vowels by learners of French and Dutch and as back vowels by learners of English.The results suggest that the hypothesis about selective attention to features should incorporate markedness and that experience with second language front rounded vowels is enough to trigger disentangling rounding from backness.The project was financed by grant no. UMO-2015/17/B/HS2/01246 “Perceptual reorganization of speech: the interplay of categories and features” from the National Science Centre, Poland. Projekt finansowany ze środków z grantu nr UMO-2015/17/B/HS2/01246 pt."Przekształecenia percepcji mowy: oddziaływanie kategorii i cech" przyznanego przez Narodowe Centrum Nauki

Adult Second Language Speakers Who Pass off as Native Speakers: Seeking Plausible Explanations from a Network of Interdisciplinary Research

Normal infants and young children who are exposed to a second language over a substantial period of years in its natural interactive community grow up to speak the second language with the native accent of that language. This is a universal observation, commonly giving rise to a common belief that children ‘are better than adults at language learning’. In some cases, the second language may even replace the first language. By default, being exposed to another language after that ‘early’ age generally leads to speaking that language with a foreign accent. The common explanation for the foreign accent is brain sensory-motor maturity in neural pathways. The phenomenon of foreign accent has received and continues to attract research. On the other hand, a relatively small group of adults present a native-accent pattern. They sound native although they learned the second language at an older age, after the 'critical period' (CP) and/or under less natural contexts. This research focuses on this ‘phenomenal’ group of speakers. The rationale of the focus stems from the fact that these cases are documented in research (e.g., Munoz and Singleton, 2007 and Scovel, 1978) as partial evidence against CP age limits on the plasticity of the human brain for sound perception and sound production. Key words: foreign accent, accent free speech, adult second language speakers, brain structure, brain functio

Vitalitas bahasa Arab (kontribusi interferensi pada pemerolehan bahasa di pesantren)

Tulisan ini bertujuan untuk menjelaskan latar belakang dan bentuk-bentuk interferensi bahasa lokal terhadap vitalitas bahasa Arab bagi santri pondok pesantren Indonesia. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan kualitatif melalui wawancara, dokumentasi, dan observasi lapangan. Hasil kajian menunjukkan bahwa terdapat enam latar belakang interferensi bahasa santri yaitu: faktor alamiah, pengaruh bahasa ibu, kurangnya perbendaharaan kata Bahasa Arab, merasa kesulitan dalam belajar bahasa, kurangnya kesadaran berbahasa, dan jarangnya berkomunikasi dengan pembicara asli. Menariknya, ditemukan 58 bentuk interferensi bahasa daerah terhadap bahasa Arab dalam empat tataran, yaitu: fonologi dengan jumlah 7 tuturan, morfologi dengan 4 tuturan, sintaksis berjumlah 30 tuturan dan semantik berjumlah 17 tuturan. Lebih lanjut, enam bentuk dukungan vitalitas bahasa oleh interferensi bahasa local yaitu motivasi dalam komunikasi, mempermudah pemahaman, menambah keberanian berkomunikasi, penerapan kosa kata bahasa Arab, inspirasi bagi pendengar, mempermudah perbendaharaan kosa kata bahasa Arab. Oleh karena itu, interferensi bahasa lokal mendukung pengembangan vitalitas bahasa Arab dan pemerolehan bahasa kedua

Vitalitas bahasa Arab (kontribusi interferensi pada pemerolehan bahasa di pesantren)

Tulisan ini bertujuan untuk menjelaskan latar belakang dan bentuk-bentuk interferensi bahasa lokal terhadap vitalitas bahasa Arab bagi santri pondok pesantren Indonesia. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan kualitatif melalui wawancara, dokumentasi, dan observasi lapangan. Hasil kajian menunjukkan bahwa terdapat enam latar belakang interferensi bahasa santri yaitu: faktor alamiah, pengaruh bahasa ibu, kurangnya perbendaharaan kata Bahasa Arab, merasa kesulitan dalam belajar bahasa, kurangnya kesadaran berbahasa, dan jarangnya berkomunikasi dengan pembicara asli. Menariknya, ditemukan 58 bentuk interferensi bahasa daerah terhadap bahasa Arab dalam empat tataran, yaitu: fonologi dengan jumlah 7 tuturan, morfologi dengan 4 tuturan, sintaksis berjumlah 30 tuturan dan semantik berjumlah 17 tuturan. Lebih lanjut, enam bentuk dukungan vitalitas bahasa oleh interferensi bahasa local yaitu motivasi dalam komunikasi, mempermudah pemahaman, menambah keberanian berkomunikasi, penerapan kosa kata bahasa Arab, inspirasi bagi pendengar, mempermudah perbendaharaan kosa kata bahasa Arab. Oleh karena itu, interferensi bahasa lokal mendukung pengembangan vitalitas bahasa Arab dan pemerolehan bahasa kedua

Acquisition of Japanese quantity contrasts by L1 Cantonese speakers

This paper explores the acquisition of Japanese vowel and consonant quantity contrasts by Cantonese learners. Our goal is to examine whether transfer from L1 is possible when L1 experience is phonemic but restricted to a small set of sounds (short vs. long vowels) and when the experience is non-phonemic, derived only at morpheme boundaries (short vs. long consonants). We recruited 20 Cantonese learners (beginner and advanced learners) and 5 native speakers of Japanese, who produced target stimuli varying in consonant and vowel quantity framed in a carrier sentence. The resultant data were converted into several durational ratios for analyses. Results showed that both the beginners and advanced learners were able to distinguish between short vs. long vowels and consonants in Japanese, but only the native speakers enhanced the contrasts in slower speech. It was also found that in most cases the learners were able to lengthen the vowel before a geminate (i.e. long consonant), a secondary cue to Japanese consonant quantity known to be rare across languages. These results are discussed in terms of current theories of second language acquisition.postprin

The role of abstraction in non-native speech perception The role of abstraction in non-native speech perception

Abstract The end-result of perceptual reorganization in infancy is currently viewed as a reconfigured perceptual space, "warped" around native-language phonetic categories, which then acts as a direct perceptual filter on any non-native sounds: naïve-listener discrimination of non-nativesounds is determined by their mapping onto native-language phonetic categories that are acoustically/articulatorily most similar. We report results that suggest another factor in nonnative speech perception: some perceptual sensitivities cannot be attributed to listeners' warped perceptual space alone, but rather to enhanced general sensitivity along phonetic dimensions that the listeners' native language employs to distinguish between categories. Specifically, we show that the knowledge of a language with short and long vowel categories leads to enhanced discrimination of non-native consonant length contrasts. We argue that these results support a view of perceptual reorganization as the consequence of learners' hierarchical inductive inferences about the structure of the language's sound system: infants not only acquire the specific phonetic category inventory, but also draw higher-order generalizations over the set of those categories, such as the overall informativity of phonetic dimensions for sound categorization. Non-native sound perception is then also determined by sensitivities that emerge from these generalizations, rather than only by mappings of non-native sounds onto nativelanguage phonetic categories