Experiments in apply morphological analysis in speech recognition and their cognitive explanation

May 200

Error Analyses and the Cognitive or Linguistic Influences on Children’s Spelling: Comparisons Between First- and Second-Language Learners

A collection of cognitive, linguistic, and spelling measures were administered to third- grade English L1 and L2 learners. To capture formative assessments of children’s developing mental graphemic representations (MGRs), spelling errors in isolation were subjected to analysis across three metrics: (1) Phonological constrained; (2) Visual- Orthographic; and (3) Correct Letter Sequences. There were no group differences on the cognitive or spelling accuracy measures, but L1 learners achieved higher scores than L2 on linguistic measures of vocabulary and syntactic knowledge. Analyses across the spelling metrics indicated that both L1 and L2 learners drew more heavily on their knowledge of graphophonemic rules and positional constraints in pronunciation for spelling. However, the contribution of underlying cognitive and linguistic resources to spelling differed as a function of scoring system and language group. Across spelling metrics, linguistic predictors (vocabulary and syntactic knowledge) accounted for more variance in L1 than L2 learners. The results are discussed in relation to conceptualization of spelling as an integral link between oral and written language in literacy development.Une série de mesures cognitives, linguistiques et orthographiques ont été administrées à des élèves de troisième année qui étaient des monolingues anglais (L1) ou des apprenants de langue anglaise (L2). Afin de procéder à des évaluations formatives du développement des représentations graphémiques mentales (RGM) des enfants, les erreurs orthographiques isolées ont été analysées selon trois métriques : (1) contraintes phonologiques ; (2) visuelle-orthographique ; et (3) séquences de lettres correctes. Il n'y avait pas de différences entre les groupes concernant les mesures cognitives ainsi que les mesures de précision orthographique, mais les apprenants L1 ont obtenu des scores plus élevés que les L2 dans les mesures linguistiques du vocabulaire et des connaissances syntaxiques. Des analyses des métriques d'orthographe ont indiqué que les apprenants L1 et L2 s'appuyaient davantage sur leur connaissance des règles graphophonémiques et des contraintes positionnelles de la prononciation pour l'orthographe. Cependant, la contribution de ressources sous-jacentes cognitives et linguistiques à l’orthographe différait en fonction du système de notation et du groupe linguistique. Parmi toutes les métriques d’orthographe, les prédicteurs linguistiques (vocabulaire et connaissances syntaxiques) représentaient plus de variance chez les apprenants de L1 que chez les L2. Les résultats sont discutés en relation avec la conceptualisation de l'orthographe en tant que lien intégral entre le langage oral et écrit chez le développement de l'alphabétisation

Co-activation in the bilingual lexicon: Evidence from Chinese-English bilinguals

Investigation of the bilingual mental lexicon suggests that one of its defining characteristics is integration. Words across both languages are subject to parallel co-activation during language processing. An auditory stimulus typing task was used to assess connectivity on the basis of both morphology and phonology. English loanwords in Chinese and transparent English noun-noun compounds with Chinese translation equivalents with corresponding compound structure (corresponding compounds) were used as the critical stimuli. Accent was also manipulated to determine whether or not phonological cues may influence the degree of cross-linguistic co-activation. Results suggest cross-linguistic co-activation on the basis of phonological overlap in different script bilinguals but only weakly supported morphological integration in Chinese-English bilinguals. Accent led to greater co-activation of phonologically similar loanword pairs. Results are discussed in terms of inhibitory control, language acquisition, and the structure of the bilingual lexicon

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

Production and processing asymmetries in the acquisition of tense morphology by sequential bilingual children

This study investigates the production and on-line processing of English tense morphemes by sequential bilingual (L2) Turkish-speaking children with more than three years of exposure to English. Thirty nine 6-9-year-old L2 children and 28 typically developing age-matched monolingual (L1) children were administered the production component for third person –s and past tense of the Test for Early Grammatical Impairment (Rice & Wexler, 1996) and participated in an on-line word-monitoring task involving grammatical and ungrammatical sentences with presence/omission of tense (third person –s, past tense -ed) and non-tense (progressive –ing, possessive ‘s) morphemes. The L2 children’s performance on the on-line task was compared to that of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in Montgomery & Leonard (1998, 2006) to ascertain similarities and differences between the two populations. Results showed that the L2 children were sensitive to the ungrammaticality induced by the omission of tense morphemes, despite variable production. This reinforces the claim about intact underlying syntactic representations in child L2 acquisition despite non target-like production (Haznedar & Schwartz, 1997)

FROM SOUND TO MEANING: QUANTIFYING CONTEXTUAL EFFECTS IN RESOLUTION OF L2 PHONOLEXICAL AMBIGUITY

In order to comprehend speech, listeners have to combine low-level phonetic information about the incoming auditory signal with higher-order contextual information. Unlike native listeners, nonnative listeners perceive speech sounds through the prism of their native language, which sometimes results in perceptual ambiguity in their second language. Across four experiments, both behavioral and electrophysiological, this dissertation provides evidence that such perceptual ambiguity causes words to become temporarily indistinguishable. To comprehend meaning, nonnative listeners disambiguate words through accessing their semantic, syntactic and morphological characteristics. Syntactic and semantic cues produce a stronger context effect than morphological cues in both native and nonnative groups. Thus, although nonnative representations may differ in that they may lack phonological specification, the mechanisms associated with the use of higher-order contextual information for meaning resolution in auditory sentence comprehension are essentially the same in the native and nonnative language

The Role of the Phonological Syllable in English Word Recognition

Three ERP experiments examined the role of syllables during English visual word recognition. A colour congruency paradigm (Carreiras, Vergara, & Barber, 2005) was used in which disyllabic words were presented in two colours that divided each item either at the syllable boundary (congruent condition), or one letter away from the syllable boundary (incongruent condition). Experiment 1 investigated syllable congruency effects for words that either were presented with an orthotactically illegal segment in the incongruent condition (e.g., whi-mper, comr-ade), or were presented with orthotactically legal segments in the incongruent condition (e.g., whi-sper, cont-act). A syllable congruency effect was observed in the ERP data, but only for words presented with an orthotactically illegal segment in the incongruent condition. Experiment 2 contrasted the phonological syllable with the Basic Orthographic Syllabic Structure (Taft, 1979), and the Maximal Onset Principle. Behavioural and ERP results did not offer any evidence in support of the BOSS, and provided mixed evidence for the MOP. Although phonological syllable effects were found in both behavioural and ERP data, the advantage for a syllable division appeared to occur primarily when the initial segment in alternative divisions was pronounced differently in isolation than in the context of the word (e.g., pi-cnic but not pla-ster). Experiment 3 investigated syllable congruency effects for phonologically confounded and phonologically unconfounded words. For phonologically confounded words, pronunciation of the initial segment in isolation matched that of the whole word in the congruent condition, but did not match in the incongruent condition (e.g., po-ny vs pon-y; pon-der vs po-nder). For phonologically unconfounded words, the pronunciation of the initial segment in isolation matched that of the whole word in both congruent and incongruent conditions (e.g., cab-in vs ca-bin), or mismatched in both iv congruent and incongruent conditions (e.g., ca-ble vs cab-le). A syllable congruency effect was found in the ERP data, but only for phonologically confounded words. These data suggest that readers of English do not parse words into syllables during silent reading. Implications for theories and computational models of English word recognition are discussed

Morphological Representations In Lexical Processing

This dissertation integrates insights from theoretical linguistics and the psycholinguistic literature through an investigation of the morphological representations involved in auditory lexical processing. Previous work in theoretical morphology, spoken word recognition, and morphological processing are considered together in generating hypotheses. Chapter 2 provides theoretical and methodological background. Theoretical linguistics is considered a subset of psycholinguistic inquiry. I argue that this perspective is beneficial to both subfields. Modality is a crucial theme: most work investigating morphological processing involves visual presentation, whereas this dissertation exclusively examines the auditory modality. Experimental work in this dissertation uses primed auditory lexical decision. Important considerations for this methodology are discussed in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 explores the role of morpho-phonological representations through a novel experimental design which examines the sensitivity of phonological rhyme priming to morphological structure, specifically, the extent to which stems of complex words are available for rhyme priming. Results suggest that phonological rhyme priming can facilitate phonological representations without facilitating syntactic representations, consistent with an architecture in which phonological and syntactic representations are separated. Furthermore, there is a directional asymmetry for the effect: stems in complex words are available for rhyme priming in targets but not primes. This asymmetry invites attention to the time-course of auditory morphological processing and a theoretical perspective in which syntactic and phonological recombination are considered separately. Chapter 4 concerns the processing of inflectional affixation. A distance manipulation is incorporated into two studies which compare word repetition priming to morphological stem priming. The results are informative about the time-course of the effects of representations involved with inflectional affixation. Furthermore, the results are consistent with abstract and episodic components of morphological priming which can be attributed to stem and recombination representations respectively. Finally, a morphological affix priming study focuses on the representation of the inflectional affix. Results are consistent with an account in which affixes are isolable representations in memory and therefore can be facilitated through identity priming. To summarise, by combining insights from theoretical linguistics and the psycholinguistic literature, this dissertation advances our understanding of the cognitive architecture of morphological representations and generates hypotheses for future research