“Shouldn’t We Do More Grammar?”: Learners’ Perspectives on the Communicative Approach in the Russian L2 Classroom

The communicative approach to language teaching (CA) has commonly been recognized as having a positive impact on student motivation. However, language instructors notice that the CA does not elicit enthusiastic response from all learners. Based on the dynamic conception of motivation (Dörnyei & Ryan, 2015), this paper shares data from the empirical study examining Russian L2 learners’ attitudes to the CA. A qualitative analysis of 241 comments collected from 448 participants in five North-American institutions enabled us to distinguish thematic clusters organized along the lines of the contrast between total-acceptance vs. criticism/disappointment. The findings also demonstrate students’ readiness to participate in discussions on L2 methodology. We propose that students’ attitudes to the CA correlate with their ability to cope with novelty and discuss this assumption in connection with “tolerance for ambiguity” as a constitutive feature of the CA (Oprandy, 1999), on the one hand, and cognitive learning style theory— which also makes use of the concept of “tolerance for ambiguity” (Grigorenko et al., 2000)—on the other. Finally, we raise the possibility of the “consultative L2 pedagogy” approach—the term we propose to use to indicate students participation in the process of curriculum design, including decisions related to teaching methodology

The effects of individual differences in native perception on discrimination of a novel non-native contrast

Native (L1) phonetic categories can constrain the perception of non-native contrasts which deviate from the listener’s L1 (Best & Tyler, 2007; Flege, 1995). Yet, some individuals are remarkably successful at accurately perceiving non-native sounds (e.g., Bongaerts, van Summeren, Planken, & Schils, 1997). We hypothesize that compact L1 categories give an initial advantage in distinguishing non-native contrasts. Sixty-eight Spanish monolinguals were tested on the degree of compactness of their native category /i/, measured through a goodness-of-fit rating task. Participants listened to synthesized variants of the Spanish /i/ vowel (differing in F1, F2, or both) and rated them as either good or bad exemplars of their representation of this category. An individual /i/ compactness index was calculated for each participant and related to the individual perceived dissimilarity score for the novel Russian contrast /i – ɨ/. The Russian contrast /i – ɨ/ is a problematic contrast to perceive for Spanish speakers due to the absence of /ɨ/ in the Spanish vowel inventory, a sound acoustically very similar to /i/. In this study, the compactness of the L1 category /i/ weakly predicted perceptual sensitivity (dissimilarity scores) for the Russian contrast /i – ɨ/

Phonaesthetics and personality—Why we do not only prefer Romance languages

Introduction: Previous aesthetic research has set its main focus on visual and auditory, primarily music, stimuli with only a handful of studies exploring the aesthetic potential of linguistic stimuli. In the present study, we investigate for the first time the effects of personality traits on phonaesthetic language ratings. Methods: Twenty-three under-researched, “rarer” (less learned and therefore less known as a foreign language or L2) and minority languages were evaluated by 145 participants in terms of eroticism, beauty, status, and orderliness, subjectively perceived based on language sound. Results: Overall, Romance languages (Catalan, Portuguese, Romanian) were still among the top six erotic languages of the experiment together with “Romance-sounding,” but less known languages like Breton and Basque. Catalan and Portuguese were also placed among the top six most beautiful languages. The Germanic languages (Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Icelandic) were perceived as more prestigious/higher in terms of status, however to some degree conditioned by their recognition/familiarity. Thus, we partly replicated the results of our earlier studies on the Romance language preferences (the so-called Latin Lover effect) and the perceived higher status of the Germanic languages and scrutinized again the effects of familiarity/language recognition, thereby calling into question the above mentioned concepts of the Latin Lover effect and the status of Germanic languages. We also found significant effects of personality traits (neuroticism, extraversion, and conscientiousness) on phonaesthetic ratings. Different personality types appreciated different aspects of languages: e.g., whereas neurotics had strong opinions about languages' eroticism, more conscientious participants gave significantly different ratings for status. Introverts were more generous in their ratings overall in comparison to extroverts. We did not find strong connections between personality types and specific languages or linguistic features (sonority, speech rate). Overall, personality traits were largely overridden by other individual differences: familiarity with languages (socio-cultural construals, the Romanization effect—perceiving a particular language as a Romance language) and participants' native language/L1. Discussion: For language education in the global context, our results mean that introducing greater linguistic diversity in school and universities might result in greater appreciation and motivation to learn lesser-known and minority languages. Even though we generally prefer Romance languages to listen to and to study, different personality types are attracted to different language families and thus make potentially successful learners of these languages

Eros, Beauty, and Phon-Aesthetic Judgements of Language Sound. We Like It Flat and Fast, but Not Melodious. Comparing Phonetic and Acoustic Features of 16 European Languages

This paper concerns sound aesthetic preferences for European foreign languages. We investigated the phonetic-acoustic dimension of the linguistic aesthetic pleasure to describe the “music” found in European languages. The Romance languages, French, Italian, and Spanish, take a lead when people talk about melodious language – the music-like effects in the language (a.k.a., phonetic chill). On the other end of the melodiousness spectrum are German and Arabic that are often considered sounding harsh and un-attractive. Despite the public interest, limited research has been conducted on the topic of phonaesthetics, i.e., the subfield of phonetics that is concerned with the aesthetic properties of speech sounds (Crystal, 2008). Our goal is to fill the existing research gap by identifying the acoustic features that drive the auditory perception of language sound beauty. What is so music-like in the language that makes people say “it is music in my ears”? We had 45 central European participants listening to 16 auditorily presented European languages and rating each language in terms of 22 binary characteristics (e.g., beautiful – ugly, funny - boring) plus indicating their language familiarities, L2 backgrounds, speaker voice liking, demographics and musicality levels. Findings revealed that all factors in complex interplay explain a certain percentage of variance: familiarity and expertise in foreign languages, speaker voice characteristics, phonetic complexity, musical acoustic properties, and finally musical expertise of the listener. The most important discovery was the trade-off between speech tempo and so-called linguistic melody (pitch variance): the faster the language, the flatter/more atonal it is in terms of the pitch (speech melody), making it highly appealing acoustically (sounding beautiful and sexy), but not so melodious in a “musical” sense

Four-YearFollow-upof [F-18]Fluorodeoxyglucose Positron Emission Tomography-Based Parkinson's Disease-Related Pattern Expression in 20 Patients With Isolated Rapid Eye Movement Sleep Behavior Disorder Shows Prodromal Progression

Background: Isolated rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder is known to be prodromal for alpha-synucleinopathies, such as Parkinson's disease (PD) and dementia with Lewy bodies. The [18F]fluorodeoxyglucose-positron emission tomography (PET)–based PD-related brain pattern can be used to monitor disease progression. Objective: We longitudinally investigated PD-related brain pattern expression changes in 20 subjects with isolated rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder to investigate whether this may be a suitable technique to study prodromal PD progression in these patients and to identify potential phenoconverters. Methods: Subjects underwent two [18F]fluorodeoxyglucose-PET brain scans ~3.7 years apart, along with baseline and repeated motor, cognitive, and olfactory testing within roughly the same time frame. Results: At baseline, 8 of 20 (40%) subjects significantly expressed the PD-related brain pattern (with z scores above the receiver operating characteristic–determined threshold). At follow-up, six additional subjects exhibited significant PD-related brain pattern expression (70% in total). PD-related brain pattern expression increased in all subjects (P = 0.00008). Four subjects (20%), all with significant baseline PD-related brain pattern expression, phenoconverted to clinical PD. Conclusions: Suprathreshold PD-related brain pattern expression and greater score rate of change may signify greater shorter-term risk for phenoconversion. Our results support the use of serial PD-related brain pattern expression measurements as a prodromal PD progression biomarker in patients with isolated rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder

Large-scale replication study reveals a limit on probabilistic prediction in language comprehension

Do people routinely pre-activate the meaning and even the phonological form of upcoming words? The most acclaimed evidence for phonological prediction comes from a 2005 Nature Neuroscience publication by DeLong, Urbach and Kutas, who observed a graded modulation of electrical brain potentials (N400) to nouns and preceding articles by the probability that people use a word to continue the sentence fragment (‘cloze’). In our direct replication study spanning 9 laboratories (N=334), pre-registered replication-analyses and exploratory Bayes factor analyses successfully replicated the noun-results but, crucially, not the article-results. Pre-registered single-trial analyses also yielded a statistically significant effect for the nouns but not the articles. Exploratory Bayesian single-trial analyses showed that the article-effect may be non-zero but is likely far smaller than originally reported and too small to observe without very large sample sizes. Our results do not support the view that readers routinely pre-activate the phonological form of predictable words.Additional co-authors: Simon Busch-Moreno, Xiao Fu, Jyrki Tuomainen, Eugenia Kulakova, E Matthew Husband, Zdenko Kohút, Shirley-Ann Rueschemeyer, Falk Huetti

Large-scale replication study reveals a limit on probabilistic prediction in language comprehension

Do people routinely pre-activate the meaning and even the phonological form of upcoming words? The most acclaimed evidence for phonological prediction comes from a 2005 Nature Neuroscience publication by DeLong, Urbach and Kutas, who observed a graded modulation of electrical brain potentials (N400) to nouns and preceding articles by the probability that people use a word to continue the sentence fragment (‘cloze’). In our direct replication study spanning 9 laboratories (N=334), pre-registered replication-analyses and exploratory Bayes factor analyses successfully replicated the noun-results but, crucially, not the article-results. Pre-registered single-trial analyses also yielded a statistically significant effect for the nouns but not the articles. Exploratory Bayesian single-trial analyses showed that the article-effect may be non-zero but is likely far smaller than originally reported and too small to observe without very large sample sizes. Our results do not support the view that readers routinely pre-activate the phonological form of predictable words

Dissociable effects of prediction and integration during language comprehension: Evidence from a large-scale study using brain potentials

Composing sentence meaning is easier for predictable words than for unpredictable words. Are predictable words genuinely predicted, or simply more plausible and therefore easier to integrate with sentence context? We addressed this persistent and fundamental question using data from a recent, large-scale (N = 334) replication study, by investigating the effects of word predictability and sentence plausibility on the N400, the brain's electrophysiological index of semantic processing. A spatiotemporally fine-grained mixed-effects multiple regression analysis revealed overlapping effects of predictability and plausibility on the N400, albeit with distinct spatiotemporal profiles. Our results challenge the view that the predictability-dependent N400 reflects the effects of either prediction or integration, and suggest that semantic facilitation of predictable words arises from a cascade of processes that activate and integrate word meaning with context into a sentence-level meaning

The Effect of First Language Perception on the Discrimination of a Non-native Vowel Contrast: Investigating Individual Differences

[eng] Adult language learners often experience difficulty acquiring a new sound system. Empirical studies have shown that native phonetic categories function as a filter that removes specific acoustic cues for non-native sounds and causes “a perceptual accent”. Not being able to perceive contrastive segment categories that do not exist in learner’s native language result in production problems and accented speech. Yet, some individuals are remarkably successful at the task of non- native perception. Such instances demonstrate that perceptual ability is a subject of high variability. Whereas native language (L1) background has been the focus of much second language acquisition research to explain such variability, little attention has been paid to the role of individual differences within the same L1 perception. This dissertation seeks to fill this gap and investigate how individual differences in native perception affect the degree of perceived dissimilarity between two members of a novel contrast that does not exist in learners’ L1. We argue that not only individuals with various L1s are equipped differently for the task of non-native perception, but also individuals with the same L1 vary in how their native phonological categories are represented in the perceptual space. Such variability is observable in measures of compactness of L1 phonetic categories, and its effects on non-native perception can be assessed by relating the degree of compactness to the perceived dissimilarity between novel contrasting sounds. We hypothesized that compact L1 categories give an initial advantage in distinguishing non-native contrasts. Sixty-eight Spanish monolinguals participated in the present study. The degree of compactness of their native category /i/ was measured through a goodness-of-fit rating task, where participants listened to synthesized variants of the Spanish /i/ vowel (differing in F1, F2 or both) and rated them as either good or bad exemplars of their internal representation of the category /i/ on an intuitive scale. These ratings provided an individual /i/ compactness index for each participant that was related to the individual perceived dissimilarity score for the novel Russian contrast /i - ɨ/. The results obtained confirmed the hypothesis. Even though L1-based individual differences in perception were small, compactness of the L1 category /i/ contributed significantly to the participants’ ability to perceive the acoustic distance between the Russian /i/ and /ɨ/. These findings suggest that having more compact vowel categories might facilitate the process of category formation for unfamiliar sounds.[spa] Los estudiantes adultos de idiomas a menudo experimentan dificultades para adquirir un nuevo sistema de sonido. Los estudios empíricos han demostrado que las categorías fonéticas nativas funcionan como un filtro que elimina las señales acústicas específicas de los sonidos no nativos y causan "un acento perceptivo". La impossibilidad de percibir categorías segmentales contrastivas que no existen en el idioma nativo del aprendiz correctamente ocasiona problemas en la producción de los fonemas conducentes a la presencia de acento extranjero en el habla. Sin embargo, algunos individuos son capaces de percibir fonemas no-nativos con notable éxito. Tales casos demuestran la gran variabilidad entre sujetos en cuanto a su capacidad perceptiva para los sonidos del lenguaje. . Dicha variabilidad se ha investigado extensamente a través numerosos estudios que se han focalizado en el factor de la lengua nativa (L1) como la principal causa. . No obstante, se ha prestado poca atención al papel potencial de las diferencias individuales en la percepción de la L1. Esta tesis pretende abordar esta cuestión empírica investigando hasta qué punto las diferencias individuales entre sujetos en la percepción de su lengua nativa afectan el grado de disimilitud perceptiva entre los miembros de un nuevo contraste fonológico inexistente en la L1 de los aprendices. Nuestra hipótesis plantea la idea de que no sólo los individuosde primeras lenguas diferentes están preparados de diferente forma para la percepción de los sonidos de una segunda lengua, sino que también los individuos que comparten una misma L1 presentan variabilidad en cómo representan sus categorías fonológicas en su espacio perceptivo, y ello puede también tener consecuencias para la percepción de los sonidos de una lengua no nativa. Partimos de la base de que la variabilidad inter-sujetos en la percepción de las categorias fonológicas nativas es observable a partir de medidas del grado de compactación de las categorías fonéticas en la L1. Los efectos del grado de compactación sobre la percepción no nativa pueden evaluarse relacionando el grado de compactación de una categoría fonológica nativa con el grado de disimilitud perceptiva observada en la percepción de contrastes fonológicos al inicio del proceso de adquisción de una nueva lengua. . Nuestra hipótesis es que aquellos individuos que presentan un mayor grado de compactación de las categorías fonológicas de la L1 obtienen una ventaja inicial en la distinción de contrastes fonológicos no nativos. Sesenta y ocho monolingües de español participaron en el presente estudio. El grado de compactación de su categoría nativa /i/ se midió a través de una tarea perceptiva donde los participantes escucharon variantes sintetizadas de la vocal española /i/ que presentaban diferèncias equidistantes en F1, F2 o ambos a la vez calificaron en una escala intuitiva como buenos o malos ejemplares de su representación interna de la categoría vocálica /i/. Esta tarea nos proporcionó un índice individual del grado de compactación de la vocal /i/ para cada participante, que relacionamos con la medida de disimilitud perceptiva individual que cada participante obtuvo para el contraste del ruso /i - ɨ/. Los resultados obtenidos confirmaron la hipótesis. Aunque las diferencias individuales en la percepción de la vocal /i/ del español observadas fueron de pequeña magnitud, el grado de compactación de /i/ contribuyó significativamente a la capacidad de los participantes de percibir la distancia acústica entre los fonemas vocálicos del ruso /i/ y /ɨ/. Estos resultados sugieren que tener categorías de vocales más compactas podría facilitar el proceso de formación de categorías fonológicas en la adquisición inicial de una nueva lengua