The Development of Perceptual Sensitivity to Polish Sibilants at First Exposure

The current study examines the development of non-native phoneme discrimination in the very first hours of exposure to a second language. Thirty-six native speakers of French received a total of 14 hours of oral input in Polish over a 10-day period. None of the participants had previously studied Polish or another Slavic language and the input included no explicit phonological instruction. Participants completed an AX discrimination task at three intervals: T1 (0 hours of input), T2 (4.5 hours of input) and T3 (10.5 hours of input). Stimuli consisted of pairs of CV non-words including six sibilant fricatives from the Polish phonemic inventory. Discrimination of non-native phonemes showed a main effect of Test Interval in accuracy scores, suggesting that participants' discrimination improved significantly as a function of input. Post-hoc analyses showed, however, that the difference was only significant between T1 and T3 and between T2 and T3, suggesting that 4.5 hours of input was not sufficient for participants to begin to establish new phonemic categories. Nonetheless, the current results show a significant increase in the ability of participants to discriminate non-native sounds after very limited acoustic input in the target language, shedding light on the developmental course of adult phonological acquisition

La résolution de la liaison en français par des locuteurs natifs et non-natifs

Les processus de perception et de compréhension de la parole nécessitent la segmentation d’un signal acoustique continu où il y a souvent une absence de marques acoustiques explicites de frontière de mot ou de frontière de syllabe, à plus forte raison à l’intérieur des groupes rythmiques en français où se produisent les phénomènes de liaison et d’enchaînement. Considérons les cas où la resyllabation due à ces phénomènes crée une ambiguïté (par exemple, la séquence [œ̃.nɛʁ] correspond également à un air ou à un nerf). Cependant, des recherches récentes (Spinelli et al., 2003 ; Wauquier-Gravelines, 1996) ont mis en évidence des différences de durée entre les consonnes de liaison et les consonnes initiales. La tâche d’amorçage de Spinelli et al. suggère que ces variations peuvent fournir un indice acoustique dont les auditeurs se serviraient pour identifier des mots dans le flux sonore. Par exemple, le /n/ de un nerf serait plus long que celui de un air, ce qui produirait un effet d’amorçage qui favoriserait la reconnaissance de ‘nerf’ par rapport à ‘air’. En employant une tâche d’identification à choix obligatoire, notre étude vise à tester directement les capacités perceptives de locuteurs natifs du français et d’apprenants tardifs de français L2 dans les cas où la localisation des frontières est ambiguë. Les résultats suggèrent que, bien que ces variations de durée soient systématiquement présentes dans le signal acoustique, elles ne sont pas assez nettes pour permettre aux auditeurs de distinguer entre deux options. Même si les deux groupes de participants n’ont pas témoigné d’une sensibilité aux variations acoustiques, leurs réponses se sont avérées fortement similaires, ce qui suggère que les apprenants ont employé des stratégies perceptives comparables à celles des locuteurs natifs. On a donc pris en compte des facteurs relevant des processus du traitement descendant (top-down) tels que la fréquence lexicale et la plausibilité des phrases, mais aucun de ces facteurs ne s’est avéré jouer un rôle systématique dans les réponses.The online segmentation of the continuous speech stream requires that the listener employ strategies to identify word and syllable boundaries. In French, the phonological processes of liaison and enchaînement often render these boundaries ambiguous (consider un air ‘a melody’ and un nerf ‘a nerve’; both are syllabified as [œ̃.nɛʁ]). Some research on liaison (e.g. Spinelli et al., 2003; Wauquier-Gravelines, 1996) has suggested that speakers give listeners acoustic cues to word boundaries, and thus segmentation, through durational variation of pivotal consonants. Spinelli et al. suggest that priming of the word ‘nerf’ via un nerf versus via un air may be mediated by consonant length; a word-initial consonant (un Nerf) is longer than the corresponding consonant that surfaces in liaison (uN air). The current study more directly tested the perceptual capacities of speakers by employing a forced-choice identification task in which both native speakers of French and late learners of French as a second language were asked to differentiate ambiguous phonemic content. The results suggest that, though durational differences may be systematically present in the acoustic signal and may allow for the activation of vowel-initial candidates in the word recognition process, these durational differences are not robust enough to systematically guide listeners in disambiguation. Neither group performed above chance in the identification task; at the same time, the responses of the two groups were highly correlated. Factors involved in top-down processing such as frequency and plausibility were also taken into consideration, but these factors were found not to play a systematic role in the differentiation of ambiguous phonemic content

The Exploitation of Fine Phonetic Detail in the Processing of L2 French

French is a language that poses particular difficulties for the second language (L2) learner in the processing of continuous speech. The phonological processes of liaison and enchaînement (resyllabification), can render syllable and word boundaries ambiguous (e.g., un air 'a melody' and un nerf 'a nerve', both [oẽ.nɛʁ]). Some research has suggested that speakers of French give listeners acoustic cues to word boundaries by varying the duration of liaison and initial consonants and that access to mental representations in the lexicon is facilitated by these cues (e.g., Spinelli, McQueen, & Cutler, 2003); however no study to date has directly demonstrated that durational differences are exploited in the online segmentation of speech. One way to directly test the exploitation of duration as a parsing cue by both native and non-native speakers is to manipulate and exaggerate this single acoustic factor while holding all other factors constant. To this end, the current study employed ambiguous French phrases in which the pivotal consonants (i.e. the /n/ in un air/nerf) had been instrumentally shortened and lengthened while the rest of the phrase remained unaltered. Eighteen native speakers of French and 18 advanced late learners of L2 French were tested on an AX discrimination task and a forced-choice identification task employing these manipulated stimuli. The results suggest that duration alone can indeed modulate the lexical interpretation of sequences rendered ambiguous by liaison in spoken French. In addition, although a good deal of variance was observed in both participant groups, five out of 18 non-native participants scored at or above the native mean on both perceptual tasks. These results are particularly interesting in that they suggest that not only can advanced L2 learners develop native-like sensitivity to non-contrastive phonological variation in a L2, but that these learners can exploit this information in L2 speech processing

The development of perceptual sensitivity to Polish sibilants at first exposure

International audienc

The Development of Perceptual Sensitivity to Polish Sibilants at First Exposure

The current study examines the development of non-native phoneme discrimination in the very first hours of exposure to a second language. Thirty-six native speakers of French received a total of 14 hours of oral input in Polish over a 10-day period. None of the participants had previously studied Polish or another Slavic language and the input included no explicit phonological instruction. Participants completed an AX discrimination task at three intervals: T1 (0 hours of input), T2 (4.5 hours of input) and T3 (10.5 hours of input). Stimuli consisted of pairs of CV non-words including six sibilant fricatives from the Polish phonemic inventory. Discrimination of non-native phonemes showed a main effect of Test Interval in accuracy scores, suggesting that participants' discrimination improved significantly as a function of input. Post-hoc analyses showed, however, that the difference was only significant between T1 and T3 and between T2 and T3, suggesting that 4.5 hours of input was not sufficient for participants to begin to establish new phonemic categories. Nonetheless, the current results show a significant increase in the ability of participants to discriminate non-native sounds after very limited acoustic input in the target language, shedding light on the developmental course of adult phonological acquisition

Processing word boundaries in a second language

International audienc