Orthography affects L1 and L2 speech perception but not production in early bilinguals

First published online: 25 August 2021Orthography plays a crucial role in L2 learning, which generally relies on both oral and written input. We examine whether incongruencies between L1 and L2 grapheme-phoneme correspondences influence bilingual speech perception and production, even when both languages have been acquired in early childhood before reading acquisition. Spanish–Basque and Basque–Spanish early bilinguals performed an auditory lexical decision task including Basque pseudowords created by replacing Basque /s̻/ with Spanish /θ/. These distinct phonemes take the same orthographic form, . Participants also completed reading-aloud tasks in Basque and Spanish to test whether speech sounds with the same orthographic form were produced similarly in the two languages. Results for both groups showed orthography had strong effects on speech perception but no effects on speech production. Taken together, these findings suggest that orthography plays a crucial role in the speech system of early bilinguals but does not automatically lead to non-native production.This work was supported by the Basque Government [BERC 2018–2021 program]; the Spanish State Research Agency [BCBL Severo Ochoa excellence accreditation SEV-2015-0490]; the H2020 European Research Council [Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant 843533; ERC Consolidator Grant ERC-2018-COG-819093]; the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [PSI2017-82941-P; Europa-Excelencia ERC2018-092833; RED2018-102615-T]; and the Basque Government [PIBA18-29]

The impact of orthographic forms on speech production and perception: An artificial vowel-learning study

Available online 23 August 2022This study investigates the effect of orthographic forms on phonetic aspects of isolated speech sound production and perception. Three groups of 25 L1-Spanish speakers were exposed to /y/ and /e/ in a multi-session learning study. They heard the same vowels presented with: L1-incongruent orthographic forms, novel orthographic forms, or without orthographic forms. After three exposure sessions, participants were tested on vowel production in an elicited production task and vowel perception in a multiple forced choice task. All groups established new /y/ and / e/ production and perception categories. Incongruent orthographic forms led to less target-like category positions for /y/ but not /e/ in production and perception. Novel orthographic forms only facilitated more target-like perception for /y/. In a fourth session, Auditory-only participants were exposed to incongruent orthography for /y/ and novel orthography for /e/. Sequential exposure to incongruent orthography caused less target-like production and perception category positions, while sequential exposure to novel orthography altered neither. Together these results suggest that orthographic forms affect isolated speech sounds and are encoded at the speech sound level. Incongruent grapheme-to-phoneme mappings from L1 to later-learned languages may critically affect the phonetic characteristics of non-native speech sounds, but learning outcomes depend on specific L1-L2 category contrasts.This work was supported by institutional grants from the Basque Government [BERC 2018–2021 program] and the Spanish State Research Agency [BCBL Severo Ochoa excellence accreditation CEX2020-001010-S] awarded to the BCBL. This project has also received funding from the European Union’s H2020 research and innovation program (Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 843533 awarded to AS); the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 819093 to CDM); the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [PSI2017-82941-P; Europa-Excelencia ERC2018-092833; RED2018-102615-T (all CDM)]; and the Basque Government [PIBA18-29 (CDM)]

Bilingual Preschoolers ’ Speech is Associated with Non-Native Maternal Language Input

Published online: 11 Nov 2018Bilingual children are often exposed to non-native speech through their parents. Yet, little is known about the relation between bilingual preschoolers’ speech production and their speech input. The present study investigated the production of voice onset time (VOT) by Dutch-German bilingual preschoolers and their sequential bilingual mothers. The findings reveal an association between maternal VOT and bilingual children’s VOT in the heritage language German as well as in the majority language Dutch. By contrast, no input-production association was observed in the VOT production of monolingual German-speaking children and monolingual Dutch-speaking children. The results of this study provide the first empirical evidence that non-native and attrited maternal speech contributes to the often-observed linguistic differences between bilingual children and their monolingual peers

Feature generalization in Dutch–German bilingual and monolingual children’s speech production

First Published November 29, 2021Dutch and German employ voicing contrasts, but Dutch lacks the ‘voiced’ dorsal plosive /ɡ/. We exploited this accidental phonological gap, measuring the presence of prevoicing and voice onset time durations during speech production to determine (1) whether preliterate bilingual Dutch–German and monolingual Dutch-speaking children aged 3;6–6;0 years generalized voicing to /ɡ/ in Dutch; and (2) whether there was evidence for featural cross-linguistic influence from Dutch to German in bilingual children, testing monolingual German-speaking children as controls. Bilingual and monolingual children’s production of /ɡ/ provided partial evidence for feature generalization: in Dutch, both bilingual and monolingual children either recombined Dutch voicing and place features to produce /ɡ/, suggesting feature generalization, or resorted to producing familiar /k/, suggesting segment-level adaptation within their Dutch phonological system. In German, bilingual children’s production of /ɡ/ was influenced by Dutch although the Dutch phoneme inventory lacks /ɡ/. This suggests that not only segments but also voicing features can exert cross-linguistic influence. Taken together, phonological features appear to play a crucial role in aspects of bilingual and monolingual children’s speech production.This work was supported by the Basque Government [BERC 2018-2021 program]; the Spanish State Research Agency [BCBL Severo Ochoa excellence accreditation SEV-2015-0490]; the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program [Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant 843533]; and the National Science Foundation [BCS1349110; OISE 1545900]

Voice onset time and vowel formant measures in online testing and laboratory-based testing with(out) surgical face masks

Since the COVID-19 pandemic started, conducting experiments online is increasingly common, and face masks are often used in everyday life. It remains unclear whether phonetic detail in speech production is captured adequately when speech is recorded in internet-based experiments or in experiments conducted with face masks. We tested 55 Spanish–Basque–English trilinguals in picture naming tasks in three conditions: online, laboratory-based with surgical face masks, and laboratory-based without face masks (control). We measured plosive voice onset time (VOT) in each language, the formants and duration of English vowels /iː/ and /ɪ/, and the Spanish/Basque vowel space. Across conditions, there were differences between English and Spanish/Basque VOT and in formants and duration between English /iː/–/ɪ/; between conditions, small differences emerged. Relative to the control condition, the Spanish/Basque vowel space was larger in online testing and smaller in the face mask condition. We conclude that testing online or with face masks is suitable for investigating phonetic detail in within-participant designs although the precise measurements may differ from those in traditional laboratory-based researchThis work was supported by institutional grants from the Basque Government [BERC 2022–2025 program] and the Spanish State Research Agency [BCBL Severo Ochoa excellence accreditation CEX2020-001010/AEI/10.13039/501100011033] awarded to the BCBL. This project has also received funding from the European Union’s H2020 research and innovation program [Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 843533 awarded to AS]; the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program [grant agreement No 819093 to CDM]; the Spanish State Research Agency [BES-2017- 082500 to CS; PID2020-113926GB-I00 to CDM; PID2021- 123578NA-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER, UE, & FJC2020-044978-I to AS]; and by the Basque Government’s Department of Education [Predoctoral training program for research staff PRE_2021_2_0006 awarded to TT]

One-to-One or One Too Many? Linking Sound-to-Letter Mappings to Speech Sound Perception and Production in Early Readers

Published online: Nov 4, 2022Purpose: Effects related to literacy acquisition have been observed at different levels of speech processing. This study investigated the link between orthographic knowledge and children’s perception and production of specific speech sounds. Method: Sixty Spanish-speaking second graders, differing in their phonological decoding skills, completed a speech perception and a production task. In the perception task, a behavioral adaptation of the oddball paradigm was used. Children had to detect orthographically consistent /t/, which has a unique orthographic representation (hti), and inconsistent /k/, which maps onto three different graphemes (hci, hqui, and hki), both appearing infrequently within a repetitive auditory sequence. In the production task, children produced these same sounds in meaningless syllables. Results: Perception results show that all children were faster at detecting consistent than inconsistent sounds regardless of their decoding skills. In the production task, however, the same facilitation for consistent sounds was linked to better decoding skills. Conclusions: These findings demonstrate differences in speech sound processing related to literacy acquisition. Literacy acquisition may therefore affect already-formed speech sound representations. Crucially, the strength of this link in production is modulated by individual decoding skills.This project has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program (Grant Agreement No. 819093 to C.D.M.) and under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No 843533 to A.S. This work was also supported by the Spanish State Research Agency through Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language Severo Ochoa excellence accreditation CEX2020-001010-S, the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (PSI2017 82941-P and PID2020-113926GB-I00), and the Basque Government (BERC 2022-2025 and PIBA18_29). M.J. was supported by a Predoctoral fellowship (associated to the Project PSI2017 82941-P; Grant No. PRE-2018-083946) from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and the Fondo Social Europeo

P53 Codon 72 (Arg72Pro) Polymorphism and Prostate Cancer Risk: Association between Disease Onset and Proline Genotype

The tumor suppressor gene p53 plays an important role in the stress response of the cell and is mutated in 50% of all human tumors. The p53 Arg72Pro single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) was found to be associated with an increased risk of various malignancies. Biochemical and biological differences between the 2 polymorphic variants of wild-type P53 might lead to distinct susceptibility to HPV- and non-HPV-induced tumors. For prostate cancer, only limited data are available, especially in the Caucasian pop-ulation. Therefore, we determined the distribution of the Arg72Pro SNP in a Caucasian case-control study including 118 prostate cancer patients and 194 male controls without any malignancy using restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis. A subset of 33 tumors was tested for HPV infection, and no HPV DNA was found. Cases and controls showed similar distributions of alleles in the SNP (p = 0.720). Regarding the onset of the disease, patients diagnosed at ≤60 years of age and older patients (>60 years of age) showed a significant difference in genotype distribution (p = 0.035); there was also an increased occurrence of risk allele Pro72 in cases aged ≤60 years (p = 0.045). A subset of 64 prostate tumors was stained immunohistochemically for P53. 5 of 64 prostate tumors (7.8%) were positive for P53 expression, indicating integrity of the protein in the majority of cases. Genotype distribution showed no association with the Gleason score or additional histopathological characteristics. This study shows that the overall risk of prostate cancer was not associated with Arg72Pro SNP and HPV infection in our cohort. However, disease onset might be modulated by the p53 Pro72 allele, suggesting an important role of apoptosis regulation in prostate carcinogenesis

P53 Codon 72 (Arg72Pro) Polymorphism and Prostate Cancer Risk: Association between Disease Onset and Proline Genotype

The tumor suppressor gene p53 plays an important role in the stress response of the cell and is mutated in 50% of all human tumors. The p53 Arg72Pro single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) was found to be associated with an increased risk of various malignancies. Biochemical and biological differences between the 2 polymorphic variants of wild-type P53 might lead to distinct susceptibility to HPV- and non-HPV-induced tumors. For prostate cancer, only limited data are available, especially in the Caucasian pop-ulation. Therefore, we determined the distribution of the Arg72Pro SNP in a Caucasian case-control study including 118 prostate cancer patients and 194 male controls without any malignancy using restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis. A subset of 33 tumors was tested for HPV infection, and no HPV DNA was found. Cases and controls showed similar distributions of alleles in the SNP (p = 0.720). Regarding the onset of the disease, patients diagnosed at ≤60 years of age and older patients (>60 years of age) showed a significant difference in genotype distribution (p = 0.035); there was also an increased occurrence of risk allele Pro72 in cases aged ≤60 years (p = 0.045). A subset of 64 prostate tumors was stained immunohistochemically for P53. 5 of 64 prostate tumors (7.8%) were positive for P53 expression, indicating integrity of the protein in the majority of cases. Genotype distribution showed no association with the Gleason score or additional histopathological characteristics. This study shows that the overall risk of prostate cancer was not associated with Arg72Pro SNP and HPV infection in our cohort. However, disease onset might be modulated by the p53 Pro72 allele, suggesting an important role of apoptosis regulation in prostate carcinogenesis