The Bold and the Beautiful: How Aspects of Personality Affect Foreign Language Pronunciation

In the main study, a group of Polish learners of English completed a number of mimicry tasks in three languages: Italian, Dutch and Chinese, as well as a narration task in English. Mimicry performance and English pronunciation were then assessed by native speakers and compared. Participants also completed a questionnaire concerning their feelings about the languages they were to mimic and a second questionnaire designed to detect affective factors such as language learning anxiety, as well as attitudes towards the pronunciation of Polish and English. The pilot study suggested that the perceived attractiveness of the foreign language to be mimicked did not affect the performance of most participants, and that mimicry skill was fairly constant across languages. However, those who were particularly concerned about their personal appearance showed greater fluctuation in their ability to mimic and their performance appeared to be influenced by their attitude towards the language. This is referred to by the author as the Cecily effect. That study also confirmed the results of my previous experimental work showing that mimicry skill is correlated to some degree with English language pronunciation and that both pronunciation and mimicry are negatively affected by high levels of anxiety. The main study sets out to investigate whether or not these conclusions hold true for a larger sample population and also seeks to determine the effect of confidence and willingness to take risks on scores for both foreign language pronunciation and mimicry exercises

Usage-based phonology and simulations as means to investigate unintuitive voicing behavior

According to studies conducted by Coetzee & Pretorius (2010) and Rothenberg (1968), languages from the Sotho-Tswana group of Bantu languages demonstrate unintuitive voicing behavior in devoicing of post-nasal voiced plosives (/mb/-->[mp]) -- unintuitive in that greater articulatory effort is required to terminate voicing than to maintain it (Westbury & Keating, 1986). Nasals preceding stop consonants are said to have appeared in Bantu languages in order to facilitate production of voicing during the stop segment and were lost later during language evolutionary changes in languages like Swahili, Sotho or Duala (Meinhof, 1932). Current studies on Tswana and Shekgalagari (Coetzee & Pretorius, 2 010; Hyman, 2001; Solé et al., 2010), however, demonstrate that nasal segments remained in those languages – surprisingly not only before voiced stops but also before voiceless ones.We present an attempt at using computational simulations on voicing behavior of Tswana post-nasal stops. Previous approaches to phonological simulations (e.g. Boersma & Hamann, 2008) put a strong emphasis on the functional bias and its role in language change. We base our investigations on the assumption that the role of social biases might play even a higher role in the formation and change of phonologically and phonetically driven sociolinguistic processes (Nettle, 1999; Coetzee & Pretorius, 2010)

Phonological Factors Affecting L1 Phonetic Realization of Proficient Polish Users of English

Acoustic phonetic studies examine the L1 of Polish speakers with professional level proficiency in English. The studies include two tasks, a production task carried out entirely in Polish and a phonetic code-switching task in which speakers insert target Polish words or phrases into an English carrier. Additionally, two phonetic parameters are studied: the oft-investigated VOT, as well as glottalization vs. sandhi linking of word-initial vowels. In monolingual Polish mode, L2 interference was observed for the VOT parameter, but not for sandhi linking. It is suggested that this discrepancy may be related to the differing phonological status of the two phonetic parameters. In the code-switching tasks, VOTs were on the whole more English-like than in monolingual mode, but this appeared to be a matter of individual performance. An increase in the rate of sandhi linking in the code-switches, except for the case of one speaker, appeared to be a function of accelerated production of L1 target items

Processing of inconsistent emotional information: an fMRI study

Previous studies investigating the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) have relied on a number of tasks which involved cognitive control and attentional demands. In this fMRI study, we tested the model that ACC functions as an attentional network in the processing of language. We employed a paradigm that requires the processing of concurrent linguistic information predicting that the cognitive costs imposed by competing trials would engender the activation of ACC. Subjects were confronted with sentences where the semantic content conflicted with the prosodic intonation (CONF condition) randomly interspaced with sentences which conveyed coherent discourse components (NOCONF condition). We observed the activation of the rostral ACC and the middle frontal gyrus when the NOCONF condition was subtracted from the CONF condition. Our findings provide evidence for the involvement of the rostral ACC in the processing of complex competing linguistic stimuli, supporting theories that claim its relevance as a part of the cortical attentional circuit. The processing of emotional prosody involved a bilateral network encompassing the superior and medial temporal cortices. This evidence confirms previous research investigating the neuronal network that supports the processing of emotional information

Recruitment of Language-, Emotion- and Speech-Timing Associated Brain Regions for Expressing Emotional Prosody: Investigation of Functional Neuroanatomy with fMRI

We aimed to progress understanding of prosodic emotion expression by establishing brain regions active when expressing specific emotions, those activated irrespective of the target emotion, and those whose activation intensity varied depending on individual performance. BOLD contrast data were acquired whilst participants spoke non-sense words in happy, angry or neutral tones, or performed jaw-movements. Emotion-specific analyses demonstrated that when expressing angry prosody, activated brain regions included the inferior frontal and superior temporal gyri, the insula, and the basal ganglia. When expressing happy prosody, the activated brain regions also included the superior temporal gyrus, insula, and basal ganglia, with additional activation in the anterior cingulate. Conjunction analysis confirmed that the superior temporal gyrus and basal ganglia were activated regardless of the specific emotion concerned. Nevertheless, disjunctive comparisons between the expression of angry and happy prosody established that anterior cingulate activity was significantly higher for angry prosody than for happy prosody production. Degree of inferior frontal gyrus activity correlated with the ability to express the target emotion through prosody. We conclude that expressing prosodic emotions (vs. neutral intonation) requires generic brain regions involved in comprehending numerous aspects of language, emotion-related processes such as experiencing emotions, and in the time-critical integration of speech information

Phonological pivot parsing

There are two basic mysteries about natural language. The speed and ease with which it is acquired by a child and the speed and ease with which it is processed. Similarly to language acquisition, language processing faces a strong input-data-deficiency problem. When we speak we alter a great lot in the idealized phonological and phonetic representations. We delete whole phonemes, we radically change allophones, we shift stresses, we break up intonational patterns, we insert the pauses at the most unexpected places, etc. If to this crippled 'phonological string ' we add all the noise from the surroundings which does not help comprehension either, it is bewildering that the parser is supposed to recognize anything at all. However, even in the most difficult circumstances (foreig