“<i>Hama</i>”? Reduced pronunciations in non-native natural speech obstruct high-school students’ comprehension at lower processing levels

Native speakers ‘reduce’ their pronunciations, i.e., they shorten and merge words. For instance, German native speakers may say “hama” for “haben wir” (‘have-we’). We examined to what extent such reductions are problematic for adolescent learners of a second language, after four years of high-school training; and whether the problems can be related to inadequate bottom-up and top-down processing. For this, 39 Dutch and 38 German adolescents heard either reduced or unreduced German full phrases and part-phrases (phrase-intelligibility task) and words (lexical decision task). The results show that (1) Learners perceive non-native reduced speech less accurately than unreduced speech and also judge it as less intelligible; (2) This reduced-form disadvantage occurs separately from factors such as speech rate, orthography and voice; (3) The disadvantage for non-native listeners is substantial and larger than that in native listeners. Therefore, it probably reflects a lack of experience with reduced (i.e., real-life) speech; and (4) Non-native reductions induce at least inadequate bottom-up processing in learners, and may make top-down processing less accessible. We interpret the findings as supporting the idea that experience with variants (here: reduced variants) is necessary to strengthen linguistic (word) representations

Looking (for) patterns: Similarities and differences between infant and adult free scene-viewing patterns

Systematic tendencies such as the center and horizontal bias are known to have a large influence on how and where we move our eyes during static onscreen free scene viewing. However, it is unknown whether these tendencies are learned viewing strategies or are more default tendencies in the way we move our eyes. To gain insight into the origin of these tendencies we explore the systematic tendencies of infants (3 - 20-month-olds, N = 157) and adults (N = 88) in three different scene viewing data sets. We replicated common findings, such as longer fixation durations and shorter saccade amplitudes in infants compared to adults. The leftward bias was never studied in infants, and our results indicate that it is not present, while we did replicate the leftward bias in adults. The general pattern of the results highlights the similarity between infant and adult eye movements. Similar to adults, infants’ fixation durations increase with viewing time and the dependencies between successive fixations and saccades show very similar patterns. A straightforward conclusion to draw from this set of studies is that infant and adult eye movements are mainly driven by similar underlying basic processes