Decrease of pitch perception ambiguity in tone language processing

This article investigates the effects of ethnic acceptance and prejudice on English language learning among immigrant nonnative speakers. During 2004 and 2005, the author conducted participatory dialogues among six Vietnamese and Mexican adult immigrant English language learners. The researcher sought to answer five questions: (1) What are some nonnative English speakers’ experience regarding the way native speakers treat them? (2) How have nonnative English speakers’ experiences of ethnic acceptance or ethnic prejudice affected their learning of English? (3) What do nonnative English speakers think they need in order to lower their anxiety as they learn a new language? (4) What can native English speakers do to lower nonnative speakers’ anxiety? (5) What can nonnative English speakers do to lower their anxiety with native English speakers? Even though many of the adult immigrant participants experienced ethnic prejudice, they developed strategies to overcome anxiety, frustration, and fear. The dialogues generated themes of acceptance, prejudice, power, motivation, belonging, and perseverance, all factors essential to consider when developing English language learning programs for adult immigrants.

Prediction is pervasive during sentence comprehension among native speakers of a language. But whether non-native speakers predict to the same extent as native speakers remains an open question. To examine the effects of semantic and syntactic predictability in native and non-native speakers, we con- ducted a self-paced reading and an acceptability judgement task. The results suggest that the effects of semantic and syntactic predictability are unequivocally robust among native speakers during sentence comprehension. However, the effects of syntactic predictability seem to be more robust for native speakers than for non-native speakers who are largely sensitive to semantic predictability.

Nonnative speakers of English listened to natural and synthetic speech materials. All natural speech material was spoken by a native male speaker of American English. The synthetic speech was produced by the MITalk-79 system for the first experiment and by the Prose 2000 V2.1 text-to-speech system for the second experiment. Results from Experiment 1 indicated that nonnative speakers show higher levels of performance when listening to natural speech than when listening to synthetic speech. However, nonnative speakers did not reach the level of performance of native speakers for either natural or synthetic speech. Experiment 2 provided further evidence that nonnative speakers fail to reach the same level of performance when listening to synthetic speech as native speakers. Performance of nonnative speakers on a dictation task showed high positive correlations with their general English language ability as measured by two standardized tests. Results indicate the importance of language background and experience in the perception of speech, particularly synthetic and digitally encoded speech.

Recognizing the pragmatic nature of prosody, research on speech act production has developed over time with much attention given to yes/no and wh-questions. Prosodic patterns of refusals, however, have received less attention when compared to other speech acts although their appropriate production is critical in conveying politeness. Furthermore, comparisons of speech act production have often been between English native speakers (NSs) and non-native speakers (NNSs). The current work responds to these gaps through a comparison of prosodic patterns of refusals across three groups: English NSs (n = 17), NNSs (n = 10), and bilinguals (BLs) (n = 7). High- and low- imposition refusals were recorded from spoken discourse completion tasks. Prosodic analyses (temporal fluency, prominence, and intonation) were performed across the speaker groups. In low-imposition refusals, NNSs had more pause time than NS and BLs, and they also had a slower articulation rate than BLs. BLs used fewer rising tones than both NSs and NNSs. In high-imposition refusals, NNSs used more prominence than NSs, while BLs used fewer falling tones than NNSs. While these findings concur with current research on differences between NSs and NNSs, they add new subtleties on how BLs use prosody when compared with these groups

Vowel undershoot (Lindblom, 1963), an effect where the articulatory gesture fails to reach the target due to the following contrary gesture (de Jong, 2004), is found to be particularly prominent (lowered F1 and shortened duration) in polysyllables (Lindblom, 1968; Moon and Lindblom, 1989). The current study investigates Mandarin and American speakers' production of English tense-lax vowels /i/-/I/ and /eI/-/ε/, and examines undershoot in monosyllabic and disyllabic words. Three Mandarin and three American speakers were recorded. Fifteen target vowels were embedded in a voiced stop-V-voiceless stop context. All disyllabic words were first-syllable stressed. Carrier sentences were of variable length to create a natural-speech-like context. F1, F2, vowel duration and utterance duration were measured. The results show that Americans did show a significant distinction between /i/-/I/ but tended to merge the formants of /eI/-/ε/ in disyllabic words, which was partly due to the coarticulation with the following syllable. They also demonstrated undershoot effect in /eI/-/ε/ but not much in /i/-/I /. Mandarin speakers, however, could not make a significant tense-lax distinction, and showed formant undershoot in disyllabic words, especially tense vowels. One possible account for this effect is the influence from L1. The issue of Mandarin vowel inventory is discussed.

This study investigates how native prosodic systems and second language (L2) learning experience shape non-native tone production. Speakers from tone language backgrounds (native Cantonese and Mandarin speakers [CS & MS]) and non-tone language backgrounds (English monolinguals [ES] and English speakers with Mandarin learning experience [EM]) produced the six Cantonese tones in an imitation task. The results suggest systematic effects of native prosodic systems on L2 tone production, regardless of tone or non-tone language backgrounds. MS have more problems with pitch height whereas ES tend to produce every tone in a level shape, which echoes the findings from previous perception studies. Further, MS’s ability to integrate their native sensitivity to pitch height, along with their Mandarin training in pitch contour, contributes to their exceptional performance in producing the new tone language. Importantly, EM speakers performed better than MS speakers, suggesting that L1 experience with tone may be less helpful to learners than L2 tone acquisition experience, even when this L2 experience is with a different tone language (here Mandarin).

Assessing Parkinson's disease severity using speech analysis in non-native speakers

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Cantonese is widely spoken among the Malaysian Chinese community. Cantonese speakers are not only native speakers, but also non-native speakers. One of the difficult parts of Cantonese learning is lexical tones. In view of this, this study provides an acoustic analysis of Cantonese lexical tones produced by Chinese youths in Seremban, Negeri Sembilan. This study investigates the acoustic characteristics of Cantonese lexical tones by analysing the length features and pitch features of monosyllabic words. Six female speakers participated in this study. Three of them are native Cantonese speakers, while the other three are non-native Cantonese speakers. Data analysis was conducted by using Praat. In terms of length features, T2 and T6 are the shortest smooth tones, and T7 is the shortest checked tone. In terms of pitch features, T3 and T4 had greater changes compared to the previous study. All lexical tones produced by non-native speakers, with the exception of T2, are level tones. Moreover, in both groups, the vowel duration and pitch value of T2 are relatively the same as T6, and there is a trend of combination.

Emotional tones of a speaker’s voice and lexical tones involve similar acoustic correlates, but only lexical tones could change the meaning of a word in tonal languages. The purpose of this study is to investigate the interaction between these two types of tonal variations by examining the acoustic and perceptual characteristics of the four Mandarin tones across different emotional tones of voice. In experiment 1, acoustic analyses of fundamental frequency, mean amplitude, and duration was conducted on a syllable with the four tones produced in a carrier phrase with four different emotional tones of voice (anger, fear, happiness, and sadness). The same acoustic measures were also taken on the Mandarin neutral tone produced with the four emotional tones. In experiment 2, speech materials from experiment 1 were used to investigate the effects of the emotional tones on the perception of Mandarin tones. The results showed that all four emotional tones had significant effects on the acoustics and perception of Mandarin tones. These findings suggest that emotional tones of voice impact both acoustic and perceptual characteristics of lexical tones.

Background noise makes listening effortful and may lead to fatigue. This may compromise classroom learning, especially for children with a non-native background. In the current study, we used pupillometry to investigate listening effort and fatigue during listening comprehension under typical (0 dB signal-to-noise ratio [SNR]) and favorable (+10 dB SNR) listening conditions in 63 Swedish primary school children (7–9 years of age) performing a narrative speech–picture verification task. Our sample comprised both native (n = 25) and non-native (n = 38) speakers of Swedish. Results revealed greater pupil dilation, indicating more listening effort, in the typical listening condition compared with the favorable listening condition, and it was primarily the non-native speakers who contributed to this effect (and who also had lower performance accuracy than the native speakers). Furthermore, the native speakers had greater pupil dilation during successful trials, whereas the non-native speakers showed greatest pupil dilation during unsuccessful trials, especially in the typical listening condition. This set of results indicates that whereas native speakers can apply listening effort to good effect, non-native speakers may have reached their effort ceiling, resulting in poorer listening comprehension. Finally, we found that baseline pupil size decreased over trials, which potentially indicates more listening-related fatigue, and this effect was greater in the typical listening condition compared with the favorable listening condition. Collectively, these results provide novel insight into the underlying dynamics of listening effort, fatigue, and listening comprehension in typical classroom conditions compared with favorable classroom conditions, and they demonstrate for the first time how sensitive this interplay is to language experience.

Native speakers of a language are able to easily detect non-native “accents”—usually a perceived accent is attributed to phonemic- and phonetic- level information. However, a growing body of work suggests that non-native speakers also exhibit differences from native speakers at the prosodic level. Differences are exhibited in the placement of lexical stress and phrasal accents, as well as the acoustic cues used in prominence production; prosodic differences in production appear to pattern in (native)-language-specific ways (Morrill, ICPhS Proceedings, 2015). In this experiment, we ask (1) whether differences in the realization of tonal contours are perceived by listeners, and (2) whether perceptual discriminability is patterning according to speakers’ native language. Participants listened to low-pass filtered phrases from the Stella passage recordings on the GMU Speech Accent Archive—produced by native speakers of English, Mandarin, Korean, Arabic, and Turkish—and judged whether speakers were saying the same thing. Results indicate that participants were less likely to rate two phrases as the same (even when they were) if they had been produced by speakers of different native languages. Patterns of discriminability across language pairings are attributed to differences in the number and timing of tonal events (e.g., pitch accents).

The present study investigates the variation in the long English vowels among native English speakers and non-native Pakistani speakers of the English language. The recordings have been collected through e-mail from different regional speakers of Pakistani languages, from U.K. and the U.S., using social-networking. The analysis of the recordings is done using PRAAT software. The long vowel /i:/ was delimited for the study. Durations quoted by the renowned phonetician Danial Jones (1976), were used as a reference for the native speakers of the English language. The initial hypotheses were built to analyze the data. The study reveals that native speakers tend to follow the pattern introduced by Danial Jones with just a slight idiolectal difference. The non-native Pakistani speakers differentiate themselves in the duration of long vowels from the native speakers. Female native speakers have shown significant variation when compared with male native speakers.

The current study investigates the effects of novel spacing systems on the reading performance of native and nonnative Korean speakers. It conducted two experiments. The first experiment measured native and nonnative speakers’ (N = 24) eye movements while they read normal, spaced, and unspaced texts. The normal text used the Korean language’s current spacing system. In the spaced text, linguistic markers were separated from their preceding noun phrases. The unspaced text had no spaces at all. We measured performance by correct answer rate, fixation rate, regression ratio, and reading speed. The second experiment measured native and nonnative Korean speakers’ (N = 69) eye movements while reading the same texts, but they also received three weeks of training on novel spacing systems according to their assigned group. It conducted a survey to examine each participant’s perceived reading efficiency on each spacing system. The evidence showed facilitating effects of spaced text for native English speakers; unspaced text did not disrupt native Korean speakers’ reading performance. The spaced text showed potential for its application in second language learning. The novel spacing systems were proved to be learnable, indicating the possible use in education.

The adoption of linguistic rules in native and non-native speakers: Evidence from a Wug task