Prosodic cues in second-language speech processing: A visual world eye-tracking study

In previous work examining heritage language phonology, heritage speakers have often patterned differently from native speakers and late-onset second language (L2) learners with respect to overall accent and segmentals. The current study extended this line of inquiry to suprasegmentals, comparing the properties of lexical tones produced by heritage, native, and L2 speakers of Mandarin living in the U.S. We hypothesized that heritage speakers would approximate native norms for Mandarin tones more closely than L2 speakers, yet diverge from these norms in one or more ways. We further hypothesized that, due to their unique linguistic experience, heritage speakers would sound the most ambiguous in terms of demographic background. Acoustic data showed that heritage speakers approximated native-like production more closely than L2 speakers with respect to the pitch contour of Tone 3, durational shortening in connected speech, and rates of Tone 3 reduction in non-phrase-final contexts, while showing the highest levels of tonal variability among all groups. Perceptual data indicated that heritage speakers’ tones differed from native and L2 speakers’ in terms of both intelligibility and perceived goodness. Consistent with the variability results, heritage speakers were the most difficult group to classify demographically. Taken together, these findings suggest that, with respect to tone, early heritage language experience can, but does not necessarily, result in a phonological advantage over L2 learners. Further, they add support to the view that heritage speakers are language users distinct from both native and L2 speakers.

“The” is a functional word of high-frequency in English. Due to its simple form, Chinese students use it extensively after they have learnt its semantic and grammatical rules, and may show different characteristics from those of native speakers. Based on the use of corpus, this paper compares texts extracted from CLEC and BNC, and finds that both Chinese English learners and native English speakers use “the” most frequently to express “specific reference”, followed by “generic reference”. There is also a feature that Chinese English learners use fixed collocations containing “the” more frequently than native English speakers do, but “the” in these fixed collocations don’t belong to its ideographic function. The enlightenment for English teaching is discussed, as well as reasons for the differences: cultural differences, mother tongue and grammar teaching.

This study is twofold: (i) whether there is a significant difference between Chinese learners’ first language (L1) proficiency and second language (L2) performance in comprehension of certain multiply self-embedded complex English sentences such as (1) Tom knows that the fact that taking good care of himself is necessary surprises the boy; (ii) whether there is a relationship between Chinese learners’ L1 proficiency and L2 processing strategies in the use of syntactic and/or semantic information in the comprehension performance. Two groups of advanced Chinese learners of English differing in Chinese proficiency (i.e. fifteen high Chinese proficiency (HCP) and fifteen low Chinese proficiency (LCP) learners of English) and one control group participated in the off-line experiment to answer questions to English sentences based on comprehension accuracy. The results show that there are no significant accuracy differences between HCP learners and LCP learners in the complex English sentence comprehension, suggesting that L1 proficiency play no significant role in Chinese learners’ complex English sentence comprehension. When doing a complex-rating task where participants rated complexity of the self-embedded complex English sentences based on a five-point scale, the results show that the LCP Chinese learners of English, like the control native English speakers, were able to use both syntactic and semantic information. However, the HCP Chinese learners of English relied more on semantic information than syntactic cues, indicating that L1 proficiency may influence Chinese learners’ processing strategy in comprehension of the complex English sentences.

The present study employs a word association test to investigate the nature of Chinese English learners’ mental lexicon by comparing the association responses of native speakers and Chinese English learners. The result shows that there are significant differences in the structure of mental lexicons between Chinese English learners and native speakers. With regard to L1 mental lexicons, Chinese English learners have poorer concentricity of association and weaker association strength. Their association is more dependent on forms. They have no established systematic and stable networks between words. The semantic network in their mental lexicon is underdeveloped. The results of the experiments have some implications for L2 vocabulary teaching and learning.

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.

This paper examines the use of a type of formulaic expression, called ‘lexical bundles’, in classroom discussions among English native and Malaysian non-native speakers. Lexical bundles are frequently used in academic discourse, and contribute to the production of coherence in speech and written language, as well as playing a central role in the comprehension of academic speech. Previous research has shown that L2 speakers often show a capacity to approximate native-like efficiency by using lexical bundles in their speech and writing. However, it has not been analysed as to what degree L2 speakers follow native expressions or rather use their own variations or versions of formulaic expressions. In order to investigate this gap, the most frequent four-word lexical bundles were identified and analysed in two different corpora of classroom discussions by native and non-native speakers, and compared in terms of discourse function. The findings show that native speakers used more lexical bundles than their non-native counterparts did. Native speakers also used more discourse organizing bundles, while non-native speakers more frequently used lexical bundles as stance expressions. These findings are discussed in terms of the pedagogical implications of exposing L2 speakers to a wider variety of lexical bundles, and the discourse functions inherent in their use.

Purpose: This study examines how speaker ethnicity (Chinese vs. White) and L2 English proficiency influence accentedness judgments by Chinese learners of English. Building on previous findings that speaker ethnicity affects accent perception in native English listeners, we tested whether similar effects occur among L2 English learners at different proficiency levels. Methodology: We employed a matched-guise paradigm in which Chinese learners of English at different proficiency levels (high vs. low) viewed either a White or Chinese face while listening to English words spoken with Mandarin-Chinese or American accents. They then rated each word’s accentedness on a 5-point scale. Data and analysis: Forty native Mandarin-Chinese speakers (with no other Chinese-dialect background) who learned English as an L2 in Chinese schools were recruited and assigned to high and low English proficiency groups (20 per group). Data for 132 target words in minimal pairs were analyzed using cumulative link mixed models. Findings: Results showed that Chinese participants with low English proficiency rated English words as less accented when paired with White faces than with Chinese faces. High-proficiency participants’ ratings were unaffected by speaker ethnicity. Originality: While previous studies primarily examined how native listeners’ perception of accentedness is shaped by speaker ethnicity using longer sentences, this study offers a novel perspective by examining nonnative listeners and using smaller linguistic units (i.e., word-level stimuli). It revealed that perceived speaker ethnicity influences accentedness judgments even for isolated words, with a notable interaction with L2 English proficiency. Significance: This study underscores the importance of adjusting L2 learners’ evaluation of English accents to foster more inclusive attitudes toward accented speech. In an increasingly globalized world where diverse English varieties coexist, promoting such inclusivity is essential for effective communication and mutual respect across linguistic and cultural boundaries.

Band importance functions (BIFs) for speech perception have been well characterized for native speakers of English tested with English speech-in-noise materials. Fewer datasets are available for speech-in-speech recognition or for listeners who are second-language learners of English. The present study evaluated BIFs for sentences in a two-talker speech background for Spanish/English bilinguals who were second-language (L2) learners of English and two groups of native (L1) English speakers. The target speech was monaural, with three target talkers presented in separate blocks of trials. The L2 speakers and one group of L1 speakers were tested with a diotic masker (MoTm); a second group of L1 speakers was tested with a monaural masker (MmTm). The L2 speakers had higher speech reception thresholds compared to L1 speakers tested with the same stimuli (MoTm), but more similar performance compared to L1 speakers tested in the more challenging condition (MmTm), which lacked binaural difference cues. Compared to both L1 groups, L2 speakers had shallower psychometric functions and benefited less from semantic context. The BIFs differed for the three talkers, but they were similar for all three groups of participants, indicating that L1 and L2 speakers largely relied on the same spectral cues for speech-in-speech recognition.

It is a great pleasure to offer this tribute to Professor Leslie M. Beebe and to help celebrate her vital contribution to the field of cross-cultural pragmatics (CCP). There is no denying that Professor Beebe stands as a distinguished scholar in the field. Anyone who wishes to conduct research on second language (L2) pragmatics would not be able to begin without learning of or citing her work. Among her contributions to the field, I would first like to ponder her groundbreaking call for serious attention to L2 pragmatics as early as the mid-1980s, a time when pragmatics was a neglected area in second language acquisition (SLA) research and L2 pedagogy. In a number of scholarly papers and at conferences, she suggested that “the social rules of speaking” are “basics, not frosting on the cake” (Beebe, 1995, p. 4). Professor Beebe is acknowledged among SLA researchers as one of the earliest linguists who was deeply concerned with cross-cultural misunderstandings (which often lead to unfortunate and offensive cultural stereotyping) resulting from a lack of pragmatic competence. Also of great importance to the field was Professor Beebe’s contribution to establishing a solid link between pragmatics and SLA by introducing the concept of pragmatic transfer. In the late 1980s, by showing that L2 learners often refer back to rules of speaking from their first language (L1), she successfully demonstrated cross-linguistic influence at the level of pragmatics (Beebe & Takahashi, 1989a; Beebe & Takahashi, 1989b; Beebe, Takahashi, & Ulis-Weltz, 1990). Motivated by her seminal work, the research focus of L2 pragmatics began shifting from CCP to interlanguage pragmatics (ILP), moving beyond the comparison of L1 and L2 pragmatic conventions towards the understanding of the developmental stages that L2 learners go through. Since that time, pragmatics has rapidly grown into a legitimate area of research in the study of SLA. It is now widely accepted that pragmatics is indispensable in helping researchers to understand how L2 learners acquire and use the target language in a meaningful and appropriate manner. Professor Beebe’s knowledge of and enthusiasm for language-and-culture (Byram & Morgan, 1994) has immensely influenced both my coursework and dissertation study. Thanks to her, I gained an appreciation for the way that cultural and social motivations can provide an important basis for understanding linguistic behavior. This recognition has led me to write my dissertation on cross-cultural conversations. In one of the chapters in my dissertation, I strive to explain cross-cultural differences and the interactional consequences of these differences in accomplishing the speech act of disagreement. In doing so, I focus on specific and observable linguistic behavior, specifically, the use of discourse markers (DMs) by Korean L2 learners and native speakers of American English in everyday, face-to-face conversation. In a preliminary analysis of my data, I found a noticeable cross-cultural difference in the use of the DM but. In fact, it is a widely accepted view that East Asian cultures are oriented toward avoiding nonalignment with others. However, as Beebe and Takahashi (1989b) aptly point out, it is too simplistic and risky to determine cultural constraints on language use in polarizing terms (e.g., positive politeness vs. negative politeness, and direct language vs. indirect language). Warning against a dichotomous approach to cross-cultural communication, the researchers underscore contextual dimensions in

The extent to which adult second language (L2) learners can achieve native-like neural processing of complex inflectional morphology remains unresolved. This study used event-related fMRI to examine neural mechanisms underlying the potential gradual achievement of L1-like proficiency in adult learners of Finnish (L2) with Russian as their first language (L1). Three groups participated: late beginner learners (N = 15, mean exposure to Finnish 24.9 months), late advanced learners (N = 15, mean exposure to Finnish 131.8 months), and native Finnish speakers (N = 15). Participants completed overt and covert word generation tasks. In the overt task, they spoke an inflected word aloud; in the covert task, they silently generated a form and judged a visually presented form as correct or incorrect. Stimuli included high-, medium-frequency, and pseudoword stems, with or without consonant gradation (stem allomorphy). Beginners had significantly higher error rates in both tasks than advanced learners and native speakers, indicating challenges in morphological encoding and recognition. Advanced learners performed comparably to native speakers. Furthermore, only advanced learners and native speakers exhibited increased BOLD responses in the LIFG and MFG for stems requiring consonant gradation, suggesting a mechanism for the lexical lookup of stems. These findings indicate that proficient adult L2 learners can develop native-like neural patterns of morphological processing, particularly in handling complex inflectional forms. This research contributes to understanding the neural mechanisms underlying morphological development in adult L2 acquisition and underscores the critical role of proficiency in achieving native-like processing of morphological complexity. • Advanced L2 learners show native-like brain activation during word inflection. • Beginners rely on word frequency, showing higher BOLD for high freq. and pseudo words. • CG stems cause more errors and stronger BOLD than NoCG stems across all groups. • Only natives and advanced learners show ROI activation differences for CG stems.

This study investigates Chinese English Learners’ usage of one of the downtoners----somewhat in an attempt to explore the features and development pattern of Chinese English Learners’ usage of this downtoners. The study reveals that the Chinese English Learners differ greatly from the native English speakers in frequency, collocation, colligation, semantic preference and semantic prosody. In order to improve the Chinese English learners’ language proficiency, it’s imperative for the teachers to change the traditional English teaching approach and adopt the corpus-driven teaching method.

Chinese learners of English often experience difficulty with English tense presumably because their native language is tenseless. We showed that this difficulty relates to their incomplete conceptual representations for tense rather than their poor grammatical rule knowledge. Participants made acceptability judgments on sentences describing two‐event sequences that were either temporally plausible or misaligned according to verb tense (time clash). Both upper‐intermediate Chinese learners of English and native English speakers were able to detect time clashes between events, showing that Chinese participants could apply tense rules explicitly. However, a predicted modulation of the N400 event‐related brain potential elicited by time clashes in English‐speaking participants was entirely absent in Chinese participants. In contrast, the same Chinese participants could semantically process time information when it was lexically conveyed in both languages. Thus, despite their mastery of English grammar, high‐functioning Chinese learners of English failed to process the meaning of tense‐conveyed temporal information in real time.

This study tests the hypothesis of linguistic relativity along two lines of research: a) how L2 learners of Chinese and English, respectively, syntactically package semantic components for caused motion (cause, manner, path) in an experimental situation in which they are asked to describe video clips showing caused motion events to an imagery addressee, and b) how monolingual native speakers of Chinese and English judge the similarity between caused motion scenes while viewing them. Our results regarding a) show that Chinese learners of English acclimate to the target pattern of organizing particularly dense caused motion information very rapidly, and English learners of Chinese also arrived at an inter–language showing considerable resemblance to the target system rather than traces of the L1 influence. Our findings regarding b) reveal that despite striking differences between Chinese and English in L1 motion descriptions, native speakers show an identical tendency to prefer the path–match alternate over the manner– match alternate. Overall, these observations suggest that language–specific constraints can be largely shaken off when encoding caused motion in a non– native language, and linguistic and non-linguistic representations of caused motion may be dissociable from each other.

Speech-on-speech masking is a common and challenging situation in everyday verbal communication. The ability to segregate competing auditory streams is a necessary requirement for focusing attention on the target speech. The Visual World Paradigm (VWP) provides insight into speech processing by capturing gaze fixations on visually presented icons that reflect the speech signal. This study aimed to propose a new VWP to examine the time course of speech segregation when competing sentences are presented and to collect pupil size data as a measure of listening effort. Twelve young normal-hearing participants were presented with competing matrix sentences (structure "name-verb-numeral-adjective-object") diotically via headphones at four target-to-masker ratios (TMRs), corresponding to intermediate to near perfect speech recognition. The VWP visually presented the number and object words from both the target and masker sentences. Participants were instructed to gaze at the corresponding words of the target sentence without providing verbal responses. The gaze fixations consistently reflected the different TMRs for both number and object words. The slopes of the fixation curves were steeper, and the proportion of target fixations increased with higher TMRs, suggesting more efficient segregation under more favorable conditions. Temporal analysis of pupil data using Bayesian paired sample t-tests showed a corresponding reduction in pupil dilation with increasing TMR, indicating reduced listening effort. The results support the conclusion that the proposed VWP and the captured eye movements and pupil dilation are suitable for objective assessment of sentence-based speech-on-speech segregation and the corresponding listening effort.

Abstracts for a wider audience: promoting linguistic diversity in JBI Evidence Synthesis.