Language and Speech

Phrase-final lengthening affects the segments preceding a prosodic boundary. This prosodic variation is generally assumed to be independent of the phonemic identity. We refer to this as the ‘uniform lengthening hypothesis’ (ULH). However, in German, lax vowels do not undergo lengthening for word stress or shortening for increased speech rate, indicating that temporal properties might interact with phonemic identity. We test the ULH by comparing the effect of the boundary on acoustic and kinematic measures for tense and lax vowels and several coda consonants. We further examine if the boundary effect decreases with distance from the boundary. Ten native speakers of German were recorded by means of electromagnetic articulography (EMA) while reading sentences that contained six minimal pairs varying in vowel tenseness and boundary type. In line with the ULH, the results show that the acoustic durations of lax vowels are lengthened phrase-finally, similarly to tense vowels. We find that acoustic lengthening is stronger the closer the segments are to the boundary. Articulatory parameters of the closing movements toward the post-vocalic consonants are affected by both phrasal position and identity of the preceding vowel. The results are discussed with regard to the interaction between prosodic structure and vowel tenseness.

We review an array of experimental methodological factors that either contribute to or detract from the measurement of pragmatic implicatures in child language. We carry out a truth value judgment task to measure children’s interpretations of the Spanish existential quantifier algunos in implicature-consistent and implicature-inconsistent contexts. Independently, we take measures of children’s inhibition, working memory, attention, approximate number ability, phrasal syntax, and lexicon. We model the interplay of these variables using a piecewise structural equation model (SEM), common in the life sciences, but not in the social and behavioral sciences. By 6 years of age, the children in our sample were not statistically different from adults in their interpretations. Syntax, lexicon, and inhibition significantly predict implicature generation, each accounting for unique variance. The approximate number system and inhibition significantly predict lexical development. The statistical power of the piecewise SEM components, with a sample of 64 children, is high, in comparison to a traditional, globally estimated SEM of the same data.

The relationship between the age of acquisition (AoA) of words and their cerebral hemispheric representation is controversial because the experimental results have been contradictory. However, most of the lexical processing experiments were performed with stimuli consisting of written words. If we want to compare the processing of words learned very early in infancy—when children cannot read—with words learned later, it seems more logical to employ spoken words as experimental stimuli. This study, based on the auditory lexical decision task, used spoken words that were classified according to an objective criterion of AoA with extremely distant means (2.88 vs. 9.28 years old). As revealed by the reaction times, both early and late words were processed more efficiently in the left hemisphere, with no AoA × Hemisphere interaction. The results are discussed from a theoretical point of view, considering that all the experiments were conducted using adult participants.

Though past research on the sound structure of speech errors has contributed greatly to our understanding of phonological encoding, most of this research comes from a small set of majority languages with similar linguistic structures. To increase the linguistic diversity of relevant evidence, a large collection of speech errors was investigated in Cantonese, an under-studied language with unique phonological structures. In particular, the Cantonese data were examined for nine psycholinguistic effects commonly used as a lens on word-form encoding. Detailed quantitative analysis found that Cantonese has eight of these effects, providing broader cross-linguistic support for models based on these patterns. Yet Cantonese also exhibited differences with well-known Indo-European languages by having a higher rate of errors involving whole syllables and sub-constituents inside the syllable rime. These differences can be accounted for by recognizing the primacy of the syllable and mora in encoding Cantonese words, following proposals that have been made for Mandarin Chinese and Japanese.

Using the masked priming technique, word recognition experiments in various languages have shown slower response times for a target word like NEVEU (nephew, in French) when preceded by a diacritical prime like néveu than by the identity prime neveu. The most common account of this effect is linguistic: diacritical and non-diacritical vowels (e.g., é and e) activate different letter representations (e.g., compare neveu /nə.vø/ vs. néveu /ne.vø/). However, another explanation is that the reduced effectiveness of the diacritical primes is merely due to the perceptual salience of accent marks in the first moments of word processing. Here, we designed a masked priming experiment that tested this perceptual salience account by comparing the effectiveness of diacritical versus non-diacritical primes in a language where diacritics have no linguistic value, namely, English (e.g., nórth-NORTH vs. north-NORTH). We found a small but reliable cost due to the diacritical primes, thus revealing that perceptual salience reduced the effectiveness of the primes. However, the effect sizes were substantially smaller than in the experiments in languages with diacritical marks, thus suggesting that the néveu-NEVEU versus neveu-NEVEU difference relies on both linguistic and perceptual sources.

Ambiguity pervades language. The sentence “My office is really hot” could be interpreted as a complaint about the temperature or as an indirect request to turn on the air conditioning. How do comprehenders determine a speaker’s intended interpretation? One possibility is that speakers and comprehenders exploit prosody to overcome the pragmatic ambiguity inherent in indirect requests. In a pre-registered behavioral experiment, we find that human listeners can successfully determine whether a given utterance was intended as a request at a rate above chance (55%), above and beyond the prior probability of a given sentence being interpreted as a request. Moreover, we find that a classifier equipped with seven acoustic features can detect the original intent of an utterance with 65% accuracy. Finally, consistent with past work, the duration, pitch, and pitch slope of an utterance emerge both as significant correlates of a speaker’s original intent and as predictors of comprehenders’ pragmatic interpretation. These results suggest that human and machine comprehenders alike can use prosody to enrich the meaning of ambiguous utterances, such as indirect requests.

Network science was used to examine different dimensions of phonological similarity in English. Data from a phonological associate task and an identification of words in noise task were used to create a phonological association network and a misperception network. These networks were compared to a network formed by a computational metric widely used to assess phonological similarity (i.e., one-phoneme metric). The phonological association network and the misperception network were topographically more similar to each other than either were to the one-phoneme metric network, but there were several network features in common between the one-phoneme metric network and the phonological association network. To assess the influence of network structure on processing, we compared the influence of degree (i.e., neighborhood density) from each of the networks on visual and auditory lexical decision reaction times obtained from two psycholinguistic megastudies. The effect of degree differed across network types and tasks. We discuss the use of each approach to determine phonological similarity and a possible direction forward for language research through the use of multiplex networks.

This paper looks at the effect of focus-marking on the immediate and delayed recognition of referents in Samoan. Focus-marking on a word can imply the presence of alternatives to that word which are relevant to the interpretation of the utterance. Consistent with this, psycholinguistic evidence is growing that alternatives to focus-marked words are selectively activated in the immediate processing of an utterance and longer term memory. However, most of this research is on Western Germanic languages which primarily use prosodic prominence to mark focus. We explore this in two experiments using immediate and delayed probe recognition tasks in the under-studied language Samoan, which primarily uses syntactic focus-marking. Participants heard short narratives ending in a critical sentence in which the object word was either focused or not, using a cleft-like construction. In the first experiment, probe recognition, alternatives to the object word which were either mentioned or unmentioned in the narrative were responded to more slowly if the object was focus-marked. In the second experiment, delayed recognition, participants were faster to correctly recognize mentioned alternatives, and slower to reject unmentioned, if the object was focus-marked. Both results are consistent with immediate and longer-term activation of focus alternatives. There was no significant effect of focus-marking on recognition of the object word itself.

Previous electroencephalography studies have yielded evidence for automatic processing of syntax and lexical stress. However, these studies looked at both effects in isolation, limiting their generalizability to everyday language comprehension. In the current study, we investigated automatic processing of grammatical agreement in the face of variation in lexical stress. Using an oddball paradigm, we measured the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) in Dutch-speaking participants while they listened to Dutch subject–verb sequences (linguistic context) or acoustically similar sequences in which the subject was replaced by filtered noise (nonlinguistic context). The verb forms differed in the inflectional suffix, rendering the subject–verb sequences grammatically correct or incorrect, and leading to a difference in the stress pattern of the verb forms. We found that the MMNs were modulated in both the linguistic and nonlinguistic condition, suggesting that the processing load induced by variation in lexical stress can hinder early automatic processing of grammatical agreement. However, as the morphological differences between the verb forms correlated with differences in number of syllables, an interpretation in terms of the prosodic structure of the sequences cannot be ruled out. Future research is needed to determine which of these factors (i.e., lexical stress, syllabic structure) most strongly modulate early syntactic processing.

In Korean noun-noun compounds, the lenis onset consonant in the second noun is often realized as a tense consonant. Although extensive work has been carried out to clarify its causes and relevant phonological processes, this tensification is deemed not entirely predictable. This paper presents a speech production experiment that confirms the existing findings that the variability in tensification is predictable to a certain extent. The experimental results also showed that the relationship between the predictors and the variability is not linear and that tensification mirrors the cognitively determined boundary strength. Native Korean speakers calibrate the boundary strength by incorporating complex information, such as the word’s length, segment type, frequency, and plausibility of the compound. While a “tight” boundary led to high tensification probability, it was not affected by speaking-rate variation. Furthermore, the perceived compound’s plausibility directly affected the duration of the tensified consonant. Importantly, the findings suggest that speakers’ calibration of the boundary strength is fluid and changeable over time and it affects both phonological and phonetic outputs. Finally, variability in data was reduced for the experimental conditions leading to either extremely high or low tensification probability, and there seemed to be lexicalized exceptions to the general trends.

This study aims to account for the underlying causes of spelling errors in hearing and deaf children who speak a dialectal form of Arabic that substantially differs from the standard written one. It presents a general overview of the spoken Arabic language and its written system, drawing attention to some of the phonological and orthographic regularities and irregularities used in constructing and decoding Arabic words and sentences. It also accounts for the diglossic factors that interfere with the process of phoneme-to-grapheme mapping. The spelling outcomes of a group of hearing children are compared with another group of orally educated deaf children, who in addition to the complexity and diglossity of Arabic, have limited hearing abilities. Both groups performed two written tasks, one representing the standard form and the other representing the dialect. These tasks identified the types of spelling and segmentation errors and the effects of the committed errors on children’s awareness of the concept of word and word boundaries. Analysis of the results reveals their spelling errors’ nature and frequencies, and progressively categorizes the most prominent errors in practicing each language form. The deaf group (n = 30) produced significantly more errors than the hearing group (n = 36) in the dysphonetic errors and the word omission categories. The findings indicate that the sociolinguistic context of the Arabic language and the orthographic nature of the Arabic script are both important factors affecting hearing and deaf children’s awareness of the concept of word as well as their spelling performance. These results may enable educators to understand the underlying factors of Arabic spelling and produce targeted error correction strategies to maximize children’s learning outcomes.