Chip Gerfen

WHEN GENDER AND LOOKING GO HAND IN HAND

In a recent study, Lew-Williams and Fernald ( 2007 ) showed that native Spanish speakers use grammatical gender information encoded in Spanish articles to facilitate the processing of upcoming nouns. In this article, we report the results of a study investigating whether grammatical gender facilitates noun recognition during second language (L2) processing. Sixteen monolingual Spanish participants (control group) and 18 English-speaking learners of Spanish (evenly divided into high and low Spanish proficiency) saw two-picture visual scenes in which items matched or did not match in gender. Participants’ eye movements were recorded while they listened to 28 sentences in which masculine and feminine target items were preceded by an article that agreed in gender with the two pictures or agreed only with one of the pictures. An additional group of 15 Italian learners of Spanish was tested to examine whether the presence of gender in the first language (L1) modulates the degree to which gender is used during L2 processing. Data were analyzed by comparing the proportion of eye fixations on the objects in each condition. Monolingual Spanish speakers looked sooner at the referent on different-gender trials than on same-gender trials, replicating results reported in past literature. Italian-Spanish bilinguals exhibited a gender anticipatory effect, but only for the feminine condition. For the masculine condition, participants waited to hear the noun before identifying the referent. Like the Spanish monolinguals, the highly proficient English-Spanish speakers showed evidence of using gender information during online processing, whereas the less proficient learners did not. The results suggest that both proficiency in the L2 and similarities between the L1 and the L2 modulate the usefulness of morphosyntactic information during speech processing.

SPEECH SEGMENTATION IN A SIMULATED BILINGUAL ENVIRONMENT: A CHALLENGE FOR STATISTICAL LEARNING?

Studies using artificial language streams indicate that infants and adults can use statistics to correctly segment words. However, most studies have utilized only a single input language. Given the prevalence of bilingualism, how is multiple language input segmented? One particular problem may occur if learners combine input across languages: The statistics of particular units that overlap different languages may subsequently change and disrupt correct segmentation. Our study addresses this issue by employing artificial language streams to simulate the earliest stages of segmentation in adult L2-learners. In four experiments, participants tracked multiple sets of statistics for two artificial languages. Our results demonstrate that adult learners can track two sets of statistics simultaneously, suggesting that they form multiple representations when confronted with bilingual input. This work, along with planned infant experiments, informs a central issue in bilingualism research, namely, determining at what point listeners can form multiple representations when exposed to multiple languages.

Phonological convergence in a contracting language variety

Most work investigating the role of convergence in situations of language attrition has focused on the morpho-syntactic restructuring of the dying language variety. A central concern of such research has been untangling the factors driving the restructuring with an eye towards establishing whether the changes observed are best viewed as externally driven or, by contrast, as internally motivated. A second and equally important concern of this research attempts to define the domains of the linguistic system that may be the most permeable to external influence. The present study provides a contribution to this line of research and sheds light on its two leading concerns from the domain of phonology and phonetics. Specifically, we present the results of an instrumental study of the phonological vowel system of Frenchville French and argue that this linguistic variety is undergoing a perceptually striking process of phonetic convergence with English that is motivated by the auditory and acoustic similarity between a subset of vowels in the contact languages. An interesting consequence of our analysis is that bilingual phonologies may become particularly permeable to inter-linguistic influence precisely where they are acoustically and perceptually unstable, and where they are already congruent to some degree.

The production and perception of laryngealized vowels in Coatzospan Mixtec

Abstract This paper examines the production and perception of contrastively laryngealized vowels in Coatzospan Mixtec (CM), an Otomanguean language of southern Mexico. A production study focuses on four dimensions of the phonetics of contrastively laryngealized vowels for eight speakers: f0 excursions, amplitude drop, amplitude differences between the first and second harmonics, and overall vowel duration. The production study reveals that the implementation of laryngealized vowels is highly variable within and across speakers, and that these vowels cannot be characterized as creaky voiced, but rather must be viewed as produced along a continuum on which creaky voicing constitutes only the most extreme of one of the ends. Strikingly, it is shown that many tokens are realized with highly subtle cues, involving only minimal drops along the f0 and amplitude dimensions. Three perception experiments conducted in a field setting using synthetic speech examined the contributions of f0 drops and amplitude in cueing the percept of laryngealized vowels. These studies agree with the production data in that they reveal speakers to be highly tuned to small changes along the f0 and amplitude dimensions in the experimental stimuli. Taken together, the production and perception data (1) add to our knowledge of the phonetics of an underdescribed and endangered language; (2) add to our knowledge of how phonation types such as laryngealization on vowels can be implemented cross-linguistically; and (3) provide a more finely grained notion of the array of acoustic cues that implement the categorical, contrastive phonological property of vowel laryngealization.

Colliding Cues in Word Segmentation: The Role of Cue Strength and General Cognitive Processes.

The process of word segmentation is flexible, with many strategies potentially available to learners. This experiment explores how segmentation cues interact, and whether successful resolution of cue competition is related to general executive functioning. Participants listened to artificial speech streams that contained both statistical and pause-defined cues to word boundaries. When these cues ‘collide’ (indicating different locations for word boundaries), cue strength appears to dictate the predominant parsing strategy. When cues are relatively equal in strength, the ability to successfully deploy a segmentation strategy significantly correlates with stronger performance on the Simon task, a non-linguistic cognitive task typically thought to involve executive processes such as inhibitory control and selective attention. These results suggest that general information processing strategies may play a role in solving one of the early challenges for language learners.

Frenchville French: A case study in phonological attrition

This paper investigates the phonetic and phonological properties of a contracting variety of French spoken in Frenchville, PA, a linguistic enclave community. Specifically, we analyze a pattern of convergence versus preservation that cannot be convincingly explained or understood given current proposals of the process of phonological convergence and attrition in a bilingual contact situation. We demonstrate that our speakers preserve some low level information while sacrificing other phonetic details. In the case under investigation, there is a gradient replacement of the French mid front rounded vowels with an English-like rhoticized schwa but our speakers maintain language specific, phonetically distinct rhotic consonants. We argue that the patterns of loss versus maintenance that emerge are not necessarily driven by the need to preserve contrastive features with a high functional load. Equally plausible accounts for these patterns may lie in acoustic salience, the sociolinguistic marking of identity, and competition between articulatory demands.

Experience with code-switching modulates the use of grammatical gender during sentence processing

Using code-switching as a tool to illustrate how language experience modulates comprehension, the visual world paradigm was employed to examine the extent to which gender-marked Spanish determiners facilitate upcoming target nouns in a group of Spanish-English bilingual code-switchers. The first experiment tested target Spanish nouns embedded in a carrier phrase (Experiment 1b) and included a control Spanish monolingual group (Experiment 1a). The second set of experiments included critical trials in which participants heard code-switches from Spanish determiners into English nouns (e.g., la house) either in a fixed carrier phrase (Experiment 2a) or in variable and complex sentences (Experiment 2b). Across the experiments, bilinguals revealed an asymmetric gender effect in processing, showing facilitation only for feminine target items. These results reflect the asymmetric use of gender in the production of code-switched speech. The extension of the asymmetric effect into Spanish (Experiment 1b) underscores the permeability between language modes in bilingual code-switchers.

Usage frequencies of complement-taking verbs in Spanish and English: Data from Spanish monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals

Verb bias, or the tendency of a verb to appear with a certain type of complement, has been employed in psycholinguistic literature as a tool to test competing models of sentence processing. To date, the vast majority of sentence processing research involving verb bias has been conducted almost exclusively with monolingual speakers, and predominantly with monolingual English speakers, despite the fact that most of the world’s population is bilingual. To test the generality of competing theories of sentence comprehension, it is important to conduct cross-linguistic studies of sentence processing and to add bilingual data to theories of sentence comprehension. Given this, it is critical for the field to develop verb bias estimates from monolingual speakers of languages other than English and from bilingual populations. We begin to address these issues in two norming studies. Study 1 provides verb bias norming data for 135 Spanish verbs. A second aim of Study 1 was to determine whether verb bias estimates remain stable over time. In Study 2, we asked whether Spanish—English speakers are able to learn verb-specific information, such as verb bias, in their second language. The answer to this question is critical to conducting studies that examine when, during the course of sentence comprehension, bilingual speakers exploit verb information specific to the second language. To facilitate cross-linguistic work, we compared our verb bias results with those provided by monolingual English speakers in a previous norming study conducted by Garnsey, Lotocky, Pearlmutter, and Myers (1997). Our Spanish data demonstrated that individual verbs showed significant similarities in their verb bias across the 3 years of data collection. We also show that bilinguals are able to learn the biases of verbs in their second language, even when immersed in the first language environment. Appendixes A–C, containing the bilingual norms discussed in the article, may be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

The interaction of subsyllabic encoding and stress assignment: A new examination of an old problem in Spanish

This study employs a naming task to examine the role of the syllable in speech production, focusing on a lesser-studied aspect of syllabic processing, the interaction of subsyllabic patterns (i.e., syllable phonotactics) and higher-level prosody, in this case, stress assignment in Spanish. Specifically, we examine a controversial debate in Spanish regarding the interaction of syllable weight and stress placement, showing that traditional representations of weight fail to predict the differential modulation of stress placement by rising versus falling diphthongs in Spanish nonce forms. Our results also suggest that the internal structure of the syllable plays a larger role than is assumed in the processing literature in that it modulates higher-level processes such as stress encoding. Our results thus inform the debate regarding syllable weight in Spanish and linguistic theorising more broadly, as well as expand our understanding of the importance of the syllable, and more specifically its internal structure, in modulating word processing.

Tracking multiple inputs: The challenge of bilingual statistical learning

For many learners, language acquisition may entail acquiring more than a single language. Yet to date, much of the research on the fundamental mechanisms of language acquisition has been predicated, at least implicitly, on modeling monolingual acquisition. In this chapter, we explore statistical learning, the ability to track distributional properties of the input, through the lens of multilingual acquisition. This ability is thought to play a critical role in the early stages of language acquisition. We identify a set of theoretical challenges that need to be overcome in order to track multiple sets of statistics and develop multiple representations to accommodate each input language. We then review the limited number of empirical studies that have investigated how people keep track of statistics in multiple artificial inputs and explore the consequences of accruing statistics in multi-language input for infants raised in bilingual environments. We highlight the role that contextual cues may play in helping solve the problem of multiple inputs, pointing out that they may facilitate the forming of multiple representations. We conclude, based on the available data, that the consequences of bilingualism for statistical learning may be a greater propensity to posit multiple underlying causal models when the input is variable.