Ellen Bouchard Ryan

Reactions Toward Varying Degrees of Accentedness in the Speech of Spanish-English Bilinguals

Approximately 100 college students were asked to evaluate Spanish-English bilingual speakers on the basis of taped readings of an English text. The speakers were chosen to represent a wide range of accentedness. The relationship between the amount of accentedness heard and the attributed characteristics of the speaker was investigated. The results show that the students made rather fine discriminations among varying degrees of accentedness in rating a speakers personal attributes and speech. Support was thus found for the proposition that Spanish-accented English is negatively stereotyped and that the more accented the speech, the stronger the stereotype. By employing a seven-point rating scale with large groups rather than more involved scaling techniques based on individual testing, this study attempted to generalize the results of recent research which indicated that linguistically naive persons can reliably rate varying degrees of accentedness. Indeed, since the more convenient group-administered rating scale procedure provided high correlations with the accentedness scores obtained via more complicated scaling techniques, research concerned with reactions to a range of accentedness can progress rapidly.

Performance of bilinguals in a picture-word interference task.

The picture-word interference task was administered to Spanish-English adults in order to determine whether the lexicons of bilinguals are integrated or whether words are stored and accessed separately in semantic memory. Pictures were printed with Spanish words naming other objects, with English translations, and with Xs. Spanish and English distractor words were observed to slow down picture naming in both languages. Also, an interaction was detected among subjects naming pictures in English. On the first trial Spanish words produced more interference than English words, whereas the pattern was reversed thereafter. This effect is attributed to task novelty, which disappears with practice. No differential patterns of interference were observed among subjects naming pictures in Spanish, probably because of greater error variance. Results for English picture-naming bilinguals supported the integration hypothesis but suggested that there is less distance between words within a language than between languages in semantic memory.

Attitudes Toward Younger and Older Adult Speakers: Effects of Varying Speech Rates

Undergraduates listened to tape recorded voices of either younger (20-22 years) or older (60-65 years) male speakers who varied in their rate of speech (slow, medium, and fast). The listeners evaluated the speakers on various personality and social characteristics, made causal attributions for success or failure of the speakers in hypothetical situations, estimated speaker ages, and rated the voices on several speech parameters. Overall, faster speakers were evaluated more favourably than slower speakers, and older speakers were evaluated less favourably than younger speakers. As predicted, the estimated age of older speakers was elevated when they spoke slowly, but the strong evaluative effects predicted for rate among old speakers were not observed. The prediction that disconfirmation of expectations would lead to especially negative attitudes toward the slow-speaking younger speakers was confirmed, while the predicted favourable impact of fast speech for the older speakers received only slight support. Causal attributions were generally consistent with the other evaluations, with larger effects for speech rate than for age. The complex differences in attributions across the three situations examined suggest that the causal attribution paradigm provides a valuable framework within which to examine the situational determinants of effects for speaker age and rate of speech.

Evaluations of Middle Class and Lower Class Speakers of Standard American and German-Accented English

Male speakers (aged 45-60) of either standard or German-accented American English were presented to middle class Anglo-American undergraduates as individuals belonging to either the lower or middle class. The respondents rated speakers on status, solidarity, and speech dimensions and also completed social distance and belief similarity items. The nonstandard speech style affected listener evaluations negatively on all measures while social class only affected status and speech intelligibility ratings. The lack of predicted interactions indicated that individuals speaking with a German accent were neither more strongly downgraded in the lower class condition nor upgraded in the middle class condition.

Scaling of apparent accentedness by magnitude estimation and sensory modality matching

In each of three experiments, 24 students judged the accentedness present in the speech of eight Spanish-English bilinguals.Ss gave magnitude estimations and also squeezed a hand dynamometer to indicate the amount of accentedness in the reading of an English passage by each of the speakers. There was significant agreement amongSs regarding the speech samples with each scaling method, and interscale agreement was good. Power functions fitted to the data had exponents falling in the range expected from earlier psychophysical studies. Scale values correlated significantly with the frequency of accented pronunciations by the speakers as judged by two independent judges. The use of these scaling methods for future research on linguistic features of accent and on the relation between accent and language attitudes is discussed.

Learning to Attend to Sentence Structure: Links Between Metalinguistic Development and Reading

Metalinguistic activity involves the ability to treat language objectively and to manipulate language structures deliberately. This ability to focus attention on language forms per se becomes possible for children only gradually as their cognitive development proceeds. In the understanding of spoken language, the focus of attention is typically on the meaning of the utterance, and little attention is paid to the particular acoustic forms of the message. Written language, on the other hand, requires analysis and manipulation of language forms in order to extract the meaning from them. According to Vygotsky (1934), Mattingly (1972), and Cazden (1972, 1974), the additional cognitive demands of this analysis and manipulation underly the observed discrepancy between the adequate speaking and listening abilities of the young, school-age child and his limited ability to deal with written language.

The Effects of Negative Affect Arousal on Reactions to Speakers

ABSTRACT Two studies were conducted to test the hypothesis that speakers associated with negative affect and/or frustration will be negatively evaluated. As part of a colour recognition study, the participants in the first experiment listened to tape-recorded colour descriptions by a male speaker of standard English . The tape was either free from noise or punctuated by bursts of white noise. The subjects in the noisy tape condition performed significantly worse on the colour recognition task, and consistent with the hypothesis, judged the speaker less favourably. Participants in the second study listened to the colour descriptions of either a standard or Spanish-accented speaker of English which were presented on tapes with no noise, continuous white noise or bursts of white noise. Colour recognition accuracy was significantly influenced by both noise and accent alone as well as in combination. Accented speakers were responded to more negatively than standard speakers on most measures, including several social evaluation scales. Noise significantly affected other measures, including the ratings of speakers communication effectiveness, tape responsibility for task difficulty, and ease of understanding. The results, as a whole, suggest that serious attention be given to the negative affect mechanism in the social evaluation of nonstandard speech styles.

Child Judgments of Sentences Varying in Grammatical Complexity.

Abstract This study is another contribution to the development of a satisfactory child version of the linguistic task of judging grammaticality. With a nondifferentially reinforced forced-choice procedure, it was found that responses of 24 5- and 24 7-yr-old children did vary as a function of the grammatical complexity of stimulus sentences. The children judged sentence stimuli of two types (negatives and wh-word questions) each having three levels of grammatical complexity (two primitive and one well-formed). After each stimulus presentation, the subject pointed to the adult or the child in a photograph, depending on who was judged to have produced that utterance. Performance of the two age groups did not differ for the question stimuli, for which subjects pointed to the adult more frequently as the grammatical complexity of wh-word questions increased. In response to the negative sentences, the older group attributed more well-formed stimuli to the adult than primitive ones. While the younger group pointed to the adult more frequently for well-formed negatives than for the middle level negatives, they made more adult responses than expected to the least complex negatives. It was concluded that, with this procedure, 5- and 7-yr-olds demonstrate ability to distinguish grammatically well-formed from primitive sentences. Procedural improvements for future research may allow children this age and younger to demonstrate more adult-like discrimination between a variety of primitive and well-formed sentences.

Development of metalinguistic performance in the early school years.

The extent to which children in kindergarten, second, and fourth grade could control their knowledge of syntax was examined in two metalinguistic tasks, judgment and repetition of sentences that va...

Metamemory and metalinguistic development: Correlates of children’s intelligence and achievement

The interrelationships between metamemory and metalinguistic development and their association with verbal intelligence and academic achievements were examined for 80 children in first and third grades. At both grade levels, metamemory correlated significantly with metalinguistic development. The moderate strength of the association was to be expected from a contrast of the two distinct theoretical constructs that are only indirectly linked within the more general concept of metacognition. For children of both ages, relationships between metamemory and metalinguistic level and those between a combined index of metacognition and achievement did not remain significant when the effects due to verbal intelligence were partialed out. The association between the combined index and a metareading assessment was significant for first-grade children, independent of verbal intelligence.