Yen-Chen Hao

Evidence for featural units in the acquisition of speech production skills: Linguistic structure in foreign accent

Abstract This study examines correlations in accuracy of the production of one set of segments with accuracy in segments that share a featural contrast in Korean EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners. Results indicate that accuracy rates for segment sets that share gestures in production tend to correlate, while segments that contrast in the same feature, but require the acquisition of different gestures do not correlate. Data here are from two tasks, a reading task and a mimicry task. Correlation results are similar across the two tasks, though a larger range of inter-subject differences in overall accuracy is evident in the mimicry task. Comparison of correlation patterns with previously published correlation patterns in perceptual identification indicates that patterns differ for perception and production, indicating that the structure of the skill sets, and hence, the acquisitional units for production and perception are different.

Neutralization in the perception and production of English coda obstruents by Korean learners of English

Phonological neutralization rules require the suspension of differences between segments in perception and production. This paper examines the role of neutralization in the production and perception of Korean learners of English. In Korean, laryngeal and manner contrasts found in initial obstruents are systematically neutralized in coda position into stops that sound like voiceless stops in English. The current paper pursues two questions: (1) Does neutralization have the same effect on perceptual and production abilities? (2) are neutralization effects found with all English segments, or are they restricted to stops, which are transferred from Korean? /p, b, t, d, f, v, θ, δ/ were placed after /a/. Two tasks are compared: (A) Identification. Forty Korean learners identified coda consonants produced by four native speakers of English, using English labels. (B) Reading. Ten native English listeners identified coda consonants produced by four Korean learners. Identification errors were largely unidirectiona...

Intonational interference on the perception and production of Mandarin Chinese tones by English‐speaking second language learners.

Most previous studies on L1 transfer focus on segments. The present study investigated the effect of L1 intonation on English speakers’ acquisition of Mandarin Chinese tones. Four intermediate learners read three sentence types: declaratives, yes/no questions, and a list sequence, both in English and Chinese. Their productions showed Tone 3 (low) to Tone 2 (rising), and Tone 4 (falling) to Tone 1 (high) errors, as expected if productions have a (English) terminal rise imposed on them. Nonfinal items in reading a list exhibited similar errors. In the perception task, subjects listened to Chinese productions of the different sentence types and identified the tone and whether the sentence is a statement or a question. When subjects identified a sentence as a question, they tended to judge the final tone to be Tone 2 (rising) or Tone 1 (high). Similarly, with final Tone 2, subjects usually called the sentence a question; and with final Tone 4, subjects often judged it as a declarative. English‐speaking learne...

The categorical nature of tones and consonants: Evidence from second language perception and production

Tones are commonly considered to be psychologically equivalent to phonetic segments like consonants and vowels [Ladd, Intonational Phonology (1996)]. However, comparing two current studies reveals intrinsic differences between tones and consonants. One study examines ten American learners acquiring Chinese tones. The other examines 40 Korean learners acquiring English obstruents. Both studies include three tasks: Identification—subjects identified the tones or consonants of L2 nonsense words. This task requires auditory perception and associating the sound with a linguistic category. Mimicry—subjects listened and repeated the stimuli. This task requires perception and production. Reading—subjects read a list of nonsense words. This task requires associating linguistic labels with speech production. These two studies yield different patterns. For tones, accuracy rates for Mimicry are the highest, suggesting learners have more problems with linguistic association, the component shared by Identification and Reading. For consonants, accuracy rates for Mimicry are the lowest, signifying difficulty with perception and production, but not with linguistic association. Taken together, these findings suggest a pervasive difference in categorical nature of tones and consonants. These results also highlight the necessity of multiple tasks in assessing how linguistic contrasts function in a phonetic system. [Work supported by the NSF.]

Featural generalization in second language identification Performance: Comparing learners with different L1s

Abstract The current study examined identification responses by Taiwan Mandarin L1 speakers learning English. Stimuli were monosyllabic and disyllabic native English productions of voiced and voiceless, labial and coronal, plosives and non-sibilant fricatives. Analyses correlated individual identification performance for laryngeal (hereafter, “voicing”) contrasts and manner contrasts, obtained from different halves of the overall corpus. Manner accuracy correlations were strong, particularly between voiced and voiceless segments. Manner accuracy also correlated across consonants appearing in different prosodic locations, word-initial, word-final, and intervocalic post-stress and pre-stress positions. Voicing accuracy also correlated across prosodic positions, though not between word-final position and the other positions. These results were interpreted with respect to a previously published corpus of Korean learners. The two corpora showed different patterns of correlation across prosodic positions for voicing, apparently due to the effects of different, prosodically-conditioned voicing allophony in the L1s. Finally, overall segmental and d-prime estimates were compared across the two language groups, revealing very strong similarities in the segmental accuracies for the two L1 groups. Analyses, however, also showed a persistent advantage for Mandarin listeners for manner contrasts. It was proposed that the difficulty of individual segments in specific prosodic locations, combined with the overall characteristics of the L1 phonological system, better account for learners’ identification accuracies than does the correspondence of specific L1 and L2 segments.

The effect of second language orthographic input on the learning of Mandarin words

This study examines the effect of L2 orthography on Mandarin word learning. English speakers at three proficiency levels participated in a Mandarin word-learning experiment. During the learning phase, half of the participants were provided with Pinyin (Chinese Romanization) and tone marks (the PY group), while the other half were provided with characters (the CH group). After learning, the participants judged the matching of sound and meaning of 64 pairs, half of which were matches, while the other half were either segmental or tonal-mismatch items. The results showed that the Advanced and Intermediate learners in the CH group were more accurate than their counterparts in the PY group in the tonal-mismatch and match conditions respectively. In contrast, the naive participants in the PY group were more accurate with the matches than those in the CH group. Also, participants in the PY group were overall inaccurate with the tonal-mismatch items regardless of their proficiency levels. However, in the CH group...

The perception of English coda obstruents by Mandarin and Korean second language learners

This study investigates the perception of English obstruents by learners whose native language is either Mandarin, which does not permit coda obstruents, or Korean, which neutralizes laryngeal and manner contrasts into voiceless stop codas. The stimuli are native productions of eight English obstruents /p b t d f v θ ð/ combined with the vowel /ɑ/ in different prosodic contexts. Forty-one Mandarin and 40 Korean speakers identified the consonant from the auditorily presented stimuli. The results show that the two groups do not differ in their accuracy in the onset position, indicating that they are comparable in their proficiency. However, the Mandarin speakers are more accurate in the coda position than the Koreans. When the fricatives and stops are analyzed separately, it shows that the two groups do not differ with fricatives, yet the Mandarin speakers are more accurate than the Koreans with stops. These findings suggest that having stop codas in their L1 does not necessarily facilitate Koreans’ acquisi...

Acoustic properties of multi-talker babble

Multi-talker babble can function as an excellent masker for speech stimuli in perception experiments. It has a higher degree of ecological validity than other maskers (e.g., white noise, speech-shaped noise), as it is a type of noise that many listeners encounter on a regular basis in everyday life. In addition, maskers constructed from speech have, by definition, acoustic properties similar to that of the signal. While multi-talker babble is used extensively in speech perception research, relatively little work has been done on the fine-grained acoustic properties of multi-talker babble. We present analyses of a number of acoustic properties of multi-talker babble generated by randomly combining phonetically balanced utterances (e.g., amplitude modulation depth, amplitude modulation frequencies, spectral properties, and spectro-temporal variability). In order to gain a fuller understanding of the nature of multi-talker babble, we analyze how the acoustic properties of babble vary as a function of the number (2–20), gender, and native language (English vs. Mandarin) of the speakers constituting the babble components. Future extensions of this work will (a) focus on how these acoustic variables affect speech perception, and (b) provide the foundation for a web-based system for generating customized samples of multi-talker babble noise for speech perception researchers.

Confusion direction differences in second language production and perception.

This study examines differences between confusions found in productions and perceptions of learners of English. Twenty Korean EFL learners engaged in three tasks involving obstruents placed in different prosodic positions: (a) identification of native English productions, (b) reading from orthographic prompts, and (c) mimicry of native English productions. Recordings of reading and mimicry were presented to 50 native English listeners for identification. This paper compares patterns of errors found for 10 intervocalic obstruents before and after a stress, since previous studies showed that Korean does not exhibit stress‐induced differences in consonant allophones. Similarity estimates using Luce’s similarity choice model were regressed across the two intervocalic positions. We found robust correlations despite allophonic differences in English, suggesting a component of L1 transfer in all three tasks. Examining bias parameters, however, revealed systematic differences in the direction of the resulting err...

The correlation between perceiving and producing English obstruents across Korean learners.

Our previous work determined that the skill structure evident in cross‐subject correlations differed in second language production and perception. This study examines how these production and perception skills correlate across subjects, finding pervasive differences between contrasts similar to ones in the L1 and novel contrasts. Twenty Korean learners of English listened to and identified eight anterior obstruents produced by four American English speakers before, after, and between the vowel /a/. The same learners were also presented with orthographic probes and produced the same eight obstruents, and English listeners identified the consonants in these recordings. Analyses show no significant correlations between production and perception accuracy in consonant voicing (similar to L1), indicating pervasive disjunction between perceiving and producing voicing contrasts in the learners. Voicing accuracy was systematically better in identification than production, suggesting a precedence for perceptual learning. Analyses of manner accuracy in labial consonants, however, reveal a robust correlation, indicating a strong relationship between perceiving manner contrasts (novel to L1) and producing them. In addition, several subjects exhibited better accuracy in production than perception, suggesting an interaction of perceptual and motor learning. Coronal stops and fricatives show similar patterns, however, without the robust correlation between perceptual and production accuracy.