Dataset Information

The Emergence of a Phoneme-Sized Unit in L2 Speech Production: Evidence from Japanese-English Bilinguals.

ABSTRACT: Recent research has revealed that the way phonology is constructed during word production differs across languages. Dutch and English native speakers are suggested to incrementally insert phonemes into a metrical frame, whereas Mandarin Chinese speakers use syllables and Japanese speakers use a unit called the mora (often a CV cluster such as "ka" or "ki"). The present study is concerned with the question how bilinguals construct phonology in their L2 when the phonological unit size differs from the unit in their L1. Japanese-English bilinguals of varying proficiency read aloud English words preceded by masked primes that overlapped in just the onset (e.g., bark-BENCH) or the onset plus vowel corresponding to the mora-sized unit (e.g., bell-BENCH). Low-proficient Japanese-English bilinguals showed CV priming but did not show onset priming, indicating that they use their L1 phonological unit when reading L2 English words. In contrast, high-proficient Japanese-English bilinguals showed significant onset priming. The size of the onset priming effect was correlated with the length of time spent in English-speaking countries, which suggests that extensive exposure to L2 phonology may play a key role in the emergence of a language-specific phonological unit in L2 word production.

SUBMITTER: Nakayama M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4763048 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

The Emergence of a Phoneme-Sized Unit in L2 Speech Production: Evidence from Japanese-English Bilinguals.

Nakayama Mariko M Kinoshita Sachiko S Verdonschot Rinus G RG

Frontiers in psychology 20160223

Recent research has revealed that the way phonology is constructed during word production differs across languages. Dutch and English native speakers are suggested to incrementally insert phonemes into a metrical frame, whereas Mandarin Chinese speakers use syllables and Japanese speakers use a unit called the mora (often a CV cluster such as "ka" or "ki"). The present study is concerned with the question how bilinguals construct phonology in their L2 when the phonological unit size differs from ...[more]

PMID: 26941669

Similar Datasets

Project description:This study investigates the acquisition of anaphora resolution (AR) in Spanish as a second language (L2). According to the Position of Antecedent Strategy (PAS), in native Spanish null pronominal subjects are biased toward subject antecedents, whereas overt pronominal subjects show a "flexible" bias (typically toward non-subject but also toward subject antecedents). The PAS has been extensively investigated in experimental studies, though little is known about real production. We show how naturalistic production (corpus methods) can uncover crucial factors in the PAS that have not been explored in the experimental literature. We analyzed written samples from the CEDEL2 corpus: L1 English-L2 Spanish adult late-bilingual learners (intermediate, lower-advanced and upper-advanced proficiency levels) and a control group of adult Spanish monolinguals (N = 75 texts). Anaphors were manually annotated via a fine-grained, linguistically-motivated tagset in UAM Corpus Tool. Against traditional assumptions, our results reveal that (i) the PAS is not a privileged mechanism for resolving anaphora; (ii) it is more complex than assumed (in terms of the division of labor of anaphoric forms, their antecedents and the syntactic configuration in which they appear); (iii) the much-debated "flexible" bias of overt pronouns is apparent since they are hardly produced and are replaced by repeated NPs, which show a clear non-subject antecedent bias; (iv) at the syntax-discourse interface, the PAS is constrained by information structure in more complex ways than assumed: null pronouns mark topic continuity, whereas overtly realized referential expressions (overt REs: overt pronouns and NPs) mark topic shift. Learners show more difficulties with topic continuity (where they redundantly use overt pronouns) than with topic shift (where they normally disambiguate by using overtly realized REs), thus being more redundant than ambiguous, in line with the Pragmatic Principles Violation Hypothesis (PPVH) (Lozano, 2016). We finally argue that the insights from corpora should be implemented into experiments. The triangulation of corpus and experimental methods in bilingualism ultimately provides a clearer understanding of the phenomenon under investigation.

Project description:There is extensive evidence showing that bilinguals activate the lexical and the syntactic representations of both languages in a nonselective way. However, the extent to which the lexical and the syntactic levels of representations interact during second language (L2) sentence processing and how those interactions are modulated by L2 proficiency remain unclear. This paper aimed to directly address these issues by using an online technique (eye-tracking) that is highly sensitive to the lexical and syntactic processes involved in sentence reading. To that purpose, native-speakers of European Portuguese (EP) learning English as L2 at intermediate and advanced levels of proficiency were asked to silently read temporally ambiguous L2 relative clause (RC) sentences disambiguated with a High-Attachment (HA) or Low-Attachment (LA) strategy while their eye-movements were monitored. Since EP and English native speakers differ in the way they process and comprehend this syntactic structure (EP: HA, English: LA), HA preferences were used as a marker of L1 RC syntax interference. Additionally, the cognate status of the complex NP that preceded the RC was manipulated to further analyze how the lexical co-activation of both languages would also affect the syntactic representations of the non-target (L1) language. Results showed cognate facilitation in early and late reading time measures regardless of L2 proficiency, and also that the cognate status of the complex NP impacted L2 reading performance, particularly at lower levels of L2 proficiency. These findings provide compelling evidence for a bilingual reading system that seems to be highly dynamic and interactive not only within each level of processing, but, importantly, across levels of representation. They also suggested that, as the level of L2 proficiency increases, L1 RC syntax interference becomes stronger, in a syntactic parser that seems to operate in a more integrated and nonselective way, with both strategies being equally available to guide L2 reading comprehension. Results are discussed attending to the current models of bilingual syntactic processing.

Dataset Information

The Emergence of a Phoneme-Sized Unit in L2 Speech Production: Evidence from Japanese-English Bilinguals.

Publications

The Emergence of a Phoneme-Sized Unit in L2 Speech Production: Evidence from Japanese-English Bilinguals.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets