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Free Allophonic Variation in Native and Second Language Spoken Word Recognition: The Case of the German Rhotic.

ABSTRACT: The question of how listeners deal with different phonetic variant forms for the same words in perception has sparked great interest over the past few decades, especially with regard to lenited and regional forms. However, the perception of free variant forms of allophones within the same syllable position remains surprisingly understudied. Because of this, in the present study, we investigate how free allophonic variation in the realization of the German rhotic (/r/) impacts spoken word recognition for native German listeners and two groups of non-native listeners (French and Italian learners of German). By means of a visual-world eye-tracking task, we tested the recognition of spoken German words starting with /r/ when the rhotic was produced either as the more canonical variant, the uvular fricative [] which is considered the German standard, or as an alveolar trill [r], a common realization in the south of Germany. Results showed that German listeners were more efficient at recognizing /r/-initial words when these were produced with the uvular fricative than with the alveolar trill. French listeners did not differ from German listeners in that respect, but Italian listeners showed exactly the opposite pattern: they showed an advantage when words were produced with the alveolar trill. These findings suggest that, for native listeners, the canonicity of the variant form is an important determiner of ease of recognition, even in the absence of orthographic or perceptual motivations for the primacy of canonical variants for this particular example of variation. For non-native listeners, by contrast, results are better explained by the match of the different allophones to the canonical realization of /r/ in their native language than by the status or frequency of the allophones in the non-native language itself.

SUBMITTER: Llompart M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8637905 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Spoken word recognition involves a perceptual tradeoff between the reliance on the incoming acoustic signal and knowledge about likely sound categories and their co-occurrences as words. This study examined how adult second language (L2) learners navigate between acoustic-based and knowledge-based spoken word recognition when listening to highly variable, multi-talker truncated speech, and whether this perceptual tradeoff changes as L2 listeners gradually become more proficient in their L2 after multiple months of structured classroom learning. First language (L1) Mandarin Chinese listeners and L1 English-L2 Mandarin adult listeners took part in a gating experiment. The L2 listeners were tested twice - once at the start of their intermediate/advanced L2 language class and again 2 months later. L1 listeners were only tested once. Participants were asked to identify syllable-tone words that varied in syllable token frequency (high/low according to a spoken word corpus) and syllable-conditioned tonal probability (most probable/least probable in speech given the syllable). The stimuli were recorded by 16 different talkers and presented at eight gates ranging from onset-only (gate 1) through onset +40 ms increments (gates 2 through 7) to the full word (gate 8). Mixed-effects regression modeling was used to compare performance to our previous study which used single-talker stimuli (Wiener et al., 2019). The results indicated that multi-talker speech caused both L1 and L2 listeners to rely greater on knowledge-based processing of tone. L1 listeners were able to draw on distributional knowledge of syllable-tone probabilities in early gates and switch to predominantly acoustic-based processing when more of the signal was available. In contrast, L2 listeners, with their limited experience with talker range normalization, were less able to effectively transition from probability-based to acoustic-based processing. Moreover, for the L2 listeners, the reliance on such distributional information for spoken word recognition appeared to be conditioned by the nature of the acoustic signal. Single-talker speech did not result in the same pattern of probability-based tone processing, suggesting that knowledge-based processing of L2 speech may only occur under certain acoustic conditions, such as multi-talker speech.

Project description:Purpose Word learning difficulties have been documented in multiple studies involving children with dyslexia and developmental language disorder (DLD; see also specific language impairment). However, no previous studies have directly contrasted word learning in these two frequently co-occurring disorders. We examined word learning in second-grade students with DLD-only and dyslexia-only as compared to each other, peers with both disorders (DLD + dyslexia), and peers with typical development. We hypothesized that children with dyslexia-only and DLD-only would show differences in word learning due to differences in their core language strengths and weaknesses. Method Children (N = 244) were taught eight novel pseudowords paired with unfamiliar objects. The teaching script included multiple exposures to the phonological form, the pictured object, a verbal semantic description of the object, and spaced retrieval practice opportunities. Word learning was assessed immediately after instruction with tasks requiring recall or recognition of the phonological and semantic information. Results Children with dyslexia-only performed significantly better on existing vocabulary measures than their peers with DLD-only. On experimental word learning measures, children in the dyslexia-only and DLD + dyslexia groups showed significantly poorer performance than typically developing children on all word learning tasks. Children with DLD-only differed significantly from the TD group on a single word learning task assessing verbal semantic recall. Conclusions Overall, results indicated that children with dyslexia display broad word learning difficulties extending beyond the phonological domain; however, this contrasted with their relatively strong performance on measures of existing vocabulary knowledge. More research is needed to understand relations between word learning abilities and overall vocabulary knowledge and how to close vocabulary gaps for children with both disorders. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.14832717.

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Free Allophonic Variation in Native and Second Language Spoken Word Recognition: The Case of the German Rhotic.

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