A formal account of the interaction of orthography and perception

Abstract

This study presents a formal generative model that integrates perception and reading, and uses English intervocalic consonants borrowed into Italian as either singletons or geminates to illustrate how the model works. Consisting of words borrowed in the 20th century, our data show that the quantity of the intervocalic consonant in an Italian loanword depends on its written representation in English, the source language. Thus only English intervocalic consonants that are written with two identical letters (for example, as in splatter) are borrowed as geminates. We provide a formalization of these orthographic adaptations with grapheme-to-phoneme mappings in the shape of Optimality-theoretic constraints that model the native reading process, and show how the output of these mappings is restricted by native phonotactic constraints. Furthermore, we illustrate that the native reading grammar proposed here complements the perceptual adaptation model by Boersma and Hamann (2009). This combined model is shown to be able to account for simultaneous orthographic and perceptual borrowings in Italian, as well as to hold for reading and perception outside the realm of loanword adaptation.

Orthographic forms affect speech perception in a second language: Consonant and vowel length in L2 English.

“…Various articles by Bassetti and colleagues provided evidence that supports this interpretation. Furthermore, such results could explain why many English loanwords that are spelled with double consonant letters have entered Italian as containing a geminate (Hamann & Colombo, 2017), as illusory perception could reinforce written input.…”

L2 speech learning of European Portuguese /l/ and /ɾ/ by L1-Mandarin learners: Experimental evidence and theoretical modelling

“…Apart from the experimental studies, in chapter 4, we provide a formal account for several L2 speech phenomena emerged during the acquisition of EP /l/ and /ɾ/ by L1-Mandairn learners, namely the between-subject (4.3.1) and within-subject variations (4.3.2) in L2 phonological categorization, prosodic effect in L2 phonological categorization (4.3.3), the interaction between phonological categorization and orthography during the construction of L2 underlying representations (4.4) and the L2 perception-production asymmetry (4.5). Our theoretical modelling within the Bidirectional Phonology and Phonetics Model (Boersma & Hamann, 2009a;Boersma, 2011;Hamann & Colombo, 2017) not only offers a fairly adequate account for all aforementioned L2 phenomena, which other L2 models cannot explain, but also put forward testable predictions for future studies.…”

Mandarin adaptations of voiced alveolar fricative [z] in English loanwords

“…Consequently, a new adaptation pattern would emerge as a result of conforming to the source-loan orthographic alignment. The surface forms of orthography-based adaptation could be different from those driven by phonetic and phonological mapping (Vendelin & Peperkamp, 2006;Kang, 2009;Hamann & Colombo, 2017).…”

“…During the adaptation, the non-native (SL) segments and structures will be modified according to perceptual and phonological similarity, which are regarded as grammatical factors (Peperkamp & Dupoux, 2003;Boersma & Hamann, 2009;Paradis & Tremblay, 2009;Hsieh, 2014;Chang, 2013;Chen & Lu, 2020). However, the extra-grammatical factors, such as orthography, can also influence the adaptation result (Vendelin & Peperkamp, 2006;Detey & Nespoulous, 2008;Kang, 2009;Daland et al, 2015;Hamann & Colombo, 2017). Take Mandarin adaptations of English voiced alveolar fricative [z] E as an example, it is mainly adapted into Mandarin as [s] M or [ts] M , and occasionally borrowed as other fricatives and affricates ("[]" is used to represent sounds; a subscript M is attached to mark the Mandarin form; a subscript E is attached to mark the English form;).…”