Bilinguals Use Language-Specific Articulatory Settings

Wilson, Irwin B.; Gick, Bryan

doi:10.1044/2013_jslhr-s-12-0345

Cited by 49 publications

(50 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…For /ʃ/, there was a main effect of age group ( F (1,94) = 35.62, p < .001, η 2 = .268), but no main effect of gender or interaction between age and gender. Taken together, these results first confirm that the centroid frequency is very high for both fricatives in the youngest children, perhaps due to the effects on the “undifferentiated lingual gesture” of the generally high tongue tip in the “articulatory setting” of English (Wilson & Gick, 2014), and then suggest that in subsequent development, the centroid of /ʃ/ decreases with age for both genders, whereas the centroid of /s/ changes with age only for men. This interaction results in men having /s/ and /ʃ/ categories that are closer together than those of women.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 63%

Quantifying the Robustness of the English Sibilant Fricative Contrast in Children

Holliday

Reidy

Beckman

et al. 2015

J Speech Lang Hear Res

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Purpose Four measures of children’s developing robustness of phonological contrast were compared to see how they correlated with age, with vocabulary size, and with adult listeners’ “correctness” ratings. Method Word-initial sibilant fricative productions from 81 two- to five-year-old children and 20 adults were phonetically transcribed and acoustically analyzed. Four measures of robustness of contrast were calculated for each speaker based on the centroid frequency measured from each fricative token. Productions from different children that were transcribed as correct were then used as stimuli in a perception experiment in which adult listeners rated the goodness of each production. Results Results showed that the degree of category overlap, quantified as the percentage of a child’s productions whose category could be correctly predicted from the output of a mixed effects logistic regression model, was the measure that correlated best with listeners’ goodness judgments. Conclusions Even when children’s productions have been transcribed as “correct”, adult listeners are sensitive to within-category variation quantified by the child’s degree of category overlap. Further research is needed to explore the relationship between the age of a child and adults’ sensitivity to different types of within-category variation in children’s speech.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 63%

Quantifying the Robustness of the English Sibilant Fricative Contrast in Children

Holliday

Reidy

Beckman

et al. 2015

J Speech Lang Hear Res

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show abstract

“…For example, within a given language, speaking rate (in terms of syllables per second) may be substantially constrained by dialectal affiliation (e.g., see Jacewicz et al , 2010, for evidence of dialect-based variation in American English), and therefore an individual bilingual talker may have a relatively fast speaking rate in one language but a relatively slow speaking rate in the other language depending on the characteristic temporal patterns of the talker's dialectal affiliation in each language. Consistent with this view, Wilson and Gick (2013) demonstrated that highly proficient, balanced bilinguals adopted distinct language-specific articulatory settings for each language. This study demonstrated distinct interspeech postural settings (i.e., lip, jaw, and tongue position during inter-utterance pauses) in French and English sentence recordings by a group of French-English bilinguals, indicating that bilinguals can switch between the language-specific articulatory settings of their two languages.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 54%

Language-independent talker-specificity in first-language and second-language speech production by bilingual talkers: L1 speaking rate predicts L2 speaking rate

Bradlow¹,

Kim²,

Blasingame³

2017

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Second-language (L2) speech is consistently slower than first-language (L1) speech, and L1 speaking rate varies within- and across-talkers depending on many individual, situational, linguistic, and sociolinguistic factors. It is asked whether speaking rate is also determined by a language-independent talker-specific trait such that, across a group of bilinguals, L1 speaking rate significantly predicts L2 speaking rate. Two measurements of speaking rate were automatically extracted from recordings of read and spontaneous speech by English monolinguals (n = 27) and bilinguals from ten L1 backgrounds (n = 86): speech rate (syllables/second), and articulation rate (syllables/second excluding silent pauses). Replicating prior work, L2 speaking rates were significantly slower than L1 speaking rates both across-groups (monolinguals' L1 English vs bilinguals' L2 English), and across L1 and L2 within bilinguals. Critically, within the bilingual group, L1 speaking rate significantly predicted L2 speaking rate, suggesting that a significant portion of inter-talker variation in L2 speech is derived from inter-talker variation in L1 speech, and that individual variability in L2 spoken language production may be best understood within the context of individual variability in L1 spoken language production.

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“…Due to the highlevel analysis we employed, these results might be suggestive of a difference in articulatory settings [10] at the dialect level. However, this needs to be confirmed by focusing on the tongue position during the speakers' interspeech posture (e.g., [28]). …”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating dialectal differences using articulography

Wieling

Tomaschek

Arnold

et al. 2016

Journal of Phonetics

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The present study introduces articulography, the measurement of the position of tongue and lips during speech, as a promising method to the study of dialect variation. By using generalized additive modeling to analyze articulatory trajectories, we are able to reliably detect aggregate group differences, while simultaneously taking into account the individual variation across dozens of speakers. Our results on the basis of Dutch dialect data show clear differences between the southern and the northern dialect with respect to tongue position, with a more frontal tongue position in the dialect from Ubbergen (in the southern half of the Netherlands) than in the dialect of Ter Apel (in the northern half of the Netherlands). Thus articulography appears to be a suitable tool to investigate structural differences in pronunciation at the dialect level.

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Bilinguals Use Language-Specific Articulatory Settings

Cited by 49 publications

References 25 publications

Quantifying the Robustness of the English Sibilant Fricative Contrast in Children

Quantifying the Robustness of the English Sibilant Fricative Contrast in Children

Language-independent talker-specificity in first-language and second-language speech production by bilingual talkers: L1 speaking rate predicts L2 speaking rate

Investigating dialectal differences using articulography

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