Distributional Learning of Speech Sounds: An Exploratory Study Into the Effects of Prior Language Experience

Chládková, Kateřina; Šimáčková, Šárka

doi:10.1111/lang.12432

Cited by 10 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Probably, in order to form new categories via distributional exposure, at least some implicit top-down information flow is needed for fast distributional learning in adults to take place: both lexicon and distributional information may be needed for the emergence of abstract categories (Boersma et al, 2013; Feldman, Griffiths, Goldwater & Morgan, 2013). Recent studies indicate that the mechanism of unsupervised statistical (including distributional) learning may not be readily available for category creation on phonetic dimensions with which listeners have no prior experience (Chládková & Šimáčková, 2021; Ong et al, 2017). Our findings add to that recent literature by showing that category creation on an uncolonized dimension (duration) was smaller (if any) than category shift on a familiar dimension (F1).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unattended distributional training can shift phoneme boundaries

2022

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Listeners are sensitive to speech sounds’ probability distributions. Distributional training (DT) studies with adults typically involve conscious activation of phoneme labels. We show that distributional exposure can shift existing phoneme boundaries (Spanish /e/–/i/) pre-attentively. Using a DT paradigm involving two bimodal distributions we assessed listener's neural discrimination across three sounds, showing pre-to-post-test improvement for the two adjacent sounds that fell into different clusters of the trained distribution than for those that fell into one cluster. Upon unattended exposure to an intricate stimulus set, listeners thus relocate native phoneme boundaries. We assessed whether the paradigm also works for category creation (Spanish establishing a duration contrast), where it has methodological advantages over the usual unimodal-versus-bimodal paradigm. DT yielded a greater effect for the /e/–/i/ boundary shift than for duration contrast creation. It seems that second-language phoneme contrasts similar to native ones might be easier to acquire than new contrasts.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unattended distributional training can shift phoneme boundaries

2022

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“…Therefore, it is possible that there may be less structural overlap between Mandarin and Hindi retroflexion than would be necessary for a learning transfer effect to be observed in adults (e.g. Chládková and Šimáčková, 2021). Taken together, this suggests that the linguistic feature canonically known as 'retroflexion' may be under-specified for the purposes of fine-grained perception tasks involving speakers of different languages.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On the other hand, stronger evidence of statistical learning in adults has been found in some studies. Chládková and Šimáčková (2021) found Czech speakers were able to learn a novel Czech-like durational contrast following bimodal distributional training while Greek speakers who were not familiar with this linguistic feature were not able to learn. Similar evidence of adults benefitting from statistical learning can also be seen in a series of studies that show that Dutch-learning native Spanish speakers living in the Netherlands show a significant improvement in their perception of the difficult Dutch /ɑ/-/a:/ vowel contrast following bimodal distributional training (Escudero et al, 2011;Wanrooij et al, 2013;Escudero & Williams, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Is retroflexion a stable cue for distributional learning for speech sounds across languages? Learning for some bilingual adults, but not generalisable to a wider population in a well powered pre-registered study

Goh¹,

Onnis²,

Styles³

2022

Preprint

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Bilinguals are widely reported to have certain kinds of cognitive advantages, including language learning advantages. One possible pathway is a language-specific transfer effect, whereby sensitivity to structural regularities in known languages can be brought to to-be-acquired languages that share particular features. Here we tested for transfer of a specific linguistic property, sensitivity to retroflexion as contrastive phonemic feature. We designed a task for bilinguals with homogeneous language exposure (i.e., bilingual in the same languages) and heterogeneous feature representation (i.e., differing levels of proficiency). Hindi and Mandarin Chinese both have retroflexion in phoneme contrasts (Hindi: stop consonants, Mandarin: sibilants). In a preregistered study, we conducted a statistical learning task for the Hindi dental-retroflex stop contrast with a group of early parallel English-Mandarin bilinguals, who varied in their Mandarin understanding levels. We based the target sample size on power analysis of a pilot study with a Bayesian stop-rule after minimum threshold. Contrary to the pilot study (N = 15), the main study (N = 50) did not find evidence for a learning effect, nor language-experience variance within the group. This finding suggests that statistical learning effects for the feature in question may be more fragile than commonly assumed, and may be evident in only a small subsample of the general population (as in our pilot). These stimuli have previously shown learning effects in children, so an additional possibility is that neural commitment to adults’ languages prevents learning of the fine-stimulus contrast in question for this adult population.

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“…Research with adults supports the idea that adults also leverage statistical and lexical evidence in the acquisition of L2 phonemes (Chládková and Šimáčková, 2020;Escudero et al, 2011;Feldman et al, 2013;Maye, 2000). For example, Hayes-Harb (2007) compared adult second language learners' use of statistical and lexical evidence to learn a novel contrast between the voiceless unaspirated and voiced unaspirated velar stops (i.e.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 85%

The acquisition of L2 allophonic variants: The role of phonological distribution and lexical cues

Barrios

Rodriguez

Barriuso

2022

Second Language Research

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Adult learners acquire second language (L2) allophones with experience. We examine two mechanisms which may support the acquisition of allophonic variants in second language acquisition. One of the mechanisms is based on the distribution of phones with respect to their phonological context (i.e. phonological distribution). The other is based on the role the phones play in contrasting words (i.e. lexical contrast). Experiment 1 established adult native English speakers’ baseline sensitivity to the novel [b]–[β] auditory contrast. In Experiment 2 we examined whether adult native English speakers infer the phonological status of [b] and [β] in an artificial language based only on their distributions to phonological contexts. We observed no evidence that these participants were able to do so. In Experiment 3 we investigated whether learners infer the phonological status of [b] and [β] from the role they play in lexical contrast and observed both perceptual and lexical processing evidence to suggest that adults may use meaning-based cues to the lack of contrast to learn that two phones are allophones of the same phoneme. Together our findings suggest that adult L2 learners may prioritize information about function (in this case, lexical contrast) over the phonological distribution of phones as they determine the phonological status of L2 sounds.

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Distributional Learning of Speech Sounds: An Exploratory Study Into the Effects of Prior Language Experience

Cited by 10 publications

References 40 publications

Unattended distributional training can shift phoneme boundaries

Unattended distributional training can shift phoneme boundaries

Is retroflexion a stable cue for distributional learning for speech sounds across languages? Learning for some bilingual adults, but not generalisable to a wider population in a well powered pre-registered study

The acquisition of L2 allophonic variants: The role of phonological distribution and lexical cues

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