Neurophysiological evidence of delayed segmentation in a foreign language

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that segmentation skills are language-specific, making it difficult to segment continuous speech in an unfamiliar language into its component words.Here we present the first study capturing the delay in segmentation and recognition in the foreign listener using ERPs. We compared the ability of Dutch adults and of English adults without knowledge of Dutch ('foreign listeners') to segment familiarized words from continuous Dutch speech. We used the known effect of repetition on the event-related potential (ERP) as an index of recognition of words in continuous speech. Our results show that word repetitions in isolation are recognized with equivalent facility by native and foreign listeners, but word repetitions in continuous speech are not. First, words familiarized in isolation are recognized faster by native than by foreign listeners when they are repeated in continuous speech. Second, when words that have previously been heard only in a continuous-speech context re-occur in continuous speech, the repetition is detected by native listeners, but is not detected by foreign listeners. A preceding speech context facilitates word recognition for native listeners, but delays or even inhibits word recognition for foreign listeners. We propose that the apparent difference in segmentation rate between native and foreign listeners is grounded in the difference in language-specific skills available to the listeners. Introduction"Parlez plus lentement, s'il vous plaît", "Bitte, sprechen Sie langsamer","Hable más despacio, por favor": Such utterances are the common resource of listeners attempting to understand an unfamiliar language: "Please, speak more slowly". Continuous speech contains no silences between words analogous to the spaces in written text. But while the continuity of spoken utterances is hardly noticeable in the native language, so that we effortlessly interpret each utterance as a sequence of individual words, the process of resolving continuous speech into words is markedly harder in a foreign language. This may explain why speech in foreign languages often seems unnervingly fast (Pfitzinger and Tamashima, 2006). The difficulty of segmenting foreign speech lies in part in the language-specificity of the procedures by which listeners segment speech into words (Cutler et al., 1983(Cutler et al., , 1986(Cutler et al., , 1989Dumay et al., 2002;Kolinksy et al., 1995;Otake et al., 1993; B R A I N R E S E A R C H 1 1 7 8 ( 2 0 0 7 ) 1 0 6 -1 1 3 ⁎ Corresponding author.

Foreign Languages Sound Fast: Evidence from Implicit Rate Normalization

“…Bosker et al (2017) demonstrated that a carrier sentence is perceived as faster if listeners are taxed by high relative to low cognitive load required for a concurrent visual search task. This supports suggestions that FLs sound fast because they are harder to process; that is, words are harder to segment out of the continuous speech stream (Snijders et al, 2007). Similarly, Bosker and Reinisch (2015) showed that sentences spoken with a foreign accent that are supposedly harder to process than native speech are perceived as faster than native speech.…”

“…Neurophysiological support for delayed segmentation in non-native listeners has been provided by an ERP study by Snijders et al (2007). Analyses of ERP responses to word repetitions in isolation revealed no difference between natives and non-natives: both groups showed a more positive ERP response to later presentations of the same word.…”

“…In that study, carrier sentences were shown to be perceived as faster when listeners were taxed by a simultaneously presented difficult visual search task. The same principle may apply to the perception of a FL: words in a FL are harder to segment out of the continuous speech stream (Snijders et al, 2007), thus taxing the perceptual system, and consequently inducing a higher perceived speech rate.…”

Event-related potentials index segmentation of nonsense sounds

“…Further, native Japanese speakers listening to normal English and English-sounding nonsense sentences did not show any evidence of segmentation within the first 300 ms after word onset (Sanders & Neville, 2003b). Studies employing a familiarization paradigm in which words were initially presented in isolation and then in continuous speech indicate that the earliest indication of segmentation for 10-month-old infants is 340 ms after onset (Kooijman, Hagoort, & Cutler, 2005) and in non-native speakers is 515 ms after onset (Snijders, Kooijman, Cultler, & Hagoort, 2007). Taken together these studies indicate that expertise, though not necessarily learning a language as a native speaker, is necessary for the rapid, online segmentation indexed by the early ERP effects.…”

Why Pitch Sensitivity Matters: Event-Related Potential Evidence of Metric and Syntactic Violation Detection Among Spanish Late Learners of German

“…Snijders et al (2007) have provided neurophysiological evidence that English adults show similar but delayed and reduced segmentation responses to Dutch stimuli compared to Dutch L1. Hence, L2 segmentation is qualitatively different although Dutch and English are highly similar languages.…”