Recent news
Congrats to UROP grant recipient
Congratulations to Kathryn Turner, who was awarded an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) grant to work on research in the lab in Spring 2017! Below is a brief description of the project she will be working on:
- Kathryn Turner: "Development of speech production in Korean-English bilingual children"
Kathryn will be comparing the speech production of young children acquiring both Korean and English with that of age-matched children acquiring only one of these languages. The goal of this project is to better understand how bilingual children differ from monolingual children with respect to the arc of their language development. Kathryn will contribute to the acoustic analysis of audio recordings from an elicited production task with 10-year-old children, focusing on fricative production.
Paper on tone learning aptitude in Language Learning
A research article entitled "Pitch ability as an aptitude for tone learning" (Bowles, Chang & Karuzis, 2016) has been published in the December issue of Language Learning.
Abstract: Tone languages such as Mandarin use voice pitch to signal lexical contrasts, presenting a challenge for second/foreign language (L2) learners whose native languages do not use pitch in this manner. The present study examined components of an aptitude for mastering L2 lexical tone. Native English speakers with no previous tone language experience completed a Mandarin word learning task, as well as tests of pitch ability, musicality, L2 aptitude, and general cognitive ability. Pitch ability measures improved predictions of learning performance beyond musicality, L2 aptitude, and general cognitive ability and also predicted transfer of learning to new talkers. In sum, although certain nontonal measures help predict successful tone learning, the central components of tonal aptitude are pitch-specific perceptual measures.
This study was published with supporting information (appendices), which can be viewed here.
Jimmy Sbordone at UROP symposium
Jimmy Sbordone (CAS '18) with his e-poster ("Comparison of Northern Pomo and Southeastern Pomo Sound Inventories") at the Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium, hosted by the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). Jimmy worked in the PAMLab on Southeastern Pomo audio analysis in Spring 2016 and with mentor Cathy O'Connor in Summer 2016. Great job, Jimmy!
Welcome to Dr. Kwon!
Welcome to Dr. Sungmi Kwon, Associate Professor in the Department of Korean Language and Literature at Pukyong National University (부경대학교) in Korea, who will be a Visiting Researcher in the lab for 2016-17. Dr. Kwon's area of specialty is interlanguage Korean phonetics and phonology. During her visit, she will be working on research projects investigating L2 perception and production of Korean.
Paper on Mandarin tone in Heritage Language Journal
A research article entitled "Toward an understanding of heritage prosody: Acoustic and perceptual properties of tone produced by heritage, native, and second language speakers of Mandarin" (Chang & Yao, 2016) has been published in the August issue of the Heritage Language Journal.
Abstract: In previous work examining heritage language phonology, heritage speakers have often patterned differently from native speakers and late-onset second language (L2) learners with respect to overall accent and segmentals. The current study extended this line of inquiry to suprasegmentals, comparing the properties of lexical tones produced by heritage, native, and L2 speakers of Mandarin living in the U.S. We hypothesized that heritage speakers would approximate native norms for Mandarin tones more closely than L2 speakers, yet diverge from these norms in one or more ways. We further hypothesized that, due to their unique linguistic experience, heritage speakers would sound the most ambiguous in terms of demographic background. Acoustic data showed that heritage speakers approximated native-like production more closely than L2 speakers with respect to the pitch contour of Tone 3, durational shortening in connected speech, and rates of Tone 3 reduction in non-phrase-final contexts, while showing the highest levels of tonal variability among all groups. Perceptual data indicated that heritage speakers’ tones differed from native and L2 speakers’ in terms of both intelligibility and perceived goodness. Consistent with the variability results, heritage speakers were the most difficult group to classify demographically. Taken together, these findings suggest that, with respect to tone, early heritage language experience can, but does not necessarily, result in a phonological advantage over L2 learners. Further, they add support to the view that heritage speakers are language users distinct from both native and L2 speakers.
This study is a follow-up to Chang, Yao, Haynes, and Rhodes (2011).
Paper on bilingual perception in Bilingualism
A research article entitled "Bilingual perceptual benefits of experience with a heritage language" (Chang, 2016) has been published in the August issue of Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.
Abstract: Research on the linguistic knowledge of heritage speakers has been concerned primarily with the advantages conferred by heritage language experience in production, perception, and (re)learning of the heritage language. Meanwhile, second-language speech research has begun to investigate potential benefits of first-language transfer in second-language performance. Bridging these two bodies of work, the current study examined the perceptual benefits of heritage language experience for heritage speakers of Korean in both the heritage language (Korean) and the dominant language (American English). It was hypothesized that, due to their early bilingual experience and the different nature of unreleased stops in Korean and American English, heritage speakers of Korean would show not only native-like perception of Korean unreleased stops, but also better-than-native perception of American English unreleased stops. Results of three perception experiments were consistent with this hypothesis, suggesting that benefits of early heritage language experience can extend well beyond the heritage language.
Paper on bilingualism and sound change in Language
A research article entitled "On the cognitive basis of contact-induced sound change: Vowel merger reversal in Shanghainese" (Yao & Chang, 2016) has been published in the June issue of Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America.
Abstract: This study investigates the source and status of a recent sound change in Shanghainese (Wu, Sinitic) that has been attributed to language contact with Mandarin. The change involves two vowels, /e/ and /ɛ/, reported to be merged three decades ago but produced distinctly in contemporary Shanghainese. Results of two production experiments show that speaker age, language mode (monolingual Shanghainese vs. bilingual Shanghainese-Mandarin), and crosslinguistic phonological similarity all influence the production of these vowels. These findings provide evidence for language contact as a linguistic means of merger reversal and are consistent with the view that contact phenomena originate from cross-language interaction within the bilingual mind.
Note that this article is accompanied by online appendices, located here.
Welcome to our summer interns!
Welcome to the three visiting students who will be interning in the lab over the summer:
- Solveig Olson-Strom (interning from May 30 to August 8) is a Linguistics and Cognitive Science major at Pomona College (Class of 2018). She found the field of linguistics because of an interest in learning other languages, sparked by living in Germany. She is currently studying Chinese and Italian. Her interests include multilingualism, psycholinguistics, and semantics.
- Emily Fisher (interning from May 30 to August 25) is an incoming freshman at Georgetown University with an intended double major in Linguistics and Chinese. She has spent two summers in China studying Mandarin, including an internship at iKids TV, a Shanghai-based company that creates apps for teaching English to children. Closer to home, Emily has created an American culture and English language tutoring service, "Practice English with an American," for Chinese students in the US. In her free time, Emily enjoys skiing and playing violin in chamber ensembles.
- Darby Douros (interning from June 15 to September 9) is a rising second-year at The University of Chicago. She became interested in language acquisition and multilingualism in studying French and Spanish and babysitting bilingual kids. Outside her Linguistics major and Philosophy minor, DJ serves as album coordinator for her a cappella group, Unaccompanied Women, works as a barista, and devours crossword puzzles.
Congrats to UROP grant recipients
Congratulations to Jimmy Sbordone and Dallas Walter, who were awarded Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) grants to work on research projects in Spring 2016! Below are brief descriptions of the projects they will be working on:
- James Sbordone: "Phonetic description of Southeastern Pomo, an endangered language of California"
Jimmy will be working on an acoustic analysis of recordings of Southeastern Pomo, a severely endangered language historically spoken in northern California. These data will ultimately contribute to a phonetic description of the idiolect of the last living fluent speaker as well as a diachronic comparison between her speech and the speech of the preceding generation (captured on archival recordings).
- Dallas Walter: "Korean fricatives: Diachronic changes in phonetic enhancement strategies"
Dallas will be carrying out analyses of younger and older Korean speakers' production of the fricative contrast between fortis /s*/ and non-fortis /s/. The recordings are from an experiment conducted earlier this year, which was designed to examine the phonetic properties that speakers exaggerate in these fricatives when speaking in the 'clear speech' register. The phonetic data that Dallas compiles will provide evidence to support a phonological classification of the non-fortis fricative in the context of the Korean laryngeal system.
Paper on tone learning in JASA
A research article entitled "Context effects on second-language learning of tonal contrasts" (Chang & Bowles, 2015) has been published in the December issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
Abstract: Studies of lexical tone learning generally focus on monosyllabic contexts, while reports of phonetic learning benefits associated with input variability are based largely on experienced learners. This study trained inexperienced learners on Mandarin tonal contrasts to test two hypotheses regarding the influence of context and variability on tone learning. The first hypothesis was that increased phonetic variability of tones in disyllabic contexts makes initial tone learning more challenging in disyllabic than monosyllabic words. The second hypothesis was that the learnability of a given tone varies across contexts due to differences in tonal variability. Results of a word learning experiment supported both hypotheses: tones were acquired less successfully in disyllables than in monosyllables, and the relative difficulty of disyllables was closely related to contextual tonal variability. These results indicate limited relevance of monosyllable-based data on Mandarin learning for the disyllabic majority of the Mandarin lexicon. Furthermore, in the short term, variability can diminish learning; its effects are not necessarily beneficial but dependent on acquisition stage and other learner characteristics. These findings thus highlight the importance of considering contextual variability and the interaction between variability and type of learner in the design, interpretation, and application of research on phonetic learning.
Note that this article is accompanied by online supplementary material, located here.