Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-7qhmt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-19T01:51:41.725Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

THE USE OF PROSODIC CUES IN LEARNING NEW WORDS IN AN UNFAMILIAR LANGUAGE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 August 2012

Sahyang Kim
Affiliation:
Hongik University, Seoul, Korea
Mirjam Broersma
Affiliation:
Donders Centre for Cognition, Radboud University Nijmegen, and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Taehong Cho*
Affiliation:
Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea
*
*Address correspondence to: Taehong Cho, Hanyang Phonetics and Psycholinguistics Lab, Department of English Language and Literature, Hanyang University, Haengdang-dong 17, Seongdong-gu, Seoul (133-791), Korea; e-mail: tcho@hanyang.ac.kr.

Abstract

The artificial language learning paradigm was used to investigate to what extent the use of prosodic features is universally applicable or specifically language driven in learning an unfamiliar language, and how nonnative prosodic patterns can be learned. Listeners of unrelated languages—Dutch (n = 100) and Korean (n = 100)—participated. The words to be learned varied with prosodic cues: no prosody, fundamental frequency (F0) rise in initial and final position, final lengthening, and final lengthening plus F0 rise. Both listener groups performed well above chance level with the final lengthening cue, confirming its crosslinguistic use. As for final F0 rise, however, Dutch listeners did not use it until the second exposure session, whereas Korean listeners used it at initial exposure. Neither group used initial F0 rise. On the basis of these results, F0 and durational cues appear to be universal in the sense that they are used across languages for their universally applicable auditory-perceptual saliency, but how they are used is language specific and constrains the use of available prosodic cues in processing a nonnative language. A discussion on how these findings bear on theories of second language (L2) speech perception and learning is provided.

Type
ARTICLES
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Aoyama, K., Flege, J., Guion, S., Akahane-Yamada, R., & Yamada, T. (2004). Perceived phonetic dissimilarity and L2 speech learning: The case of Japanese /r/ and English /l/ and /r/. Journal of Phonetics, 32, 233250.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arvaniti, A., Ladd, D. R., & Mennen, I. (1998). Stability of tonal alignment: The case of Greek prenuclear accents. Journal of Phonetics, 26, 325.Google Scholar
Bagou, O., Fougeron, C., & Frauenfelder, U. H. (2002, April). Contribution of prosody to the segmentation and storage of “words” in the acquisition of a new mini-language. Paper presented at Speech Prosody, Aix-en-Provence, France.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beckman, M. E. (1996). The parsing of prosody. Language and Cognitive Processes, 11, 1767.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beckman, M. E., & Pierrehumbert, J. (1986). Intonational structure in Japanese and English. Phonology Yearbook, 3, 255309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Best, C. T. (1994). The emergence of native-language phonological influences in infants: A perceptual assimilation model. In Goodman, J. C. & Nusbaum, H. C. (Eds.), The development of speech perception (pp. 167224). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Best, C. T. (1995). A direct realist perspective on cross-language speech perception. In Strange, W. (Ed.), Speech perception and linguistic experience: Theoretical and methodological issues in cross-language speech research (pp. 167200). Timonium, MD: York Press.Google Scholar
Best, C. T., McRoberts, G. W., & Goodell, E. (2001). Discrimination of non-native consonant contrasts varying in perceptual assimilation to the listener’s native phonological system. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 109, 775794.Google Scholar
Bohn, O. S., & Munro, M. J. (Eds.). (2007). Language experience in second language speech learning: In honor of James Emile Flege. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Broersma, M. (2005). Perception of familiar contrasts in unfamiliar positions. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 117, 38903901.Google Scholar
Broersma, M. (2010). Perception of final fricative voicing: Native and nonnative listeners’ use of vowel duration. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 127, 16361644.Google Scholar
Cambier-Langeveld, T. (2000). Temporal marking of accent and boundaries. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.Google Scholar
Cambier-Langeveld, T., Nespor, M., & van Heuven, V. J. (1997, September). The domain of final lengthening in production and perception in Dutch. Paper presented at Eurospeech, Rhodes, Greece.Google Scholar
Cho, T. (2002). The effects of prosody on articulation in English. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Cho, T. (2004). Prosodically conditioned strengthening and vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in English. Journal of Phonetics, 32, 141176.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cho, T., & Jun, S.-A. (2000). Domain-initial strengthening as featural enhancement: Aerodynamic evidence from Korean. Chicago Linguistics Society, 36, 3144.Google Scholar
Cho, T., & Keating, P. A. (2001). Articulatory and acoustic studies on domain-initial strengthening in Korean. Journal of Phonetics, 29, 155190.Google Scholar
Cho, T., & Keating, P. A. (2009). Effects of initial position versus prominence in English. Journal of Phonetics, 37, 466485.Google Scholar
Cho, T., & Ladefoged, P. (1999). Variation and universals in VOT: Evidence from 18 languages. Journal of Phonetics, 27, 207229.Google Scholar
Cho, T., & McQueen, J. M. (2005). Prosodic influences on consonant production in Dutch: Effects of prosodic boundaries, phrasal accent and lexical stress. Journal of Phonetics, 33, 121157.Google Scholar
Cho, T., & McQueen, J. M. (2006). Phonological versus phonetic cues in native and non-native listening: Korean and Dutch listeners’ perception of Dutch and English consonants. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 119, 30853096.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cho, T., McQueen, J. M., & Cox, E. (2007). Prosodically driven phonetic detail in speech processing: The case of domain-initial strengthening in English. Journal of Phonetics, 35, 210243.Google Scholar
Christophe, A., Peperkamp, S., Pallier, C., Block, E., & Mehler, J. (2004). Phonological phrase boundaries constrain lexical access I. Adult data. Journal of Memory and Language, 51, 523547.Google Scholar
Chung, K., Chang, S., Choi, J., Nam, S., Lee, M., Chung, S., et al. . (1996). A study of Korean prosody and discourse for the development of speech synthesis/recognition system. Daejun, Korea: KAIST Artificial Intelligence Research Center.Google Scholar
Cutler, A. (1994). Segmentation problems, rhythmic solutions. Lingua, 92, 81104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cutler, A., & Otake, T. (1994). Mora or phoneme: Further evidence for language-specific listening. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 824844.Google Scholar
de Jong, K. (1995). The supraglottal articulation of prominence in English: Linguistic stress as localized hyperarticulation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 97, 491504.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dilley, L., & McAuley, J. D. (2008). Distal prosodic context affects word segmentation and lexical processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 59, 294311.Google Scholar
Flege, J. (1991). Perception and production: The relevance of phonetic input to L2 phonological learning. In Heubner, T. & Ferguson, C. W. (Eds.), Crosscurrents in second language acquisition and linguistic theory (pp. 249289). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Flege, J. (1995). Second-language speech learning: Theory, findings, and problems. In Strange, W. (Ed.), Speech perception and linguistic experience: Theoretical and methodological issues (pp. 233272). Timonium, MD: York Press.Google Scholar
Flege, J., & MacKay, I. (2004). Perceiving vowels in a second language. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 26, 134.Google Scholar
Flege, J., & Wang, C. (1989). Native-language phonotactic constraints affect how well Chinese subjects perceive the word-final English /t/-/d/ contrast. Journal of Phonetics, 17, 299315.Google Scholar
Goto, H. (1971). Auditory perception by normal Japanese adults of the sounds “l” and “r.” Neuropsychologia, 9, 317323.Google Scholar
Gussenhoven, C. (2004). Transcription of Dutch intonation. In Jun, S.-A. (Ed.), Prosodic typology: The phonology of intonation and phrasing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, E. K., & Jusczyk, P. W. (2001). Word segmentation by 8-month-olds: When speech cues count more than statistics. Journal of Memory and Language, 44, 548567.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jun, S.-A. (1993). The phonetics and phonology of Korean prosody. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.Google Scholar
Jun, S.-A. (1998). The accentual phrase in the Korean prosodic hierarchy. Phonology, 15, 189226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jun, S.-A. (2000). K-ToBI (Korean ToBI) labelling conventions (version 3.1). Retrieved February 18, 2011, fromhttp://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/jun/ktobi/K-tobi.html.Google Scholar
Jun, S.-A. (Ed.). (2004). Prosodic typology: The phonology of intonation and phrasing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kager, R. J. W. (1989). A metrical theory of stress and destressing in English and Dutch. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Foris.Google Scholar
Keating, P. A. (2006). Phonetic encoding of prosodic structure. In Harrington, J. & Tabain, M. (Eds.), Speech production: Models, phonetic processes, and techniques (pp. 167186). London: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Keating, P. A., & Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. (2003). A prosodic view of word form encoding for speech production. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics, 101, 112156.Google Scholar
Kim, S. (2004). The role of prosodic phrasing in Korean word segmentation. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Kim, S., & Cho, T. (2009). The use of phrase-level prosodic information in lexical segmentation: Evidence from word-spotting experiments in Korean. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 125, 33733386.Google Scholar
Kim, S., Cho, T., & McQueen, J. M. (2012). Phonetic richness can outweigh prosodically-driven phonological knowledge when learning words is an artificial language. Journal of Phonetics, 40, 443452.Google Scholar
Kingston, J., & Diehl, R. L. (1994). Phonetic knowledge. Language, 70, 419454.Google Scholar
Klatt, D. H. (1975). Vowel lengthening is syntactically determined in connected discourse. Journal of Phonetics, 3, 129140.Google Scholar
Ladd, D. R., Schepman, A., White, L., Quarmby, L. M., & Stackhouse, R. (2009). Structural and dialectal effects on pitch peak alignment in two varieties of British English. Journal of Phonetics, 37, 145161.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, H. J. (1998). Tonal realization and implementation of the accentual phrase in Seoul Korean. Unpublished master’s thesis, University of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Lehiste, I. (1970). Suprasegmentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Lerdahl, F., & Jackendoff, R. (1983). A generative theory of tonal music. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Lively, S. E., Logan, J. S., & Pisoni, D. B. (1993). Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/. II: The role of phonetic environment and talker variability in learning new perceptual categories. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 94, 12421255.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Logan, J. S., Lively, S. E., & Pisoni, D. B. (1991). Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: A first report. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 89, 874886.Google Scholar
Mattys, S. L. (2004). Stress versus coarticulation: Toward an integrated approach to explicit speech segmentation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 30, 397408.Google Scholar
McQueen, J. M. (1998). Segmentation of continuous speech using phonotactics. Journal of Memory and Language, 39, 2146.Google Scholar
McQueen, J. M. (2005). Speech perception. In Lamberts, K. & Goldstone, R. (Eds.), The handbook of cognition (pp. 255275). London: Sage.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, J. (1980). The phonology and phonetics of English intonation. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Polka, L. (1991). Cross-language speech-perception in adults: Phonemic, phonetic, and acoustic contributions. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 89, 29612977.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Quené, H. (1993). Segment durations and accent as cues to word segmentation in Dutch. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 94, 20272035.Google Scholar
Saffran, J. R., Newport, E. L., & Aslin, R. N. (1996). Word segmentation: The role of distributional cues. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 606621.Google Scholar
Salverda, A. P., Dahan, D., & McQueen, J. M. (2003). The role of prosodic boundaries in the resolution of lexical embedding in speech comprehension. Cognition, 90, 5189.Google Scholar
Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., & Turk, A. E. (1996). A prosody tutorial for investigators of auditory sentence processing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 25, 193247.Google Scholar
Shatzman, K. B., & McQueen, J. M. (2006). Prosodic knowledge affects the recognition of newly acquired words. Psychological Science, 17, 372377.Google Scholar
Sluijter, A. M. C., & van Heuven, V. J. (1996, October). Acoustic correlates of linguistic stress and accent in Dutch and American English. Paper presented at the Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Philadelphia, PA.Google Scholar
Spitzer, S. M., Liss, J. M., & Mattys, S. L. (2007). Acoustic cues to lexical segmentation: A study of resynthesized speech. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 122, 36783687.Google Scholar
Strange, W. (Ed.). (1995). Speech perception and linguistic experience: Issues in cross-language research. Timonium, MD: York Press.Google Scholar
Tyler, M. D., & Cutler, A. (2009). Cross-language differences in cue use for speech segmentation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 126, 367376.Google Scholar
Vroomen, J., Tuomainen, J., & de Gelder, B. (1998). The roles of word stress and vowel harmony in speech segmentation. Journal of Memory and Language, 38, 133149.Google Scholar
Warner, N., Otake, T., & Arai, T. (2010). Intonational structure as a word boundary cue in Japanese. Language and Speech, 53, 107131.Google Scholar
Weber, A. (2001). Language-specific listening: The case of phonetic sequences. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.Google Scholar
Welby, P. (2007). The role of early fundamental frequency rises and elbows in French word segmentation. Speech Communication, 49, 2848.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wightman, C. W., Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., Ostendorf, M., & Price, P. J. (1992). Segmental durations in the vicinity of prosodic phrase boundaries. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 91, 17071717.Google Scholar