Events

PIRE fellows Emily Herman and Angelica Brill present poster at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America.

Spanish speakers perceive an illusory [e] preceding word-initial [s]-consonant sequences, related to a productive loanword adaptation process, e.g. escáner from English scanner. We tracked the emergence of this illusion in 4IAX auditory discrimination. Native speakers heard initial portions of Spanish-like nonce words, e.g. estipa/astipa/stipa. The perceptual illusion was expected to hinder discrimination of pairs like estipa-stipa. For these pairs, when stimuli were truncated after the stop burst following the [s], discrimination was near ceiling although the burst confirmed the conditioning environment for the illusion. Accuracy dropped when longer portions were presented (e.g. esti-sti). The illusion is thus linguistic, not auditory.

Citation: Herman, E., Carlson, M. T., Brill, A., & Olmstead, A. (2022, January). Tracking illusory vowel effects through auditory and phonetic representations. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Washington, DC.

PIRE fellows Angelica Brill and Emily Herman present poster at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America.

Spanish speakers often produce English words with initial /s/-consonant clusters with an initial [e], e.g. school as [esku:l]. This has been linked to the perception of an illusory [e] preceding acoustic [sC] sequences, but there is evidence that exposure to English can weaken this illusion, raising the possibility that late Spanish-English bilinguals can learn to distinguish tokens like eschool from school, but they map both to the target word. Lexical decision and auditory discrimination experiments confirmed this hypothesis. Late Spanish-English bilinguals accepted both pronunciations readily (from either native- or Spanish-accented talkers), but they also discriminated them easily.

Citation: Carlson, M. T., Brill, A., Herman, E., & Olmstead, A. (2022, January). Can you un-hear that?: Phonotactics and the lexicon in Spanish-English bilinguals’ perception of English words. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Washington, DC.

PIRE fellows Hailey Atiyeh and Jason Giovagnoli present at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society.

Listeners in a second language can adapt to subtle regional, social, and idiosyncratic phonetic variation. We hypothesize that the ease of this adaptation depends on which abstract phonological representations are available to the listener. Dutch-English bilinguals and L1 English controls identified words spoken by a native English speaker
in a 2AFC task. The words were minimal pairs distinguished by [æ-ɛ] or [ɛ-ɪ] (e.g., bat-bet, bet-bit). The bat-bet contrast is notoriously difficult for Dutch listeners. For half the listeners this vowel series was artificially moved up in the talker’s vowel space, and for the other half it was moved down, such that half heard a bat-bet contrast that was acoustically the same as the other’s bet-bit. Listeners were familiarized with these artificial accents prior to the 2AFC task. The key finding was that the bilinguals, in contrast to the L1 controls, had substantial difficulty identifying [æ-ɛ] targets when shifted higher in the talker’s vowel space but identified (acoustically equivalent) [ɛ-ɪ] targets easily when shifted down in the vowel space. Thus, the same acoustic information can be easier or harder to adapt to and identify in an L2, depending on which abstract categories are expected.

Citation: Carlson, M. T., Atiyeh, H., Giovagnoli, J., & McQueen, J. M. (2021, November). Bat, bet, or bit? Adapting to idiosyncratic vowels in a second language. Paper presented at the 62^nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society.

PIRE fellow Carly Danielson presents at the 60th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society.

Research shows that native-accented speech is easier to comprehend than foreign-accented speech. Most studies presented speech in isolation. We examined how faces cuing the speaker’s ethnicity create expectations about upcoming speech, and how this impacts the comprehension of American- and Chinese-accented English. Caucasian American monolinguals listened to American-accented and Chinese-accented sentences, preceded by a picture of an Asian face or a Caucasian face, yielding two congruent face-accent conditions (Caucasian face/American accent; Asian face/Chinese accent) and two incongruent face-accent conditions (Asian face/American-accent; Caucasian face/Chinese-accent). Immediately after hearing the sentence, listeners transcribed the sentence. For American-accented sentences, transcription accuracy was lower when preceded by an Asian face than by a Caucasian face. For Chinese-accented sentences, transcription accuracy did not differ for Caucasian and Asian faces. This indicates that faces cuing ethnicity only trick our ears in native- accented,  but  not  in  foreign-accented  speech.  Results  will  be discussed in terms of reverse linguistic stereotyping and accent-driven asymmetries in face-accent processing.

Citation: Danielson, C., Fernandez, C. B., & Van Hell, J. G. (2019). Faces can trick your ears: Speaker identity affects native-accented but not foreign-accented speech. Poster presented at the 60^th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Montreal, Canada, November 14-17.

PIRE fellow Christianna Otto presents at the 12th International Symposium on Bilingualism.

Differences in how languages map acoustic space onto phonetic categories present challenges in second language (L2) learning, but those challenges are exacerbated by phonetic variation within the L2 (e.g. regional or social lects). In this study, we asked what happens when L2 listeners encounter native speakers whose speech exhibits unfamiliar features. Listeners adapt easily to such features in their native language, a process known as perceptual learning, but the evidence suggests that they often attribute those features to talker-specific idiosyncrasies. This may also be the case in L2 listening, but since L2 users are more likely to encounter unfamiliar lects shared by many talkers, they might be more open to the possibility that a second talker would share the same features.

We explored this hypothesis by presenting proficient, late Dutch-English bilinguals, residing in the Netherlands, with English speech exhibiting a vowel merger and a consonant merger. // and // were merged, either in favor of [] (e.g. pitcher  p[]tcher) or [] (e.g. ketchup  k[]tchup), counterbalanced across participants, and /s/ and /f/ were merged, either in favor of [s] (perfect  per[s]ect) or [f] (mustard  mu[f]tard). Participants were familiarized with the novel lects via sentences produced by a single talker. Learning was then assessed via a cross-modal priming task in which participants made lexical decisions on visual targets preceded by matching or mismatching auditory words (with or without the merged phonemes). Words exhibiting the mergers initially produced weaker priming, which strengthened throughout the task, demonstrating learning of the unfamiliar variation. The speech of a second talker, exhibiting the same mergers, was then introduced in a second cross-modal priming task. Words with the merger immediately yielded strong priming, suggesting that listeners had formed the expectation that the second talker’s speech would exhibit the same features.

Citation: Carlson, M. T., Otto, C., Schuhmann, K., & McQueen, J. M. (2019, June). Cross-talker perceptual learning in a second language. Paper presented at the 12^th International Symposium on Bilingualism, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

PIRE core-faculty Rena Torres Cacoullos presents at the International Conference of Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE).

A long-standing issue in bilingualism research is the interaction between speakers’ linguistic systems, most clearly evidenced in contexts of code-switching. Here, we propose to use priming as a measure of degree of association between bilinguals’ two grammars, appealing to constructions as units of grammar.

Structural priming, whereby the use of one variant favors subsequent use of that same variant over alternatives, is a robust factor in language-internal variation and also applies across languages (cf., Gries & Kootstra 2017). In language-internal variation, priming can be used to assess the relationships between constructions. For example, working (vs. workin’) is primed by kicking but not by morning (Tamminga 2016). In a seeming parallel, priming across languages has been taken to support the conjecture that bilinguals have a “shared syntax”, in which parallel grammatical structures “are represented once” (Hartsuiker et al. 2004: 409).

To examine this, we turn to the spontaneous speech of a bilingual community in northern New Mexico, USA, where multi-word code-switches are copious. Comparisons with monolingual English and Spanish benchmarks on a range of linguistic variables indicate maintenance of distinct grammars in this language contact situation (e.g., word order (Benevento & Dietrich 2015), mood choice (LaCasse 2018), complementizer use (Steuck & Torres Cacoullos To Appear)). For variable subject expression as well, these bilingual speakers maintain the same probabilistic constraints as speakers of monolingual varieties, such as accessibility, verb class and person effects. Of most interest here is coreferential subject priming, the tendency to repeat the form (pronoun vs. unexpressed) of the previous mention of the same subject. Notably, coreferential subject priming occurs both within Spanish and across languages, such that, in code-switching, English pronouns prime Spanish pronouns (1). This cross-language priming provides evidence that Spanish and English pronouns are associated for these bilingual speakers.

(1)

I was a statistician.

yo fui a todos los basketball games.

but I did all the stats.

‘I was a statistician.

I went to all the basketball games.

but I did all the stats.’

However, we also observe differential priming. Within Spanish, cognition verb constructions (e.g., (yo) creo ‘(I) think’) are less susceptible to coreferential subject priming than other [(pronoun) + verb] instances, evidence of autonomy from the more general construction (Bybee 2010). Similarly, the priming effect from English to Spanish is weaker than that from Spanish to Spanish. The differential strength of within- vs. cross-language priming serves as a gauge of the associations between the structures of the two languages in contact, suggesting a weaker association between Spanish [(pronoun) + verb] and English [(pronoun) + verb] constructions than between two instances that share the same language. This in turn suggests that the two grammars in contact are interconnected, but not conflated, highlighting the possibility for the maintenance of distinct grammars: while variant forms are primed across languages in contact, their linguistic conditioning remains intact.

Citation: Travis, C. E.  & Torres Cacoullos, R.  (2019, June). Bilingual interconnections: Priming as a measure of strength of associations. In International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE) 10. Presentation conducted at Fryske Akademy, Leeuwarden/Ljouwert, Netherlands.

PIRE fellows Jaclyn Yuro and Fatemeh Abdollahi present at the 2019 Linguistic Cognitive Science Student Conference at the University of Delaware.

Citation: Yuro, J., Abdollahi, F., Unsworth, S., & Van Hell, J. G. (2019). L1 and L2 phonetic interaction in classroom L2 learners: A developmental perspective. Poster presented at the 2019 Linguistics and Cognitive Science Student Conference. University of Delaware, April 12.

Maura Jaeger & Dana Winthrop - Using developmental milestones to characterize language delay in preschool-age users of American Sign Language
Alec Powers & Gabriella Rivera-Corchada - Cognate Facilitation and Syntactic Ambiguity in Bilingual Children
Joana Pinzon-Coimbra, Julia Rembalsky, & Gloria Xu - English proficiency and the understanding/use of articles
Kellie Harrington, David Miller, & Maggie Rose Pelella - The processing of Spanish dialectal variation by native Spanish speakers
Emily Pifer - Creativity in two languages: Convergent and Divergent Thinking in Billingual Engineering Students
Julian Yee - Comprehension of code-switched speech in non-habitual code-switchers: An electrophysiological study
Carmen Gonzalez Recober - Comprehension of code-switched speech: Does code-switching experience play a role?