Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-11T08:32:06.177Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Effects of first and second language on segmentation of non-native speech*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2011

ADRIANA HANULÍKOVÁ ,
HOLGER MITTERER  and
JAMES M. MCQUEEN
ADRIANA HANULÍKOVÁ*
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
HOLGER MITTERER
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
JAMES M. MCQUEEN
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands & Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
*
Address for correspondence: Adriana Hanulíková, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Paseo Mikeletegi 69, 20009 Donostia, Spaina.hanulikova@bcbl.eu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Do Slovak–German bilinguals apply native Slovak phonological and lexical knowledge when segmenting German speech? When Slovaks listen to their native language, segmentation is impaired when fixed-stress cues are absent (Hanulíková, McQueen & Mitterer, 2010), and, following the Possible-Word Constraint (PWC; Norris, McQueen, Cutler & Butterfield, 1997), lexical candidates are disfavored if segmentation leads to vowelless residues, unless those residues are existing Slovak words. In the present study, fixed-stress cues on German target words were again absent. Nevertheless, in support of the PWC, both German and Slovak listeners recognized German words (e.g., Rose “rose”) faster in syllable contexts (suckrose) than in single-consonant contexts (krose, trose). But only the Slovak listeners recognized, for example, Rose faster in krose than in trose (k is a Slovak word, t is not). It appears that non-native listeners can suppress native stress segmentation procedures, but that they suffer from prevailing interference from native lexical knowledge.

Keywords

non-native segmentationSlovakGermanPossible-Word Constraint (PWC)fixed stress
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 14 , Issue 4 , October 2011 , pp. 506 - 521
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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.)

Footnotes

*

This research was supported by a doctoral stipend from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation to Adriana Hanulíková and by the NWO SPINOZA grant awarded to Anne Cutler. We would like to thank Prof. Mária Vajíčková for providing testing facilities in Bratislava, and Olinka Blauová for her help in finding Slovaks living in Berlin. We thank Katja Kühn for lending her voice to our materials. The last-listed author is a member of the Behavioural Science Institute and the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Centre for Cognition, both at the Radboud University Nijmegen.

References

Al-jasser, F. (2008). The effect of teaching English phonotactics on the lexical segmentation of English as a foreign language. System, 36, 94–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Allopenna, P. D., Magnuson, J. S., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (1998). Tracking the time course of spoken word recognition using eye movements: Evidence for continuous mapping models. Journal of Memory and Language, 38, 419–439.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Altenberg, E. (2005). The perception of word boundaries in a second language. Second Language Research, 21, 325–358.Google Scholar
Baayen, H., Piepenbrock, R., & Gulikers, L. (1995). The CELEX Lexical Database (CD-ROM). Philadelphia, PA: Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Boersma, P. (2001). Praat: A system for doing phonetics by computer. Glot International, 5, 341–345.Google Scholar
Bradley, D. C., Sánchez-Casas, R. M., & García-Albea, J. E. (1993). The status of the syllable in the perception of Spanish and English. Language and Cognitive Processes, 8 (2), 197–233.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Broersma, M. (2008). Flexible cue use in nonnative phonetic categorization. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 123, 712–715.Google Scholar
Brysbaert, M., & Dijkstra, T. (2006). Changing views on word recognition in bilinguals. In Morais, J. & d'Ydewalle, G. (eds.), Bilingualism and second language acquisition, pp. 25–37. Brussels: The Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium.Google Scholar
Carroll, S. E. (2004). Segmentation: Learning how to “hear words” in the L2 speech stream. Transactions of the Philological Society, 102 (2), 227–254.Google Scholar
Cluff, M. S., & Luce, P. A. (1990). Similarity neighborhoods of spoken two-syllable words: Retroactive effects on multiple activation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 16, 551–563.Google ScholarPubMed
Connine, C. M., Blasko, D. M., & Titone, D. A. (1993). Do the beginnings of spoken words have a special status in auditory word recognition? Journal of Memory and Language, 32, 193–210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Connine, C. M., Blasko, D. M., & Wang, J. (1994). Vertical similarity in spoken word recognition: Perceptual ambiguity, sentence context and individual differences. Perception & Psychophysics, 56, 624–636.Google Scholar
Cutler, A. (1997). The syllable's role in the segmentation of stress languages. Language and Cognitive Processes, 12, 839–845.Google Scholar
Cutler, A. (2005). Lexical stress. In Pisoni, D. B. & Remez, R. E. (eds.), The handbook of speech perception, pp. 264–289. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Cutler, A., & Carter, D. (1987) The predominance of strong initial syllables in the English vocabulary. Computer Speech and Language, 2, 133–142.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cutler, A., Demuth, K., & McQueen, J. M. (2002). Universality versus language-specificity in listening to running speech. Psychological Science, 13, 258–262.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cutler, A., El Aissati, A., Hanulíková, A., & McQueen, J. M. (2010). Effects on speech parsing of vowelless words in the phonology. Abstracts in Laboratory Phonology, 12, 115–116. Albuquerque, New Mexico.Google Scholar
Cutler, A., Mehler, J., Norris, D. G., & Seguí, J. (1986). The syllable's differing role in the segmentation of French and English. Journal of Memory and Language, 25, 385–400.Google Scholar
Cutler, A., Mehler, J., Norris, D., & Seguí, J. (1989). Limits on bilingualism. Nature, 320, 229–230.Google Scholar
Cutler, A., Mehler, J., Norris, D., & Seguí, J. (1992). The monolingual nature of speech segmentation by bilinguals. Cognitive Psychology, 24, 381–410.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (1988). The role of strong syllables in segmentation for lexical access. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 14, 113–121.Google Scholar
Cutler, A., & Otake, T. (1994). Mora or phoneme? Further evidence for language-specific listening. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 824–844.Google Scholar
Cutler, A., Otake, T., & McQueen, J. M. (2009). Vowel devoicing and the perception of spoken Japanese words. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 125, 1693–1703.Google Scholar
Cutler, A., Weber, A., & Otake, T. (2006). Asymmetric mapping from phonetic to lexical representations in second-language listening. Journal of Phonetics, 34, 269–284.Google Scholar
Dahan, D., & Magnuson, J. S. (2006). Spoken-word recognition. In Traxler, M. J. & Gernsbacher, M. A. (eds.), Handbook of psycholinguistics, pp. 249–283. Amsterdam: Academic Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Groot, A. M. B., & Kroll, J. F. (eds.) (1997). Tutorials in bilingualism: Psycholinguistic perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Dijkstra, A. (2005). Bilingual visual word recognition and lexical access. In Kroll, J. F. & de Groot, A. M. B. (eds.), Handbook of bilingualism: Psycholinguistic approaches, pp. 179–201. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Dijkstra, A., & van Heuven, W. (1998). The BIA model and bilingual word recognition. In Grainger, J. & Jacobs, A. M. (eds.), Localist connectionist approaches to human cognition, pp. 189–225. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Dijkstra, A., & van Heuven, W. (2002). The architecture of the bilingual word recognition system: From identification to decision. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 5, 175–97.Google Scholar
Doctor, E. A., & Klein, D. (1992). Phonological processing in bilingual word recognition. In Harris, R. J. (ed.), Cognitive processing in bilinguals, pp. 237–252. Amsterdam: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Dumay, N., Frauenfelder, U. H., & Content, A. (2002). The role of the syllable in lexical segmentation in French: Word-spotting data. Brain and Language, 81, 144–161.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gaskell, M. G., & Marslen-Wilson, W. D. 1997. Integrating form and meaning. A distributed model of speech perception. Language and Cognitive Processes, 12, 613–656.Google Scholar
Golato, P. (2002). Word parsing by late-learning French–English bilinguals. Applied Psycholinguistics, 23, 417–446.Google Scholar
Green, D. W. (1998). Mental control and the bilingual lexico-semantic system. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1, 67–81.Google Scholar
Hanulíková, A. (2009). The role of syllabification in the lexical segmentation of German and Slovak. In Fuchs, S., Loevenbruck, H., Pape, D. & Perrier, P. (eds.), Some aspects of speech and the brain, pp. 331–361. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Hanulíková, A., McQueen, J. M., & Mitterer, H. (2010). Possible words and fixed stress in the segmentation of Slovak speech. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63, 555–579.Google Scholar
Kroll, J. F., & de Groot, A. M. B. (1997). Lexical and conceptual memory in the bilingual: Mapping form to meaning in two languages. In de Groot & Kroll (eds.), pp. 201–224.Google Scholar
Kroll, J. F., & Dijkstra, A. (2002). The bilingual lexicon. In Kaplan, R. A. (ed.), The Oxford handbook of applied linguistics pp. 301–321. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kroll, J. F., & Dussias, P. (2004). The comprehension of words and sentences in two languages. In Bhatia, T. & Ritchie, W. (eds.), Handbook of bilingualism, pp. 169–200. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Marian, V., & Spivey, M. (1999). Activation of Russian and English cohorts during bilingual spoken word recognition. In Hahn, M. & Stoness, S. C. (eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pp. 349–354. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Marian, V., & Spivey, M. (2003a). Competing activation in bilingual language processing: Within- and between-language competition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6 (2), 97–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marian, V., & Spivey, M. (2003b). Bilingual and monolingual processing of competing lexical items. Applied Psycholinguistics, 24, 173–193.Google Scholar
Mattys, S. L. (1997). The use of time during lexical processing and segmentation: A review. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 4, 310–329.Google Scholar
McClelland, J. L., & Elman, J. L. (1986). The TRACE model of speech perception. Cognitive Psychology, 18, 1–86.Google Scholar
McQueen, J. M. (2007). Eight questions about spoken-word recognition. In Gaskell, G. (ed.), Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics, pp. 37–54. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (1998). Spotting (different types of) words in (different types of) context. Proceedings of ICSLP 98, pp. 2791–2794. Sydney: Causal Productions.Google Scholar
McQueen, J. M., Norris, D., & Cutler, A. (1994). Competition in spoken word recognition: Spotting words in other words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20, 621–638.Google Scholar
McQueen, J. M., Otake, T., & Cutler, A. (2001). Rhythmic cues and possible-word constraints in Japanese speech segmentation. Journal of Memory and Language, 45, 103–132.Google Scholar
Mehler, J., Dommergues, J. Y., Frauenfelder, U. H., & Seguí, J. (1981). The syllable's role in speech segmentation. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour, 20, 298–305.Google Scholar
Nas, G. (1983). Visual word recognition in bilinguals: Evidence for a cooperation between visual and sound based codes during access to a common lexical store. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 22, 526–534.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Norris, D. (1994). Shortlist: A connectionist model of continuous speech recognition. Cognition, 52, 189–234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Norris, D., McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (1995). Competition and segmentation in spoken-word recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21, 1209–1228.Google Scholar
Norris, D., McQueen, J. M., Cutler, A., & Butterfield, S. (1997). The possible-word constraint in the segmentation of continuous speech. Cognitive Psychology, 34, 191–243.Google Scholar
Norris, D., McQueen, J. M., Cutler, A., Butterfield, S., & Kearns, R. (2001). Language-universal constraints on speech segmentation. Language and Cognitive Processes, 16, 637–660.Google Scholar
Otake, T., Hatano, G., Cutler, A., & Mehler, J. (1993). Mora or syllable? Speech segmentation in Japanese. Journal of Memory and Language, 32, 258–278.Google Scholar
Otake, T., Hatano, G., & Yoneyama, K. (1996). Speech segmentation by Japanese listeners. In Otake, T. & Cutler, A. (eds.), Phonological structure and language processing: Cross-linguistic studies, pp. 183–201. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, M. (1997). The cognitive neuropsychology of bilingualism. In de Groot & Kroll (eds.), pp. 331–354.Google Scholar
Quené, H., & Koster, M. L. (1998). Metrical segmentation in Dutch: Vowel quality or stress? Language and Speech, 41, 185–202.Google Scholar
Sabol, J. (1977). Prozodická sústava slovenčiny [Prosodic system of Slovak]. Bratislava: Metodicko-výskumný kabinet Čsl. rozhlasu.Google Scholar
Sabol, J., & Zimmermann, J. (1994). Komunikačný štatút prízvuku v spisovnej Slovenčine [Communicative status of stress in standard Slovak]. Prešov: Filozofická fakulta Univerzity P. J. Šafárika.Google Scholar
Sanders, L. D., Neville, H. J., & Woldorff, M. G. (2002). Speech segmentation by native and non-native speakers: The use of lexical, syntactic, and stress-pattern cues. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 45, 519–530.Google Scholar
Sebastián-Gallés, N., Dupoux, E., Seguí, J., & Mehler, J. (1992). Contrasting syllabic effects in Catalan and Spanish. Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 18–32.Google Scholar
Sebastián-Gallés, N., Echeverría, S., & Bosch, L. (2005). The influence of initial exposure on lexical representation: Comparing early and simultaneous bilinguals. Journal of Memory and Language, 52, 240–255.Google Scholar
Sebastián-Gallés, N., & Kroll, J. F. (2003). Phonology in bilingual language processing: Acquisition, perception and production. In Schiller, N. O. & Meyer, A. S. (eds.), Phonetics and phonology in language comprehension and production, pp. 279–317. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Sinor, M. (2006). Lexical and phonotactic cues to speech segmentation in a second language. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Alberta, Edmonton. www.manuelsinor.com/links/ManuelSinor_thesis.pdf (retrieved February 15, 2009).Google Scholar
Slovenský národný korpus [Slovak National Corpus] (2007). prim-3.0-public-all. Bratislava: Jazykovedný ústav Ľ. Štúra SAV.Google Scholar
Spivey, M., & Marian, V. (1999). Cross talk between native and second languages: Partial activation of an irrelevant lexicon. Psychological Science, 10, 281–284.Google Scholar
Strange, W. (1995). Speech perception and linguistic experience: Issues in cross-language research. Timonium, MD: York Press.Google Scholar
Sunderman, G., & Kroll, J. F. (2006). First language activation during second language lexical processing. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 28, 387–422.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tabossi, P., Burani, C., & Scott, D. (1995). Word identification in fluent speech. Journal of Memory and Language, 34, 440–467.Google Scholar
Tremblay, K., Kraus, N., Carrell, T. D., & McGee, T. (1997). Central auditory system plasticity: Generalization to novel stimuli following listening training. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 102, 3762–3773.Google Scholar
Trubetzkoy, N. S. (1939). Grundzüge der Phonologie (Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague 7).Google Scholar
Vitevitch, M. S., & Luce, P. A. (1998). When words compete: Levels of processing in spoken word perception. Psychological Science, 9, 325–329.Google Scholar
Vitevitch, M. S., & Luce, P. A. (1999). Probabilistic phonotactics and neighborhood activation in spoken word recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 40, 374–408.Google Scholar
Vroomen, J., & de Gelder, B. (1995). Metrical segmentation and lexical inhibition in spoken word recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 21, 98–108.Google Scholar
Weber, A., & Cutler, A. (2004). Lexical competition in non-native spoken-word recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 50, 1–25.Google Scholar
Weber, A., & Cutler, A. (2006). First-language phonotactics in second-language listening. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 119, 597–607.Google Scholar
Yip, M. C. W. (2004). Possible-word constraint in Cantonese speech segmentation. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 33, 165–173.Google Scholar
Zwitserlood, P., & Schriefers, H. (1995). Effects of sensory information and processing time in spoken-word recognition. Language and Cognitive Processes, 10, 121–136.Google Scholar
Zwitserlood, P., Schriefers, H., Lahiri, A., & van Donselaar, W. (1993). The role of the syllable in the perception of spoken Dutch. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 19, 260–271.Google Scholar