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Purpose: Coarticulatory effects in speech vary across development, but the sources of this variation remain unclear. This study investigated whether developmental differences in intrasyllabic coarticulation degree could be explained by differences in children's articulatory patterns compared to adults.
Method: To address this question, we first compared the tongue configurations of 3-to 7-year-old German children to those of adults. The observed developmental differences were then examined through simulations with Task Dynamics Application, a Task Dynamics simulation system, to establish which articulatory modifications could best reproduce the empirical results. To generate syllables simulating the lack of tongue gesture differentiation, we tested three simulation scenarios.
Results: We found that younger speakers use less differentiated articulatory patterns to achieve alveolar constrictions than adults. The simulations corresponding to undifferentiated control of tongue tip and tongue body resulted in (a) tongue shapes similar to those observed in natural speech and (b) higher degrees of intrasyllabic coarticulation in children when compared to adults.
Conclusions: Results provide evidence that differences in articulatory patterns contribute to developmental differences in coarticulation degree. This study further shows that empirically informed modeling can advance our understanding of changes in coarticulatory patterns across age.
In previous research, mutual information (MI) was employed to quantify the physical information shared between consecutive phonological segments, based on electromagnetic articulography data. In this study, MI is extended to quantifying coarticulatory resistance (CR) versus overlap in German using ultrasound imaging. Two measurements are tested as input to MI: (1) the highest point on the tongue body and (2) the first coefficient of the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) of the whole tongue contour. Both measures are used to examine changes in coarticulation between two time points during the syllable span: the consonant midpoint and the vowel onset. Results corroborate previous findings reporting differences in coarticulatory overlap in German and across languages. Further, results suggest that MI used with the highest point on the tongue body captures distinctions related both to place and manner of articulation, while the first DFT coefficient does not provide any additional information regarding global (whole tongue) as opposed to local (individual articulator) aspects of CR. However, both methods capture temporal distinctions in coarticulatory resistance between the two time points. Results are discussed with respect to the potential of MI measure to provide a way of unifying coarticulation quantification methods across data collection techniques.
Extract: Topics in psycholinguistics and the neurocognition of language rarely attract the attention of journalists or the general public. One topic that has done so, however, is the potential benefits of bilingualism for general cognitive functioning and development, and as a precaution against cognitive decline in old age. Sensational claims have been made in the public domain, mostly by journalists and politicians. Recently (September 4, 2014) The Guardian reported that “learning a foreign language can increase the size of your brain”, and Michael Gove, the UK's previous Education Secretary, noted in an interview with The Guardian (September 30, 2011) that “learning languages makes you smarter”. The present issue of BLC addresses these topics by providing a state-of-the-art overview of theoretical and experimental research on the role of bilingualism for cognition in children and adults.
This study investigates whether number dissimilarities on subject and object DPs facilitate the comprehension of subject-and object-extracted centre-embedded relative clauses in children with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI). We compared the performance of a group of English-speaking children with G-SLI (mean age: 12; 11) with that of two groups of younger typically developing (TD) children, matched on grammar and receptive vocabulary, respectively. All groups were more accurate on subject-extracted relative clauses than object-extracted ones and, crucially, they all showed greater accuracy for sentences with dissimilar number features (i.e., one singular, one plural) on the head noun and the embedded DP. These findings are interpreted in the light of current psycholinguistic models of sentence comprehension in TD children and provide further insight into the linguistic nature of G-SLI.
The predictions of two contrasting approaches to the acquisition of transitive relative clauses were tested within the same groups of German-speaking participants aged from 3 to 5 years old. The input frequency approach predicts that object relative clauses with inanimate heads (e.g., the pullover that the man is scratching) are comprehended earlier and more accurately than those with an animate head (e.g., the man that the boy is scratching). In contrast, the structural intervention approach predicts that object relative clauses with two full NP arguments mismatching in number (e.g., the man that the boys are scratching) are comprehended earlier and more accurately than those with number-matching NPs (e.g., the man that the boy is scratching). These approaches were tested in two steps. First, we ran a corpus analysis to ensure that object relative clauses with number-mismatching NPs are not more frequent than object relative clauses with number-matching NPs in child directed speech. Next, the comprehension of these structures was tested experimentally in 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds respectively by means of a color naming task. By comparing the predictions of the two approaches within the same participant groups, we were able to uncover that the effects predicted by the input frequency and by the structural intervention approaches co-exist and that they both influence the performance of children on transitive relative clauses, but in a manner that is modulated by age. These results reveal a sensitivity to animacy mismatch already being demonstrated by 3-year-olds and show that animacy is initially deployed more reliably than number to interpret relative clauses correctly. In all age groups, the animacy mismatch appears to explain the performance of children, thus, showing that the comprehension of frequent object relative clauses is enhanced compared to the other conditions. Starting with 4-year-olds but especially in 5-year-olds, the number mismatch supported comprehension-a facilitation that is unlikely to be driven by input frequency. Once children fine-tune their sensitivity to verb agreement information around the age of four, they are also able to deploy number marking to overcome the intervention effects. This study highlights the importance of testing experimentally contrasting theoretical approaches in order to characterize the multifaceted, developmental nature of language acquisition.
The Relativized Minimality approach to A'-dependencies (Friedmann et al., 2009) predicts that headed object relative clauses (RCs) and which questions are the most difficult, due to the presence of a lexical restriction on both the subject and the object DP which creates intervention. We investigated comprehension of center-embedded headed object RCs with Italian children, where Number and Gender feature values on subject and object DPs are manipulated. We found that. Number conditions are always more accurate than Gender ones, showing that intervention is sensitive to DP-internal structure. We propose a finer definition of the lexical restriction where external and syntactically active features (such as Number) reduce intervention whereas internal and (possibly) lexicalized features (such as Gender) do so to a lesser extent. Our results are also compatible with a memory interference approach in which the human parser is sensitive to highly specific properties of the linguistic input, such as the cue-based model (Van Dyke, 2007).
We investigate the variation in oral and written language in terms of anaphoric distance (i.e., the textual distance between anaphors and their antecedents), expanding corpus-based research with experimental evidence.
Contrastive corpus studies demonstrate that oral genres include longer average anaphoric distance than written genres, if the distance is measured in terms of clauses (Fox, 1987; Aktas & Stede, 2020).
We designed an experiment in order to examine the contrasts in oral and written mediums, using the same genre.
We aim to gain more insight about the impact of the medium, in a situation where both mediums convey a similar level of spontaneity, informality and interactivity. We designed a story continuation study, where the participants are recruited via crowdsourcing.
To our knowledge, this is the first study of its kind, where anaphoric distance is manipulated systematically in a language production experiment in order to examine medium distinctions.
We observed that participants use more pronouns in oral medium than in written medium if the anaphoric distance is long.
This result is in line with the implications of the earlier corpus-based research. In addition, our results indicate that anaphoric distance has a larger effect in referential choice for the written medium.
Sonority is a fundamental notion in phonetics and phonology, central to many descriptions of the syllable and various useful predictions in phonotactics. Although widely accepted, sonority lacks a clear basis in speech articulation or perception, given that traditional formal principles in linguistic theory are often exclusively based on discrete units in symbolic representation and are typically not designed to be compatible with auditory perception, sensorimotor control, or general cognitive capacities. In addition, traditional sonority principles also exhibit systematic gaps in empirical coverage. Against this backdrop, we propose the incorporation of symbol-based and signal-based models to adequately account for sonority in a complementary manner. We claim that sonority is primarily a perceptual phenomenon related to pitch, driving the optimization of syllables as pitch-bearing units in all language systems. We suggest a measurable acoustic correlate for sonority in terms of periodic energy, and we provide a novel principle that can account for syllabic well-formedness, the nucleus attraction principle (NAP). We present perception experiments that test our two NAP-based models against four traditional sonority models, and we use a Bayesian data analysis approach to test and compare them. Our symbolic NAP model outperforms all the other models we test, while our continuous bottom-up NAP model is at second place, along with the best performing traditional models. We interpret the results as providing strong support for our proposals: (i) the designation of periodic energy as the acoustic correlate of sonority; (ii) the incorporation of continuous entities in phonological models of perception; and (iii) the dual-model strategy that separately analyzes symbol-based top-down processes and signal-based bottom-up processes in speech perception.
This study is concerned with repair practices that a teacher and students employ to restore intersubjectivity when faced with interactional problems in a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classroom. Adopting a conversation analytic (CA) approach, it examines the interactional treatment of students’ verbal and embodied trouble displays in a video-recorded, teacher-fronted geography lesson held in English at a German high school. At the same time, it explores to what extent the repair practices employed are fitted to this specific interactional context. The analysis shows that students’ verbal trouble displays often result in extensive repair sequences, whereas students’ embodied trouble displays are usually met with teacher self-repair in the transition space. In this way, the latter are resolved much earlier and more quickly. The study further reveals practices like reformulation and translation to be especially useful for repairing interactional problems in classrooms in which a foreign language is used as the medium of instruction. The findings may be of interest for prospective as well as practicing teachers in that they provide relevant insights into how interactional trouble can be successfully managed in (CLIL) classroom interaction.