Phonology in Protolanguage and Interlanguage
Edited by
Elena Babatsouli [+–]
Institute of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech
Elena Babatsouli is the Director of the Institute of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech in Chania, Greece, whose purpose is the advancement and dissemination of scientific knowledge in various aspects of language acquisition, typical and atypical. She received a BA in English from Royal Holloway, University of London, a MA in Languages and Business from London South Bank University and her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Crete. Her research interests are in the acquisition, use and loss of language in all its forms (first, second, bilingual, dialectal), and in clinical implications. She was co-chair of the inaugural International Symposium of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech 2015 and co-editor of its Proceedings.
David Ingram [+–]
Arizona State University
David Ingram is Professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science at Arizona State University. He received his BS from Georgetown University and his PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University. His research interests are in language acquisition in typically developing children and children with language disorders, with a cross-linguistic focus. The language areas of interest are phonological, morphological, and syntactic acquisition. He is the author of Phonological disability in children (1976),Procedures for the phonological analysis of children’s language (1981), and First language acquisition (1989). His most recent work has focused on whole word measures of phonological acquisition.
Phonemic awareness and phonetic skill are the backbones of phonological theory. In phonological acquisition, the presence or lack of the former crucially determines the outcome of the latter. This inescapably becomes a common thread that interweaves developmental phonology in both childhood and adulthood. Child and adult-learner speech in the course of development constitute separate linguistic systems in their own right: they are intermediate states whose endpoint is, or ought to be, mastery of targeted speech either in a first or a second language. These intermediate states form the theme of this volume which introduces the term protolanguage (to refer to child language in development) and juxtaposes it with interlanguage (to refer to language development in adulthood).
Although major languages like English and Spanish are included, there is an emphasis in the book on under-reported languages: monolingual Hungarian and Swedish and bilingual combinations, like Greek-English and German-English. There is also a focus on under-represented studies in IL: L2 German from L1 French ; L2 English from Catalan and Portuguese; and in dialectal acquisition of Ecuadorian Spanish from Andalusian speakers.
This volume brings together different methodological approaches with a stress on both phonetic and phonological analysis. It includes both child and adult developmental perspectives, descriptive and/or theoretical results from a combination of methodological approaches (e.g. single-case, cross-sectional; spontaneous speech samples, narrative retells) and a consideration of speech acquisition in the general context of language.
The volume aims to motivate a shift in the general tendency among researchers to specialize in language subfields (L1 acquisition; L2 acquisition, bilingualism; typical/atypical language) of what is actually one common linguistic domain, i.e. the study of speech sounds (phonology/phonetics).
Table of Contents
Preliminaries
Preface vii-viii
Institute of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech
Elena Babatsouli is the Director of the Institute of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech in Chania, Greece, whose purpose is the advancement and dissemination of scientific knowledge in various aspects of language acquisition, typical and atypical. She received a BA in English from Royal Holloway, University of London, a MA in Languages and Business from London South Bank University and her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Crete. Her research interests are in the acquisition, use and loss of language in all its forms (first, second, bilingual, dialectal), and in clinical implications. She was co-chair of the inaugural International Symposium of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech 2015 and co-editor of its Proceedings.
Arizona State University
David Ingram is Professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science at Arizona State University. He received his BS from Georgetown University and his PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University. His research interests are in language acquisition in typically developing children and children with language disorders, with a cross-linguistic focus. The language areas of interest are phonological, morphological, and syntactic acquisition. He is the author of Phonological disability in children (1976),Procedures for the phonological analysis of children’s language (1981), and First language acquisition (1989). His most recent work has focused on whole word measures of phonological acquisition.
Prologue 1-23
Institute of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech
Elena Babatsouli is the Director of the Institute of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech in Chania, Greece, whose purpose is the advancement and dissemination of scientific knowledge in various aspects of language acquisition, typical and atypical. She received a BA in English from Royal Holloway, University of London, a MA in Languages and Business from London South Bank University and her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Crete. Her research interests are in the acquisition, use and loss of language in all its forms (first, second, bilingual, dialectal), and in clinical implications. She was co-chair of the inaugural International Symposium of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech 2015 and co-editor of its Proceedings.
Arizona State University
David Ingram is Professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science at Arizona State University. He received his BS from Georgetown University and his PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University. His research interests are in language acquisition in typically developing children and children with language disorders, with a cross-linguistic focus. The language areas of interest are phonological, morphological, and syntactic acquisition. He is the author of Phonological disability in children (1976),Procedures for the phonological analysis of children’s language (1981), and First language acquisition (1989). His most recent work has focused on whole word measures of phonological acquisition.
Part I: Protolanguage
Arizona State University
David Ingram is Professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science at Arizona State University. He received his BS from Georgetown University and his PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University. His research interests are in language acquisition in typically developing children and children with language disorders, with a cross-linguistic focus. The language areas of interest are phonological, morphological, and syntactic acquisition. He is the author of Phonological disability in children (1976),Procedures for the phonological analysis of children’s language (1981), and First language acquisition (1989). His most recent work has focused on whole word measures of phonological acquisition.
East Tennessee State University
A. Lynn Williams, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, is an Associate Dean for the College of Clinical and Rehabilitative Health Sciences and professor in the Department of Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tennessee. Her research and practice have focused on developing assessment and intervention models that utilize linguistic methodology and principles to describe and treat disordered sound systems. Lynn is the author of several articles, book chapters, and books, is the current Associate Editor of the American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, a Fellow of ASHA, and ASHA Vice President for Academic Affairs in Speech-Language Pathology (2016-2018).
Arizona State University
Nancy Scherer is currently Professor and Chair Professor in the Speech and Hearing Science Department at Arizona State University. Her research and clinical interests are in the areas of speech and language development and intervention for children with craniofacial conditions. Her research has focused on developing and validating intervention models including parent implemented intervention, telehealth delivery and training community health professionals in rural and international contexts with the goal of preventing long-term speech disorders. Her research funding includes grants from the National Institutes Health (NIDCD) and Department of Education.
Chapter 1 introduces the spectrum approach to speech sound disorders. It is argued that speech sound disorders should not be viewed as either the result of an articulatory problem or a phonological problem, but a combination of both. Specifically, it is proposed that speech sound disorders are considered within a model that incorporates the interaction of articulation and phonology as a spectrum upon which both reside. The speech of children within the spectrum may clearly show a tendency for phonological and/or articulatory patterns or varying combinations of them, depending on where these productions are in the spectrum as well as along the children’s development of phonological and articulatory skill. The investigation utilized both group and case study methodology providing evidence that supports the validity of the new perspective. In particular, the child case study showed that CS’s errors were sometimes of an articulatory nature and sometimes of a phonological nature. The group study assessed the speech of children with clefts, that is children who were expected to show patterns of articulatory errors due to their clefts. In spite of this, a combination of articulatory and phonological patterns were evidenced in the speech productions of this group that were shown to improve longitudinally, suggesting that the children were acquiring a typically developing phonological system, albeit with some speech delay.
University of Geneva
Margaret Kehoe is a senior lecturer at the University of Geneva. She is also a practicing speech-language therapist who works with the International community in Geneva. She received her Bachelor in Speech Therapy (with Honors) from the University of Queensland, her MSc, from the University of Arizona, and her Ph.D from the University of Washington. She has conducted research on phonetic and phonological acquisition in English-, German-, Spanish-, and French-speaking children as well as in bilingual children. She is currently interested in the theme of cross-linguistic interaction in bilingual children.
This chapter provides a critical review of research on cross-linguistic interaction in the phonetic and phonological development of young bilingual children. The first part of the chapter presents examples of cross-linguistic interaction (e.g., acceleration, delay, transfer) based on Paradis and Genesee’s (1996) framework using a data-base of German-Spanish bilingual children tested in Hamburg, Germany. It then goes on to examine whether other investigators have documented similar results to the Hamburg study by testing comparable contact situations (e.g., comparing languages with high vs. low percentages of codas). This survey indicates that few generalizations can be gleaned across studies. The second part of the chapter explores possible reasons for the lack of generalizations, which include methodological limitations and the lack of an appropriate research model. It is argued that by incorporating additional interaction patterns into the current framework (such as merging and deflecting patterns), and by considering the developing speech-motor and lexical abilities of young children, a better explanatory model of phonological interaction in early bilingualism might be obtainable.
University of Hamburg (Retired)
Conxita Lleó, now retired, was Professor of Romance Linguistics at the University of Hamburg, Germany. She studied Romance Languages at the University of Barcelona and General Linguistics at the U of W (Seattle), and received two PhD degrees, one from each university. She taught at the Universities of Barcelona, Concepción (Chile), San Luis (Argentina), Göttingen (Germany) the University of Hamburg . Her focus of research lies in bilingualism, child language, phonological acquisition, and sound change, where she has published about 100 studies and several books. During ca. 20 years she obtained research grants from the German Science Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). She fluently speaks Spanish, Catalan, French, English, and German.
This chapter focuses on the development of German-Spanish bilingual children’s phonological grammars, which are compared to the grammars of two control groups: Spanish and German monolinguals. The bilingual children grew up in North Germany and were exposed to the two languages from birth. Data collection was done in the home of each child, while playing and conversing. The domains analyzed are characterized by phonological differences between German and Spanish and cover segments as well as prosody. An interesting line of bilingual research began with Paradis and Genesee (1996)’s study, where they asked about crosslanguage interaction between the languages of bilinguals. They did not find interaction in the morphosyntactic domains, but studies on phonological acquisition have found much interaction between the phonological components of bilingual grammars, which are permeable and resilient at the same time. The present article reports on the interaction between the phonology of simultaneous bilinguals, and suggests that Optimality Theory, based on constraints and their demotion, is capable of carrying out the most explanatory analysis of the results on acquisition. Several studies of bilingual children producing utterances framed in various segmental and suprasegmental language domains are inspected here.
4. Acquired Singleton Fricatives and Lateral in Cluster Development: A Bilingual Child Case [+–] 109-138
Institute of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech
Elena Babatsouli is the Director of the Institute of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech in Chania, Greece, whose purpose is the advancement and dissemination of scientific knowledge in various aspects of language acquisition, typical and atypical. She received a BA in English from Royal Holloway, University of London, a MA in Languages and Business from London South Bank University and her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Crete. Her research interests are in the acquisition, use and loss of language in all its forms (first, second, bilingual, dialectal), and in clinical implications. She was co-chair of the inaugural International Symposium of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech 2015 and co-editor of its Proceedings.
The chapter investigates the acquisition of fricative-lateral consonant clusters in child developmental speech longitudinally with a focus on clusters whose members have been acquired in singleton contexts. Specifically, the study investigates patterns in the acquisition of labial fricatives (C1) clustering with the alveolar lateral (C2), i.e. /fl, vl/, at syllable onsets in a bilingual child’s speech in Greek and English across the span of 17 months of her phonological development, starting at age 2;7. Comparisons with the child’s /sl/ in English are included where pertinent, since /sl/ is the only other targeted cluster in the child’s bilingualism satisfying the research criterion. Dense, longitudinal data on the child’s naturalistic cluster production were elicited during daily interaction with the author, who entered the child’s full utterances orthographically and phonetically in CLAN (MacWhinney 2000). The study provides a fresh insight into developmental speech by investigating cluster acquisition in detailed data longitudinally, re-examining developmental stages, paths, and processes under the new perspective considered, and utilizing the single-subject methodology in bilingualism to investigate production disparity that emanates from differences in phonotactic distributions in the languages studied. The study reveals that known stages and processes in cluster development are not challenged by the new criterion, though still shown to be tempered by idiosyncratic tendencies. The acquisition level of singletons in the targeted contexts plays a role that is both facilitative and obsolete in the process of cluster acquisition. Furthermore, a propensity towards non-targeted complexity and markedness in the child’s speech is evidenced alongside the known tendency towards simplified productions.
5. The Production of Selected Phonemically Short versus Long Hungarian Vowel Pairs by 5-, 6, and 7-Year Olds [+–] 139-161
University of Houston
Ferenc Bunta is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Houston. His research focuses primarily on bilingual and cross-linguistic phonological acquisition in both typical populations and individuals with communication disorders(such as children with hearing loss). His work has included both children and adults ranging from children undergoing bilingual as first language acquisition to later second language learners.
Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Tilda Neuberger is a research fellow in the Department of Phonetics at the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She received her PhD in Hungarian linguistics from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest in 2013. Her research interests include speech and language development of 5–14-year-old children. Her current research focuses on the phonetic and phonological aspects of gemination in Hungarian.
Eotvos Lorand University, Department of Phonetics
Judit Bóna is an associate professor in the Department of Phonetics at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. Since 2002 she has been teaching courses in Phonetics and Psycholinguistics. Her research focuses primarily on phonetic and psycholinguistic characteristics of speech in individuals of different ages from children to older adults, including populations who are typical and who have communication disorders (such as speakers with fluency disorders).
Eötvös Loránd University
Alexandra Markó is an Associate Professor at the Department of Phonetics at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary. Her research focuses primarily on spontaneous speech with special regard to intonation, temporal characteristics and voice quality (especially irregular phonation) both in typical and pathological speech. The subjects’ age cover both the adulthood and the infancy from the age of 5. The pragmatic functions of prosody were also included in her studies, principally the suprasegmental characteristics of discourse markers. Her research has involved mainly acoustic analysis but recently it has been extended to articulatory investigations.
NILD for Educational Therapy
Agnes Jordanidisz has been the chair of the Association for Educational Needs since 2004 and, as the representative of NILD Educational Therapy in Central and Eastern Europe, she works in postgraduate teacher training. Her main research interest is child language development. Her PhD. research disclosed Hungarian children’s phonological awareness development between ages 4 and 10.
This chapter investigates the differences in duration of 3 pairs of phonemically short versus long Hungarian vowels reflecting a vowel quantity contrast, produced by monolingual children from 5 to 7 years of age. We predict differentiation between phonemically short and long vowels produced by Hungarian-speaking children based on quantity and quality as well as more robust vowel differences over time that would become more pronounced in the productions of older children relative to their younger peers. Three groups of monolingual Hungarian-speaking children were selected based on age (5-year-olds, n=14; 6-year-olds, n=14, and 7-year-olds, n=14). Parent and teacher reports indicated no cognitive, speech, language, or hearing disorders in the participants. Audio recorded samples were collected from the children during interactions with the experimenter. Topics included the children’s lives, favorite pastimes, and favorite stories. PRAAT 5.0 (Boersma & Weenink 2015) was used to conduct the acoustic analyses of the target vowels (/i/, /iː/, /o/, /oː/, /u/ and /uː/), measuring the duration of the sound segments.
6. Phonological Development and Language Proficiency of Bilingual Children who Learn Greek as a Second Language [+–] 162-191
University of Ioannina
Eleni Morfidi is an assistant professor at the University of Ioannina, Greece. She graduated from the University of Athens, Greece and followed postgraduate studies (M.Ed, M.Sc, PhD) at the University of Manchester, UK. Her work focused on literacy development, phonological abilities and related problems. She worked as a researcher at the University of Leeds UK, University of Amsterdam The Netherlands and University of Houston Texas US. She is currently serving the area of special education and language disorders at the Department of Primary Education, University of Ioannina, Greece. Her research interests include bilingual language and literacy development, phonological acquisition and development across languages.
University of Patras
Eleni Samsari holds a Master’s Degree in Education (M.Ed.) and she is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Primary Education of University of Patras in Greece. She has presented her work in several conferences in Educational Sciences worldwide. Her articles have been published in national and international refereed conference proceedings and journals. Her research interests include intercultural education, special education, inclusion, bilingualism and educational psychology.
Chapter 6 investigates aspects of early L2 phonological acquisition in association with broader language skills in order to examine the development of interlanguage phonology in Greek-speaking children, who acquired Greek as a second language. The study includes eleven bilingual English-Greek speaking children from grades three to six, and eleven monolingual Greek speaking peers as the control group. Phonological whole-word measures of accuracy (PCC), complexity (pMLU), proximity (PWP) and variability (PWV) were calculated from children’s retelling of the Greek ‘Frog where are you?’ story. Measures of phonological awareness, vocabulary and reading in both languages have also been included. Results suggest that their level of phonological acquisition in their interlanguage exhibits a gradient mix of characteristics typical of both early bilingual and L2 acquisition of phonology. The research builds on the assumption that by identifying both similarities and differences between monolingual and bilingual acquisition, specific insights may be gained for phonological development and linguistic abilities across different modes and stages of language acquisition, which has significant implications for research and practice.
Synopsis on Protolanguage [+–] 192-198
Institute of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech
Elena Babatsouli is the Director of the Institute of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech in Chania, Greece, whose purpose is the advancement and dissemination of scientific knowledge in various aspects of language acquisition, typical and atypical. She received a BA in English from Royal Holloway, University of London, a MA in Languages and Business from London South Bank University and her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Crete. Her research interests are in the acquisition, use and loss of language in all its forms (first, second, bilingual, dialectal), and in clinical implications. She was co-chair of the inaugural International Symposium of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech 2015 and co-editor of its Proceedings.
Arizona State University
David Ingram is Professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science at Arizona State University. He received his BS from Georgetown University and his PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University. His research interests are in language acquisition in typically developing children and children with language disorders, with a cross-linguistic focus. The language areas of interest are phonological, morphological, and syntactic acquisition. He is the author of Phonological disability in children (1976),Procedures for the phonological analysis of children’s language (1981), and First language acquisition (1989). His most recent work has focused on whole word measures of phonological acquisition.
Phonemic awareness and phonetic skill are the backbones of phonological theory. In phonological acquisition, the presence or lack of the former crucially determines the outcome of the latter. This inescapably becomes a common thread that interweaves developmental phonology in both childhood and adulthood. Child and adult-learner speech in the course of development constitute separate linguistic systems in their own right: they are intermediate states whose endpoint is, or ought to be, mastery of targeted speech either in a first or a second language. These intermediate states form the theme of this volume which introduces the term protolanguage (to refer to child language in development) and juxtaposes it with interlanguage (to refer to language development in adulthood). Although major languages like English and Spanish are included, there is an emphasis in the book on under-reported languages: monolingual Hungarian and Swedish and bilingual combinations, like Greek-English and German-English. There is also a focus on under-represented studies in IL: L2 German from L1 French ; L2 English from Catalan and Portuguese; and in dialectal acquisition of Ecuadorian Spanish from Andalusian speakers. This volume brings together different methodological approaches with a stress on both phonetic and phonological analysis. It includes both child and adult developmental perspectives, descriptive and/or theoretical results from a combination of methodological approaches (e.g. single-case, cross-sectional; spontaneous speech samples, narrative retells) and a consideration of speech acquisition in the general context of language. The volume aims to motivate a shift in the general tendency among researchers to specialize in language subfields (L1 acquisition; L2 acquisition, bilingualism; typical/atypical language) of what is actually one common linguistic domain, i.e. the study of speech sounds (phonology/phonetics).
Part II: Interlanguage
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Kelly Millard is from Miami, Florida and attended Florida State University where she received her Bachelor’s degree. In 2015, she received a Master’s in Linguistics from Florida International University where she studied under Professor Mehmet Yavaş and focused on acoustic phonetics. While at FIU, she was awarded the Truby Award for her outstanding achievements in the Linguistics program. Currently, she is a PhD student in the Department of Communicative Disorders at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where she studies Applied Language and Speech Sciences.
Florida International University
Mehmet Yavaş is a Professor of Linguistics at Florida International University.
He has published numerous articles on applied phonology and is the principal
author of Avaliacao Fonologica da Crianca, a phonological assessment procedure
for Brazilian Portuguese. His other publications include Phonological
disorders in children (1991), First and second language phonology (1994),
Phonology: Development and disorders (1998), Unusual productions in phonology
(2014) and Applied English phonology (3rd edition 2015).
He has published numerous articles on applied phonology and is the principal
author of Avaliacao Fonologica da Crianca, a phonological assessment procedure
for Brazilian Portuguese. His other publications include Phonological
disorders in children (1991), First and second language phonology (1994),
Phonology: Development and disorders (1998), Unusual productions in phonology
(2014) and Applied English phonology (3rd edition 2015).
Several studies have shown that a lag of even a few years of acquiring a second language L2 tends to have dramatic consequences on both speech production and perception. The study reported here investigates the production of American English reduced vowels by early sequential Spanish-English bilingual adults. The central question is whether adult bilinguals are able to develop native-like phonological patterns and maintain separate phonetic categories for the sounds of their L2 (English), or if starting a few years later will create impediments in the formation of new phonetic categories. We acoustically investigated the durations and quality of English reduced vowels in unstressed syllables produced by early Spanish-English bilinguals. The analyses of vowels were done in two different prosodic environments and word frequency was also measured, to examine the effect of these two factors (prosodic environment and word frequency) on vowel duration and quality. The productions of bilinguals were compared to a control group consisting of monolingual English adults in order to determine the amount of deviation in both duration and formant frequencies. Through an analysis of multiple variables, the research contributes evidence that early age of acquisition of a bilingual speaker’s L2 may result in a perceived native-like sound; however measurable differences suggest that their pronunciation is different from that of monolingual speakers. Their system is phonemically stable (native-like), but phonetically exhibiting non-monolingual aspects.
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Angelica Carlet holds a Master’s Degree in second language acquisition from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and a BA in English and Brazilian Portuguese studies from UNISINOS, Brazil. The influence of one’s native language phonology in the acquisition of a second language constitutes the main area of her interest along with the effect of phonetic training for non-native speakers of English. She is a PhD candidate at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and she is currently lecturing at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) and at the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (UIC), in Barcelona, Spain.
University of Toronto
Anabela Rato graduated in Portuguese and English Teaching (2004) at the University of Minho. She also holds an MA in English Language, Literature and Culture (2009) and a PhD in Language Sciences (2014) from the University of Minho, Portugal. She has served as an invited assistant professor, and a researcher in the Centre for Humanistic Studies, University of Minho, Portugal. From July 2016 onwards, she is an assistant professor at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Toronto, Canada. Her research interests include non-native speech perception and production, second language acquisition, foreign language learning, and applied phonetics.
Due to the interplay of several factors, including L1 attunement and L2 experience (understood as length of formal instruction), native speakers of Romance languages who learn English as a second language (L2) encounter certain difficulty when perceiving English voiceless stops (Alves & Zimmer 2015; Flege, Munro & MacKay 1995; Fullana & MacKay 2008). The purpose of this study was to further investigate the role of formal instruction and to evaluate the effect of language exposure (i.e. amount of outside classroom L2 input) on the non-native perception of the English voiceless stops /p, t, k/ by Portuguese and Catalan learners of English. A total of 63 learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) were divided into three experimental groups (an advanced group, differing in their L1, and two upper-intermediate groups) and were asked to identify and discriminate naturally produced tokens contrasting word-initial voiceless aspirated and unaspirated stops. Results show that the advanced group of Portuguese EFL learners outperformed the upper-intermediate Portuguese learners when discriminating and identifying the target stops. This finding seems to indicate that length of formal instruction has a positive effect on the perception of non-native allophonic contrasts. Furthermore, the comparison between the performance of the two upper-intermediate groups revealed that despite the comparable VOT patterns in both languages, the upper-intermediate Portuguese perceivers outperformed the Catalans, which may be accounted by the effect of a greater outside classroom L2 exposure. These outcomes suggest that L2 formal instruction and L2 exposure play an important role on the perception of a non-native allophonic contrast.
University Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3
Jane Wottawa is a certified high-school German teacher in France. Since 2014, she is a PhD candidate at University Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 in the Laboratory of Phonetics and Phonology (LPP, UMR 7018). Her research interests are centered on foreign language learning with a special focus on speech production and perception. Her research is based on acoustic and phonetic analyses in L2 speech production as well as behavioral and neuroimaging methods in speech perception.
University Paris-Sud (Orsay)
Martine Adda-Decker holds a MD in Applied Mathematics and a PhD in Computer Science from University Paris-Sud (Orsay) France. She is a CNRS researcher since 1990. In 2010, she joined the Laboratory of Phonetics and Phonology (LPP, UMR 7018), her previous position was with the Spoken Language Processing group at LIMSI (UPR 3251), where she remains an associate researcher. Her research interests go to man-machine communication, language and accent identification, multilingual speech recognition, acoustic-phonetic and lexical modeling, pronunciation variants, corpus phonetics, phonology and corpus-based studies. Martine Adda-Decker has authored or co-authored over 150 peer-reviewed articles in the field. She is regularly reviewing papers in the major Speech related journals and conferences.
University Paris Lumières – Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense
Frédéric Isel is Professor of Psycholinguistics at the University Paris Lumières – Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense in France. His research is centered on the study of the neurodynamics of language processes involved in both word recognition and sentence comprehension. In particular, Frédéric Isel investigates the role of linguistic prosody in lexical acess and parsing. He also studies second language acquisition (SLA) and examines the link between language use and language control. His research employs both behavioral and neuroimaging methods.
Research on foreign language speech production often focuses on repeated speech and read speech. To the best of our knowledge, only a few studies have investigated the role of the complexity of speech production tasks on the abilities to produce sounds in a foreign language. The present study aims to fill this gap. We recorded adult French native speakers with German as a second language (L2). The participants performed three speech tasks: word repetition, reading and picture description. Note that, the picture description task is a semi-spontaneous speech task, which can be considered to be closer to a real life speech experience than the two other tasks. We assume that L2 production complexity depends upon the three tasks and on the linguistic information provided: the sound in the repetition, the text in reading, and no linguistic information in picture description. We created two corpora of German speech: the FLACGS and the ProFee-FLACGS corpora. The speech resources were analysed regarding word initial /h/ and vowel duration contrast production. Taken together, our results show that both increasing L2 speech production complexity as well as conflicting grapheme-phoneme conventions in the two languages have an impact on production accuracy in L2 speech. Moreover, L2 learners tend to achieve native like productions when provided with a native German auditory input. Awareness of pronunciation differences between ones first and second language can help with the amount of correct sound production but it has very limited impact on the accuracy of the produced sounds.
Western University
Esperanza Ruíz-Peña obtained her MA in Hispanic Studies (Linguistics) from Western University, in London, Canada, and currently she is in her last year of her Ph.D in the Hispanic Studies program at Western University. Her research focuses on sociolinguistics and dialectal phonetic variation. Especially, she has investigated the neutralization of /l/ for /r/ in Seville (Spain), the production of Ecuadorian assibilated rhotics by Spanish speakers who belong to a non-assibilated rhotic Spanish variety, and the bilingual advantage in the imitation of intonation patterns in English second dialect learners.
Pennsylvania State University
Diego Sevilla obtained his MA in the Hispanic Studies (Linguistics) program from Western University (Linguistics) at Western University, London, Canada. Fascinated by the field of linguistics, he decided to continue his studies and has been recently admitted by the Pennsylvania State University in the MA/PhD program in Spanish Linguistics, where he will be doing a dual PhD program in Spanish and Language Science. His interests and research areas are mainly related to language contact, morphosyntax and semantics.
Western University
Yasaman Rafat obtained her PhD in Hispanic Linguistics from the University of Toronto. She is currently a Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at the Department of Modern Language & Literatures at Western University. She is also affiliated with the graduate program in Linguistics at Western University. Her primary research interests include second language speech acquisition, where she has examined the interaction between orthographic and acoustic input in second language learners. She also works on bilingualism and first language change, second dialect acquisition, foreign accent, sound change and variation. The languages she has examined are Spanish, Farsi, English and Korean.
This chapter focuses on an acoustic study in order to determine whether equivalence classification in the acquisition of second dialect speech operates in a similar fashion to second language acquisition of speech. In particular, we report on the results of a real word and a nonce word imitation task that were conducted to examine whether native Andalusian Spanish speakers could accurately imitate Ecuadorian Spanish assibilated rhotics. The results show that two distinct patterns of production emerged in the real and nonce word imitation tasks that mirror the results previously reported in Rafat (2015) for naïve English-speaking participants’ productions of assibilated rhotics. Whereas the assibilated rhotics in the real word imitation task were mainly realized as rhotics as in the auditory-orthographic condition in Rafat (2015), they were produced as sibilants in the nonce words imitation task as in the auditory-only group in Rafat (2015). An acoustic analysis of the results also demonstrated that not all features of these rhotics were equally acquirable. Moreover, assibilated rhotic production was constrained by the social factor gender.
University of Gothenburg
Åsa Abelin is a professor of general linguistics at the Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science at University of Gothenburg. Her research interests lie within phonetics and psycholinguistics ranging between the areas of second language acquisition, emotional prosody and iconicity in language. In particular, she has studied intelligibility, comprehensibility and attitudes to non-native accent as well as perception of emotional prosody, and sound symbolism and onomatopoeia in Swedish.
Dalarna University,
Bosse Thorén is a senior lecturer at Dalarna University, Sweden, and he also gives lectures to teachers of Swedish as a second language at seminars and workshops. His PhD at Stockholm University was about the priority of temporal aspects of the Swedish prosody. His research interests lie in describing Swedish and English prosodies and investigating the intelligibility of foreign accented speech in relation to teaching the languages to second language speakers. He seeks to suggest phonological core features of Swedish and English critical for cross-cultural communication.
Wherever migration or travelling takes place, people need to learn new languages. This learning entails a variety of interlanguages. Irrespective of whether you are a learner or a teacher of a language, you need to decide how to allocate time and effort for learning and teaching into developing different sub-skills of the language. Four skills are considered in second language teaching and learning; listening, reading, speaking and writing. Proficiency in speaking requires sub-competences, such as pragmatic competence, fluency or making a clear pronunciation. Even having each of these sub-competences for speaking require having sub-skills. For example, to have a “good” pronunciation, one needs to well realise segmental features: phonemes, phonotactics, assimilations, and prosodic features: rhythm and intonation. Most of the time, young children learning their first language (L1) as well as additional languages (L2’s) acquire these pronunciation skills without formal training and often reach a native-like speech also in additional languages. By contrast, adult learners of an additional language seldom reach nativelikeness in their pronunciation of the language. However, ideally, they still can achieve a fluent, intelligible and well-received pronunciation of the language. The present paper is concerned with the pronunciation of Swedish as an additional language, in particular, three phonemic prosodic contrasts, namely stress contrast, quantity contrast and tonal word accent contrast. We attempt to find out, among these three prosodic contrasts, which is more crucial than the others for making one’s speech intelligible. That is, if the second language learner cannot acquire all of them perfectly, which of them should be given more priority in learning and teaching Swedish pronunciation? We also want to study whether or not a pronunciation lacking one or two of these contrasts can still be well understood.
Synopsis on Interlanguage [+–] 342-346
Institute of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech
Elena Babatsouli is the Director of the Institute of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech in Chania, Greece, whose purpose is the advancement and dissemination of scientific knowledge in various aspects of language acquisition, typical and atypical. She received a BA in English from Royal Holloway, University of London, a MA in Languages and Business from London South Bank University and her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Crete. Her research interests are in the acquisition, use and loss of language in all its forms (first, second, bilingual, dialectal), and in clinical implications. She was co-chair of the inaugural International Symposium of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech 2015 and co-editor of its Proceedings.
Arizona State University
David Ingram is Professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science at Arizona State University. He received his BS from Georgetown University and his PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University. His research interests are in language acquisition in typically developing children and children with language disorders, with a cross-linguistic focus. The language areas of interest are phonological, morphological, and syntactic acquisition. He is the author of Phonological disability in children (1976),Procedures for the phonological analysis of children’s language (1981), and First language acquisition (1989). His most recent work has focused on whole word measures of phonological acquisition.
Phonemic awareness and phonetic skill are the backbones of phonological theory. In phonological acquisition, the presence or lack of the former crucially determines the outcome of the latter. This inescapably becomes a common thread that interweaves developmental phonology in both childhood and adulthood. Child and adult-learner speech in the course of development constitute separate linguistic systems in their own right: they are intermediate states whose endpoint is, or ought to be, mastery of targeted speech either in a first or a second language. These intermediate states form the theme of this volume which introduces the term protolanguage (to refer to child language in development) and juxtaposes it with interlanguage (to refer to language development in adulthood). Although major languages like English and Spanish are included, there is an emphasis in the book on under-reported languages: monolingual Hungarian and Swedish and bilingual combinations, like Greek-English and German-English. There is also a focus on under-represented studies in IL: L2 German from L1 French ; L2 English from Catalan and Portuguese; and in dialectal acquisition of Ecuadorian Spanish from Andalusian speakers. This volume brings together different methodological approaches with a stress on both phonetic and phonological analysis. It includes both child and adult developmental perspectives, descriptive and/or theoretical results from a combination of methodological approaches (e.g. single-case, cross-sectional; spontaneous speech samples, narrative retells) and a consideration of speech acquisition in the general context of language. The volume aims to motivate a shift in the general tendency among researchers to specialize in language subfields (L1 acquisition; L2 acquisition, bilingualism; typical/atypical language) of what is actually one common linguistic domain, i.e. the study of speech sounds (phonology/phonetics).
End Matter
Index [+–] 347-349
Institute of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech
Elena Babatsouli is the Director of the Institute of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech in Chania, Greece, whose purpose is the advancement and dissemination of scientific knowledge in various aspects of language acquisition, typical and atypical. She received a BA in English from Royal Holloway, University of London, a MA in Languages and Business from London South Bank University and her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Crete. Her research interests are in the acquisition, use and loss of language in all its forms (first, second, bilingual, dialectal), and in clinical implications. She was co-chair of the inaugural International Symposium of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech 2015 and co-editor of its Proceedings.
Arizona State University
David Ingram is Professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science at Arizona State University. He received his BS from Georgetown University and his PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University. His research interests are in language acquisition in typically developing children and children with language disorders, with a cross-linguistic focus. The language areas of interest are phonological, morphological, and syntactic acquisition. He is the author of Phonological disability in children (1976),Procedures for the phonological analysis of children’s language (1981), and First language acquisition (1989). His most recent work has focused on whole word measures of phonological acquisition.
Phonemic awareness and phonetic skill are the backbones of phonological theory. In phonological acquisition, the presence or lack of the former crucially determines the outcome of the latter. This inescapably becomes a common thread that interweaves developmental phonology in both childhood and adulthood. Child and adult-learner speech in the course of development constitute separate linguistic systems in their own right: they are intermediate states whose endpoint is, or ought to be, mastery of targeted speech either in a first or a second language. These intermediate states form the theme of this volume which introduces the term protolanguage (to refer to child language in development) and juxtaposes it with interlanguage (to refer to language development in adulthood). Although major languages like English and Spanish are included, there is an emphasis in the book on under-reported languages: monolingual Hungarian and Swedish and bilingual combinations, like Greek-English and German-English. There is also a focus on under-represented studies in IL: L2 German from L1 French ; L2 English from Catalan and Portuguese; and in dialectal acquisition of Ecuadorian Spanish from Andalusian speakers. This volume brings together different methodological approaches with a stress on both phonetic and phonological analysis. It includes both child and adult developmental perspectives, descriptive and/or theoretical results from a combination of methodological approaches (e.g. single-case, cross-sectional; spontaneous speech samples, narrative retells) and a consideration of speech acquisition in the general context of language. The volume aims to motivate a shift in the general tendency among researchers to specialize in language subfields (L1 acquisition; L2 acquisition, bilingualism; typical/atypical language) of what is actually one common linguistic domain, i.e. the study of speech sounds (phonology/phonetics).
