Assessment of stuttering in a familiar versus an unfamiliar language

The present study investigated how well individuals knowledgeable about stuttering are able to make disfluency judgments in clients who speak another language than their own. Fourteen native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese identified and judged stuttering in Dutch speakers and in Portuguese speakers. Fourteen native speakers of Dutch identified and judged stuttering in Brazilian Portuguese speakers and in Dutch speakers. It was found that judges can make similar level of judgment in a native and a foreign language, and that native and foreign judges can make similar level of judgment irrespective of native/foreign differences. It was also found, however, that the Dutch judges performed significantly better in identifying native stutterers than foreign stutterers. And for the identification of nonstutterers, both panels performed better in their native language than in the foreign language, and in their native language they both performed better than the other panel. Both the Brazilian Portuguese and the Dutch speaking panel were generally also less confident, and found identification of stuttering more difficult in the foreign language than in the native language. In addition, when asked for the characteristics that helped them identify stutterers, they provided more detail in the native language than in the foreign language. Also a number of differences were found between the two panels which may be due to differences in training or cultural background. The implications of the findings for clinical practice and for future research in this area are discussed. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: The reader will be able to: (1) describe how language influences the identification of a speech disorder such as stuttering, and (2) list, and (3) define behaviors that help to identify stuttering in a foreign language.     

Category and perceptual interference in second-language phoneme learning: an examination of English /w/-/v/ learning by Sinhala, German, and Dutch speakers

The present study investigated the perception and production of English /w/ and /v/ by native speakers of Sinhala, German, and Dutch, with the aim of examining how their native language phonetic processing affected the acquisition of these phonemes. Subjects performed a battery of tests that assessed their identification accuracy for natural recordings, their degree of spoken accent, their relative use of place and manner cues, the assimilation of these phonemes into native-language categories, and their perceptual maps (i.e., multidimensional scaling solutions) for these phonemes. Most Sinhala speakers had near-chance identification accuracy, Germans ranged from chance to 100% correct, and Dutch speakers had uniformly high accuracy. The results suggest that these learning differences were caused more by perceptual interference than by category assimilation; Sinhala and German speakers both have a single native-language phoneme that is similar to English /w/ and /v/, but the auditory sensitivities of Sinhala speakers make it harder for them to discern the acoustic cues that are critical to /w/-/v/ categorization.     

The word frequency effect in first- and second-language word recognition: A lexical entrenchment account

We investigate the origin of differences in the word frequency effect between native speakers and second-language speakers. In a large-scale analysis of English word identification times we find that group-level differences are fully accounted for by the individual language proficiency scores. Furthermore, exactly the same quantitative relation between word frequency and proficiency is found for monolinguals and three different bilingual populations (Dutch–English, French–English, and German–English). We conclude that the larger frequency effects for second-language processing than for native-language processing can be explained by within-language characteristics and thus need not be the consequence of “being bilingual” (i.e., a qualitative difference). More specifically, we argue that language proficiency increases lexical entrenchment, which leads to a reduced frequency effect, irrespective of bilingualism, language dominance, and language similarity.     

Cross‐Linguistic Differences in Processing Double‐Embedded Relative Clauses: Working‐Memory Constraints or Language Statistics?

An English double‐embedded relative clause from which the middle verb is omitted can often be processed more easily than its grammatical counterpart, a phenomenon known as the grammaticality illusion. This effect has been found to be reversed in German, suggesting that the illusion is language specific rather than a consequence of universal working memory constraints. We present results from three self‐paced reading experiments which show that Dutch native speakers also do not show the grammaticality illusion in Dutch, whereas both German and Dutch native speakers do show the illusion when reading English sentences. These findings provide evidence against working memory constraints as an explanation for the observed effect in English. We propose an alternative account based on the statistical patterns of the languages involved. In support of this alternative, a single recurrent neural network model that is trained on both Dutch and English sentences is shown to predict the cross‐linguistic difference in the grammaticality effect.     

Foreign language knowledge can influence native language performance in exclusively native contexts

In three experiments, we studied the influence of foreign language knowledge on native language performance in an exclusively native language context. Trilinguals with Dutch as their native and dominant language (L1), English as their second language (L2), and French as their third language (L3) performed a word association task (Experiment 1) or a lexical decision task (Experiments 2 and 3) in L1. The L1 stimulus words were cognates with their translations in English, cognates with their translations in French, or were noncognates. In Experiments 1 and 2 with trilinguals who were highly proficient in English and relatively low in proficiency in French, we observed shorter word association and lexical decision times to the L1 words that were cognates with English than to the noncognates. In these relatively low-proficiency French speakers, response times (RTs) for the L1 words that were cognates with French did not differ from those for the noncognates. In Experiment 3, we tested Dutch-English- French trilinguals with a higher level of fluency in French (i.e., equally fluent in English and in French). We now observed faster responses on the L1 words that were cognates with French than on the noncognates. Lexical decision times to the cognates with English were also shorter than those to the noncognates. The results indicate that words presented in the dominant language, to naive participants, activate information in the nontarget, and weaker, language in parallel, implying that the multilinguals’ processing system is profoundly nonselective with respect to language. A minimal level of nontarget language fluency seems to be required, however, before any weaker language effects become noticeable in L1 processing.     

The effects of late acquisition of L2 and the consequences of immigration on L1 for semantic and morpho-syntactic language aspects

It has been hypothesized that some aspects of a second language (L2) might be learned easier than others if a language is learned late. On the other hand, non-use might result in a loss of language skills in one's native, i.e. one's first language (L1) (language attrition). To study which, if any, aspects of language are affected by either late acquisition or non-use, long-term German immigrants to the US and English native speakers who are long-term immigrants to Germany as well as two additional control groups of native German speakers were tested with an auditory semantic and morpho-syntactic priming paradigm. German adjectives correctly or incorrectly inflected for gender and semantically associated or not associated with the target noun served as primes. Participants made a lexical decision on the target word. All groups of native German speakers gained from semantically and morpho-syntactically congruent primes. Evidence for language attrition was neither found for semantic nor morpho-syntactic priming effects in the German immigrants. In contrast, English native speakers did not gain from a morpho-syntactic congruent prime, whereas semantic priming effects were similar as for the remaining groups. The present data suggest that the full acquisition of at least some syntactic functions may be restricted to limited periods in life while semantic and morpho-syntactic functions seem to be relatively inured to loss due to non-use.     

Estimation tests as a means of quantifying linguistic expectancy

Objective word counts of English and Dutch were used to carry out binary choice tests concerning frequencies of occurrence of word-initial consonant clusters. Subjects were native speakers of English or Dutch. Results indicate that subjective estimations are logarithmically related to objective data and that there is an improvement in frequency judgments with increased overall second language proficiency.Frequency estimation tests are envisaged as a means for testing second language proficiency. The degree of difficulty in estimating frequencies of clusters seems to be language specific.     

Strength of German accent under altered auditory feedback.

Borden's (1979, 1980) hypothesis that speakers with vulnerable speech systems rely more heavily on feedback monitoring than do speakers with less vulnerable systems was investigated. The second language (L2) of a speaker is vulnerable, in comparison with the native language, so alteration to feedback should have a detrimental effect on it, according to this hypothesis. Here, we specifically examined whether altered auditory feedback has an effect on accent strength when speakers speak L2. There were three stages in the experiment. First, 6 German speakers who were fluent in English (their L2) were recorded under six conditions--normal listening, amplified voice level, voice shifted in frequency, delayed auditory feedback, and slowed and accelerated speech rate conditions. Second, judges were trained to rate accent strength. Training was assessed by whether it was successful in separating German speakers speaking English from native English speakers, also speaking English. In the final stage, the judges ranked recordings of each speaker from the first stage as to increasing strength of German accent. The results show that accents were more pronounced under frequency-shifted and delayed auditory feedback conditions than under normal or amplified feedback conditions. Control tests were done to ensure that listeners were judging accent, rather than fluency changes caused by altered auditory feedback. The findings are discussed in terms of Borden's hypothesis and other accounts about why altered auditory feedback disrupts speech control.     

Strength of German accent under altered auditory feedback

Borden’s (1979, 1980) hypothesis that speakers with vulnerable speech systems rely more heavily on feedback monitoring than do speakers with less vulnerable systems was investigated. The second language (L2) of a speaker is vulnerable, in comparison with the native language, so alteration to feedback should have a detrimental effect on it, according to this hypothesis. Here, we specifically examined whether altered auditory feedback has an effect on accent strength when speakers speak L2. There were three stages in the experiment. First, 6 German speakers who were fluent in English (their L2) were recorded under six conditions—normal listening, amplified voice level, voice shifted in frequency, delayed auditory feedback, and slowed and accelerated speech rate conditions. Second, judges were trained to rate accent strength. Training was assessed by whether it was successful in separating German speakers speaking English from native English speakers, also speaking English. In the final stage, the judges ranked recordings of each speaker from the first stage as to increasing strength of German accent. The results show that accents were more pronounced under frequency-shifted and delayed auditory feedback conditions than under normal or amplified feedback conditions. Control tests were done to ensure that listeners were judging accent, rather than fluency changes caused by altered auditory feedback. The findings are discussed in terms of Borden’s hypothesis and other accounts about why altered auditory feedback disrupts speech control.     

Impact of language on development of auditory-visual speech perception

The McGurk effect paradigm was used to examine the developmental onset of inter-language differences between Japanese and English in auditory-visual speech perception. Participants were asked to identify syllables in audiovisual (with congruent or discrepant auditory and visual components), audio-only, and video-only presentations at various signal-to-noise levels. In Experiment 1 with two groups of adults, native speakers of Japanese and native speakers of English, the results on both percent visually influenced responses and reaction time supported previous reports of a weaker visual influence for Japanese participants. In Experiment 2, an additional three age groups (6, 8, and 11 years) in each language group were tested. The results showed that the degree of visual influence was low and equivalent for Japanese and English language 6-year-olds, and increased over age for English language participants, especially between 6 and 8 years, but remained the same for Japanese participants. This may be related to the fact that English language adults and older children processed visual speech information relatively faster than auditory information whereas no such inter-modal differences were found in the Japanese participants' reaction times.     

Native language influences on word recognition in a second language: a megastudy

Many studies have reported that word recognition in a second language (L2) is affected by the native language (L1). However, little is known about the role of the specific language combination of the bilinguals. To investigate this issue, the authors administered a word identification task (progressive demasking) on 1,025 monosyllabic English (L2) words to native speakers of French, German, and Dutch. A regression approach was adopted, including a large number of within- and between-language variables as predictors. A substantial overlap of reaction time patterns was found across the groups of bilinguals, showing that word recognition results obtained for one group of bilinguals generalize to bilinguals with different mother tongues. Moreover, among the set of significant predictors, only one between-language variable was present (cognate status); all others reflected characteristics of the target language. Thus, although influences across languages exist, word recognition in L2 by proficient bilinguals is primarily determined by within-language factors, whereas cross-language effects appear to be limited. An additional comparison of the bilingual data with a native control group showed that there are subtle but significant differences between L1 and L2 processing.     

Linguistic Phenomena and Language Selection in the REM Dreams of German-English Bilinguals

Sixteen German-English bilinguals were studied in a sleep laboratory for four nonconsecutive nights each. Half were native English speakers living in Zürich, and half native German speakers living in Atlanta. Presleep thought samples were solicited each evening and REM dream reports each night; subjects judged the waking appropriateness of their imagined speech and language phenomena, and also identified waking sources of their dream imagery, the following mornings. Incidences of dreaming and of speech therein generally were similar to those of monolinguals. Whether sessions were conducted in German (two nights) or English (two nights) did directly influence language selection in subjects' dreams. Judged appropriateness of language selection to imagined events was very high for thought samples, and high for REM dreams. Sources for thought samples were generally consonant with the language dominant at study site; for REM dreams this relationship was considerably weaker. Judged waking appropriateness to imagined situations was more strongly related to language selection than was the language reference of the supposed sources of those situations.     

Cognitive strategies in discourse processing: A comparison of Chinese and English speakers

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that, when processing a normative language, individuals tend to adopt the discourse processing strategies that they use in their native language. In a natural language processing task, native speakers of English and Chinese read English passages that were heavily loaded with zero anaphora. Native Chinese speakers found the passages more comprehensible than did native English speakers, presumably because zero anaphora occurs much more often in Chinese than in English. However, in an artificial laboratory task, native Chinese speakers did not find it easier to recover the missing referents than did native English speakers, suggesting that the two groups were equally capable of reference retrieval although they differed in their natural language discourse-processing strategies. These results suggest that the strategies used for processing foreign-language discourse are influenced by those used to process native-language discourse.This research was supported in part by Dean's Small Grants from the Graduate School of the University of Colorado to Liang Tao and United States Army Research Institute Contracts MDA903-90-K-0066 and MDA903-93-K-0010 to the University of Colorado (Alice Healy, Principal Investigator).We thank Barbara Fox, Lise Menn, and Nanfang Jiang for stimulating discussions about this research.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the First International Conference on Chinese Linguistics held in Singapore, 1992.     

Abstraction and the (Misnamed) Language Familiarity Effect

Talkers are recognized more accurately if they are speaking the listeners’ native language rather than an unfamiliar language. This “language familiarity effect” has been shown not to depend upon comprehension and must instead involve language sound patterns. We further examine the level of sound‐pattern processing involved, by comparing talker recognition in foreign languages versus two varieties of English, by (a) English speakers of one variety, (b) English speakers of the other variety, and (c) non‐native listeners (more familiar with one of the varieties). All listener groups performed better with native than foreign speech, but no effect of language variety appeared: Native listeners discriminated talkers equally well in each, with the native variety never outdoing the other variety, and non‐native listeners discriminated talkers equally poorly in each, irrespective of the variety's familiarity. The results suggest that this talker recognition effect rests not on simple familiarity, but on an abstract level of phonological processing.     

Effects of contextual diversity on semantic decision and reading aloud: evidence from a word learning study in English as a second language / Efectos de la diversidad contextual en la decisión semántica y la lectura en voz alta: evidencia de un estudio de aprendizaje de palabras en inglés como segundo idioma

This experiment investigated contextual diversity effects on novel word learning in English as a second language (L2). A group of advanced English speakers, whose native language was Spanish, participated in the study. Participants learned the meaning of real but obscure words that were embedded in either two or 12 different sentences and learned over two days (frequency of exposure was kept constant). On day three, participants were tested using reading aloud and semantic decision tasks. The results showed that participants learned the meaning of words in both conditions fairly well as revealed by their accuracy in the semantic decision task. However, words experienced in 12 different contexts generated more accurate and faster reaction times (RTs), suggesting the acquisition of more robust semantic representations. Strikingly, reading latencies were also faster for the 12-sentence condition, which might imply that semantics has an effect on reading newly learned words in English as a second language. These results are discussed and accommodated in view of the DRC and the PDP models of single-word reading.     

Is Dutch native English? Linguistic analysis by 2-month-olds

A variant of the non-nutritive habituation/dishabituation sucking method was used to test 2-month-old English infants’ perception of languages. This method tests for the spontaneous interest of the baby to a change in the stimulus. English and Japanese were clearly discriminated. The difference between French and Japanese was equally clearly not of interest to babies using this procedure, the babies behaving as though both languages were classified simply as ‘foreign’. In order to further specify babies’ representation of native and foreign language, we used Dutch, which shares a number of suprasegmental features with English. The results from our last 2 experiments indicate that a portion of our 6–12 week-old babies consider Dutch as native, suggesting that we tapped in a transition period where the babies are still refining the suprasegmental specification of their native language.     

Age-of-acquisition effects in native speakers and second-language learners

Two lexical decision experiments were conducted to study the locus of age-of-acquisition (AoA) effects in skilled readers with English or Dutch as their first language. AoA effects have generally been explained in terms of phonological processing. In Experiment 1, Dutch elementary school and secondary school students were presented with words factorially manipulated on surface frequency and AoA). Two main effects and an interaction were found, confirming findings reported for English speakers by Gerhand and Barry (1999). In addition, a language development effect was established: AoA effects decreased with reading age. Elementary school students showed the largest AoA effects. Experiment 2 used two groups of subjects. The first group consisted of Dutch students enrolled in a master's degree program in English. The second group consisted of native speakers of English. All subjects were presented with the experimental set of words used by Gerhand and Barry (1999). British subjects showed the same response pattern as reported by Gerhand and Barry (1999). The question of interest was whether Dutch subjects would show an AoA effect on the English set or not. The answer was affirmative. Dutch subjects produced identical response patterns as the British group, showing only an overall 94-msec latency delay. This result challenges predictions of the phonological completeness hypothesis. Alternative accounts in terms of semantic processing are discussed.     

Ordered short-term memory differs in signers and speakers: implications for models of short-term memory

Capacity limits in linguistic short-term memory (STM) are typically measured with forward span tasks in which participants are asked to recall lists of words in the order presented. Using such tasks, native signers of American Sign Language (ASL) exhibit smaller spans than native speakers ([Boutla, M., Supalla, T., Newport, E. L., & Bavelier, D. (2004). Short-term memory span: Insights from sign language. Nature Neuroscience, 7(9), 997-1002]). Here, we test the hypothesis that this population difference reflects differences in the way speakers and signers maintain temporal order information in short-term memory. We show that native signers differ from speakers on measures of short-term memory that require maintenance of temporal order of the tested materials, but not on those in which temporal order is not required. In addition, we show that, in a recall task with free order, bilingual subjects are more likely to recall in temporal order when using English than ASL. We conclude that speakers and signers do share common short-term memory processes. However, whereas short-term memory for spoken English is predominantly organized in terms of temporal order, we argue that this dimension does not play as great a role in signers' short-term memory. Other factors that may affect STM processes in signers are discussed.     

The incidence of false memories in native and non-native speakers

The current study consisted of four experiments that utilised a novel approach to investigating false memories. Each of the experiments in the current study investigated individuals with varying experience with different languages. Experiment 1 tested participants in both their native and secondary languages as well as monolingual English speakers, while Experiment 2 assessed native Spanish speakers using both English and Spanish associative lists. Experiment 3 examined the illusory memories in monolingual Spanish speakers in both English and Spanish, while Experiment 4 investigated false memories in monolingual English speakers in both English and Spanish. Results indicated that memory for list items and critical lures was greatest when the lists were presented in the participants' primary language. Results can be explained by either activation-based or fuzzy-trace theories.