On teaching articulatory phonetics via an orthography

In six experiments, the ability of university students to obtain generalizable knowledge about subphonemic distinctive features through learning to read an orthography based on these features was explored. In the reference experiment, it was found that learning four grapheme-phoneme pairs did not generate “feature awareness,” as tested by generalization to new instances of the orthography. In a second experiment, it was demonstrated that this failure was not due to inherent limitations in the testing technique, and a third experiment indicated that a considerable increase in exposure to the orthography and its principles did not help. In the last three experiments, instruction in articulatory phonetics was given prior to subjects’ learning the orthography, but reliable generalization to new instances emerged only when the instruction was based directly on the phonemes used in acquisition. Also, successful generalization was found to go hand in hand with verbalizable awareness of phonetic structure. A high level of performance was achieved only when the orthography/speech isomorphism was pointed out clearly. The results indicate that usable knowledge about an implicitly known property of speech is relatively resistant to instruction via an orthography, and that direct instruction in the property is necessary. An analogy is drawn with the acquisition of reading by nonreaders, with the results of the study lending weight to the use of curricula that emphasize phonemic awareness.     

Frequency trajectory effects in Chinese character recognition: Evidence for the arbitrary mapping hypothesis

Frequency trajectory is a better measure to investigate age-limited learning effects than age of acquisition (AoA) ratings (Zevin, J. D., & Seidenberg, M. S. (2002). Age of acquisition effects in word reading and other tasks. Journal of Memory and Language, 47(1), 1-29). The current study uses frequency trajectory as a variable to investigate age-limited learning effects in Chinese character recognition, and tests predictions of the arbitrary mapping hypothesis as applied in a non-alphabetic writing system. In Experiment 1, regression analyses showed that, compared to rated AoA, frequency trajectory of characters was less affected by other lexical properties, and could explain a significant proportion of variance of AoA. In Experiment 2, the frequency trajectory and predictability from orthography to pronunciation of characters were orthogonally manipulated in a character naming task. The frequency trajectory effect appeared only for the arbitrary mapping condition. In Experiment 3, frequency trajectory and predictability from orthography to meaning of characters were manipulated in a semantic category judgment task. The frequency trajectory effects were found only when the mapping from orthography to semantic is less consistent. In summary, the study confirmed that AoA is a genuine factor affecting word processing, and the AoA effects were limited to those situations in which mapping between input and output representation was arbitrary. These results provide strong cross-linguistic evidence in support of the arbitrary mapping hypothesis.     

Infant learning is influenced by local spurious generalizations

In previous work, 11‐month‐old infants were able to learn rules about the relation of the consonants in CVCV words from just four examples. The rules involved phonetic feature relations (same voicing or same place of articulation), and infants' learning was impeded when pairs of words allowed alternative possible generalizations (e.g. two words both contained the specific consonants p and t). Experiment 1 asked whether a small number of such spurious generalizations found in a randomly ordered list of 24 different words would also impede learning. It did – infants showed no sign of learning the rule. To ask whether it was the overall set of words or their order that prevented learning, Experiment 2 reordered the words to avoid local spurious generalizations. Infants showed robust learning. Infants thus appear to entertain spurious generalizations based on small, local subsets of stimuli. The results support a characterization of infants as incremental rather than batch learners.     

Use of visual information in speech perception: evidence for a visual rate effect both with and without a McGurk effect

The McGurk effect, where an incongruent visual syllable influences identification of an auditory syllable, does not always occur, suggesting that perceivers sometimes fail to use relevant visual phonetic information. We tested whether another visual phonetic effect, which involves the influence of visual speaking rate on perceived voicing (Green & Miller, 1985), would occur in instances when the McGurk effect does not. In Experiment 1, we established this visual rate effect using auditory and visual stimuli matching in place of articulation, finding a shift in the voicing boundary along an auditory voice-onset-time continuum with fast versus slow visual speech tokens. In Experiment 2, we used auditory and visual stimuli differing in place of articulation and found a shift in the voicing boundary due to visual rate when the McGurk effect occurred and, more critically, when it did not. The latter finding indicates that phonetically relevant visual information is used in speech perception even when the McGurk effect does not occur, suggesting that the incidence of the McGurk effect underestimates the extent of audio-visual integration.     

Integral processing of visual place and auditory voicing information during phonetic perception.

Results of auditory speech experiments show that reaction times (RTs) for place classification in a test condition in which stimuli vary along the dimensions of both place and voicing are longer than RTs in a control condition in which stimuli vary only in place. Similar results are obtained when subjects are asked to classify the stimuli along the voicing dimension. By taking advantage of the "McGurk" effect (McGurk & MacDonald, 1976), the present study investigated whether a similar pattern of interference extends to situations in which variation along the place dimension occurs in the visual modality. The results showed that RTs for classifying phonetic features in the test condition were significantly longer than in the control condition for the place and voicing dimensions. These results indicate a mutual and symmetric interference exists in the classification of the two dimensions, even when the variation along the dimensions occurs in separate modalities.     

Continuous mapping from sound to meaning in spoken-language comprehension: immediate effects of verb-based thematic constraints

The authors used 2 "visual-world" eye-tracking experiments to examine lexical access using Dutch constructions in which the verb did or did not place semantic constraints on its subsequent subject noun phrase. In Experiment 1, fixations to the picture of a cohort competitor (overlapping with the onset of the referent's name, the subject) did not differ from fixations to a distractor in the constraining-verb condition. In Experiment 2, cross-splicing introduced phonetic information that temporarily biased the input toward the cohort competitor. Fixations to the cohort competitor temporarily increased in both the neutral and constraining conditions. These results favor models in which mapping from the input onto meaning is continuous over models in which contextual effects follow access of an initial form-based competitor set.     

书面字形在汉语低年级儿童口语词汇学习中的作用

采用配对联想学习范式, 通过2个实验, 系统考察了书面字形在汉语低年级儿童口语词汇学习中的作用。实验一以40名二年级学生为研究对象, 控制了假字的形旁透明度, 操纵了声旁的规则性, 要求儿童分别在规则字、不规则字和无字形条件下学习4个新异物体的名称, 结果发现呈现不规则汉字阻碍了儿童口语词汇的学习;实验二以27名一年级学生为研究对象, 采用相同的配对联想学习范式, 同时操纵了假字的声旁规则性和形旁透明度, 再次发现了不规则汉字的阻碍效应, 并且发现透明形旁对口语词汇学习的促进作用。整个研究表明, 书面字形在汉语儿童口语词汇学习中具有重要作用, 这对今后的教学实践和理论研究都具有重要启示意义。     

Effects of orthographic transparency on reading and phoneme awareness in children learning to read in Wales

The relationship between the development of reading skills and the consistency of the orthography (writing system) is investigated in a study that examines reading acquisition in children living in Wales. Performance of children learning to read Welsh (a transparent alphabetic orthography) on tests of reading and phoneme detection was compared with the performance of children learning to read English (an opaque alphabetic orthography). The children were tested during their second year of formal reading instruction at school when they were aged between 5 and 6 years, and again one year later. The children learning to read in Welsh performed significantly better at reading both real words and nonwords than children learning to read in English. The English readers made fewer phonologically based reading errors. The Welsh readers also performed better on a phoneme awareness task. These findings support the claim that children learn to read more quickly in a transparent orthography, and provide further evidence that the consistency of the orthography influences the initial adoption of different strategies for word recognition.     

Phonetic awareness and reading acquisition

Summary Three issues are dealt with: the relationship between phonetic awareness and reading acquisition, the nature of the cognitive capacities that make phonetic awareness possible, and the potential influence of phonetic awareness on language perception and comprehension. Data on the relationships between phonetic awareness and reading acquisition support an interactive view. For most people, learning to read in the alphabetic system stimulates phonetic awareness. On the other hand, phonetic awareness is a critical factor for success in reading acquisition. Indications about the nature of the cognitive capacities that underlie phonetic awareness may be obtained by inspecting its development. Two capacities at least seem to be required: the capacity to ignore meaning and focus on the sound properties of speech and the capacity of segmentation.Lack of phonetic awareness does not imply that phonetic processing does not take place during speech perception. Recent data suggest that speech perception includes a stage of extraction of phonetic features regardless of whether or not the subject is able to segment speech into phones explicitly. However, phonetic awareness may influence perceptual strategies and the relative weight of meaning expectancies in identification.Our work received support from the Belgian Fonds de la Recherche fondamentale collective (F.R.F.C.) under contracts No. 2.4505.76 and 2.4505.80 as well as from the Belgian Ministère de la Politique et de la Programmation scientifiques (Action de Recherche concertée Processus cognitifs dans la lecture)     

Age of acquisition effects in reading Chinese: Evidence in favour of the arbitrary mapping hypothesis

Two experiments explored the locus of the age of acquisition (AoA) effects in the processing of Chinese characters and tested the arbitrary mapping hypothesis of AoA effects. In Experiment 1, AoA and predictability from orthography to pronunciation of Chinese characters were manipulated in a naming task. Results showed a larger AoA effect for characters from low‐predictive families than for characters from high‐predictive families. In Experiment 2, AoA and predictability from orthography to meaning were manipulated in a semantic category judgment task. Results showed a larger AoA effect for characters from low‐predictive families than for characters from high‐predictive families. In summary, the two experiments provided empirical support for the arbitrary mapping hypothesis to explain AoA effects.     

Long-term memory for elementary visual percepts: memory psychophysics of context and acquisition effects

In the first phase of each of two experiments, participants learned to associate a set of labels (i.e., consonant-vowel-consonant [CVC]) with a set of line lengths by using a paired-associate learning procedure. In the second phase of each experiment, these learned labels were used as memorial standards in the method of constant stimuli. Psychometric functions and the associated indices of discriminative performance (i.e., Weber fractions [WFs], just noticeable difference, and point of subjective equality) were then obtained for the remembered standards. In Experiment 1, WFs (i.e., the indices of memory precision) obtained with remembered standards were found to be higher (i.e., had poorer discriminability) than were WFs obtained with perceptual standards. In addition, WFs obtained with the remembered standards exhibited serial position effects (i.e., poorer discriminability for central items in the memory ensemble) and systematically varied with set size (i.e., the number of standards in the memory set), but WFs obtained with perceptual standards did not depend on serial position or set size. In Experiment 2, increasing the number of acquisition trials reduced WFs and diminished serial position effects. In addition, WFs did not vary systematically with the "physical" spacing between the standards in memory, but they did with the ordinal spacing. The results are consistent with a noisy analogue representation of remembered magnitudes, whereby central items in a memory ensemble are subject to lateral inhibition and thus reduced discriminability. Finally, presentation order effects, as defined by the classic time-order error, were observed with purely perceptual comparisons but not with comparisons involving a remembered standard. This latter finding is inconsistent with a strong form of the functional equivalence view of perception and memory.     

Phonetic factors in letter detection: A reevaluation

Three experiments in which subjects searched for the letter e in printed text were conducted to examine the effects of phonetic factors in silent reading. In Experiment 1, subjects made more errors on silent es than on pronounced es, but silent es always occurred at the ends of words, whereas pronounced es occurred in the middle of words. In Experiment 2, all instances of the letter e occurred in the penultimate location in the words, and no effects of letter voicing were obtained. In Experiment 3, subjects made more errors on es in unstressed syllables than on es in stressed syllables in three-syllable words. However, this effect occurred only for es in the second and third syllables and only for the more common words. All three experiments yielded large effects of word frequency, which were reduced in passages printed in alternating typecase. It was concluded that letter detection is affected by syllable stress but not by letter voicing and that the stress effect depends on whether the subject is able to form reading units at the syllable level.     

Perceptual-motor processing of phonetic features in speech

Some reaction time experiments are reported on the relation between the perception and production of phonetic features in speech. Subjects had to produce spoken consonant-vowel syllables rapidly in response to other consonant-vowel stimulus syllables. The stimulus syllables were presented auditorily in one condition and visually in another. Reaction time was measured as a function of the phonetic features shared by the consonants of the stimulus and response syllables. Responses to auditory stimulus syllables were faster when the response syllables started with consonants that had the same voicing feature as those of the stimulus syllables. A shared place-of-articulation feature did not affect the speed of responses to auditory stimulus syllables, even though the place feature was highly salient. For visual stimulus syllables, performance was independent of whether the consonants of the response syllables had the same voicing, same place of articulation, or no shared features. This pattern of results occurred in cases where the syllables contained stop consonants and where they contained fricatives. It held for natural auditory stimuli as well as artificially synthesized ones. The overall data reveal a close relation between the perception and production of voicing features in speech. It does not appear that such a relation exists between perceiving and producing places of articulation. The experiments are relevant to the motor theory of speech perception and to other models of perceptual-motor interactions.     

The structure of pigeon multiple-class same-different learning

Three experiments examined the structure of the decision framework used by pigeons in learning a multiple-class same-different task. Using a same-different choice task requiring the discrimination of odd-item different displays (one or more of the display's component elements differed) from same displays (all display components identical), pigeons were concurrently trained with sets of four discriminable display types. In each experiment, the consistent group was tested such that the same and different displays of four display types were consistently mapped onto their choice alternatives. The inconsistent group received a conflicting mapping of the same and different displays and the choice alternatives that differed across the four display types but were consistent within a display type. Experiment 1 tested experienced pigeons, and Experiment 2 tested naive pigeons. In both experiments, the consistent group learned their discrimination faster and to a higher level of choice accuracy than did the inconsistent group, which performed poorly in general. Only in the consistent group was the discrimination transferred to novel stimuli, indicative of concept formation in that group. A third experiment documented that the different display classes were discriminable from one another. These results suggest that pigeons attempt to generate a single discriminative rule when learning this type of task, and that this general rule can cover a large variety of stimulus elements and organizations, consistent with previous evidence suggesting that pigeons may be capable of learning relatively unbounded relational same-different concepts.     

The role of phonology in incidental vocabulary acquisition during silent reading

In two experiments, we investigated the role of phonology in learning new words incidentally during silent reading. Participants read sentence pairs containing novel or known words that varied in homophony (whether another word exists with an alternate spelling for the same pronunciation). In Experiment 1, we monitored readers' eye movements to investigate online processes involved in establishing meanings for novel words. In Experiment 2, participants completed cued recall and vocabulary recognition tasks after the reading session to assess the influence of phonological form on word learning. Eye movement results indicate that readers spent the most time reading novel homophones (e.g., skwosh) and surrounding context, indicating that phonological information is activated early during a reader's initial encounter with a new letter string. Retention measures suggest that readers were able to infer a meaning for each novel word type, despite the increased difficulty associated with reading novel words with familiar phonological forms, and that phonology aided the acquisition of orthography.     

听觉条件下词汇获得年龄效应产生机制的初探

通过三个实验考察听觉词汇的获得年龄效应。实验1采用基于语音的词汇判断任务,在错误率上存在词汇获得年龄效应,即早期习得词汇的正确率高于晚期习得词汇;实验2、3分别采用基于字形和语义的词汇判断任务,在反应时上存在词汇获得年龄效应,即早期习得词汇的反应快于晚期习得词汇。结果支持任意映射假说的观点：⒈词汇获得年龄效应产生于音、形、义加工的多个方面;⒉映射程度高低是决定词汇获得年龄效应大小的重要因素。     

Visual influences on the internal structure of phonetic categories

Previous work has demonstrated that the graded internal structure of phonetic categories is sensitive to a variety of contextual factors. One such factor is place of articulation: The best exemplars of voiceless stop consonants along auditory bilabial and velar voice onset time (VOT) continua occur over different ranges of VOTs (Volaitis & Miller, 1992). In the present study, we exploited the McGurk effect to examine whether visual information for place of articulation also shifts the best exemplar range for voiceless consonants, following Green and Kuhl's (1989) demonstration of effects of visual place of articulation on the location of voicing boundaries. In Experiment 1, we established that /p/ and /t/ have different best exemplar ranges along auditory bilabial and alveolar VOT continua. We then found, in Experiment 2, a similar shift in the best-exemplar range for /t/ relative to that for /p/ when there was a change in visual place of articulation, with auditory place of articulation held constant. These findings indicate that the perceptual mechanisms that determine internal phonetic category structure are sensitive to visual, as well as to auditory, information.     

The effects of alphabetic-reading competence on language representation in bilingual Chinese subjects

Summary The metaphonological abilities of two groups of bilingual Chinese adults residing in the Netherlands were examined. All subjects were able to read Chinese logograms, but those in the alphabetic group had, unlike those in the non-alphabetic group, also acquired some competence in reading Dutch. In Experiment 1, strong, significant differences between the two groups were obtained in the task of deleting the initial consonant of a Dutch spoken pseudo-word and also in a task consisting of segmenting a sentence into progressively smaller fragments, but there was no difference in a rhyme-nonrhyme classification task with pairs of Dutch words. In the latter task, the subjects in the two groups performed at a near-ceiling level. In Experiment 2, a significant difference was obtained again for the consonant-deletion task and no difference with an initial syllabic-vowel-deletion task, but the non-alphabetic subjects performed at a significantly lower level than the alphabetic subjects in the rhyme-judgement task. Taken together, these results are consistent with the earlier evidence that learning a non-alphabetic orthography does not promote awareness of the segmental structure of utterances. On the other hand, they confirm, for a population of Chinese readers, the conclusion drawn earlier from work with illiterate subjects that explicit instruction is more critical for the development of segmental representations of language than of representations of higher levels such as those of rhymes and syllables.     

Place learning in scopolamine-treated rats: the roles of distal cues and catecholaminergic mediation

Experiments 1 and 2 tested the hypothesis that cholinergic receptor antagonists impair place learning in a water maze by interfering with the processing of distal, visual cues. Extramaze cues were offered to rats in the form of geometrical patterns arranged on the inner circumference of a curtain surrounding the water maze. In Experiment 1 the animals were offered both the distal cues and proximal cues in the form of pingpong balls in fixed positions on the surface of the water while only distal cues were present in Experiment 2. Animals were injected with either scopolamine (0.5 mg/kg body wt) or saline 20 min prior to the daily place learning sessions. Upon reaching criterion level performance the animals were tested on "rotation" sessions on which the distal cues were displaced. The outcome of such "rotations" demonstrated that-regardless of the presence or absence of proximal cues-scopolamine-treated rats relied at least as much as normal animals on the distal cues. The acquisition phase of both Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated an almost complete lack of scopolamine-associated impairment in acquisition and performance of the place learning task. In Experiment 3 (when scopolamine was no longer administered) the subjects of Experiment 2 were exposed to a series of pharmacological "challenges" of their place learning performance and eventually to surgical ablation of the anteromedial prefrontal cortex. The outcome of the pharmacological challenges and the postoperative test of task performance demonstrated that the place learning performance of animals which had acquired the task under scopolamine was mediated by a neural substrate dissimilar to the substrate of task performance in normal animals. Rats acquiring the task while deprived of the cholinergic system demonstrated above-normal contributions to task mediation from catecholaminergic-probably dopaminergic-mechanisms and tentative results pointed to a "shift" toward prefrontal task mediation.