Does visual speech information affect word segmentation?

We present an experiment in which we explored the extent to which visual speech information affects learners’ ability to segment words from a fluent speech stream. Learners were presented with a set of sentences consisting of novel words, in which the only cues to the location of word boundaries were the transitional probabilities between syllables. They were exposed to this language through the auditory modality only, through the visual modality only (where the learners saw the speaker producing the sentences but did not hear anything), or through both the auditory and visual modalities. The learners were successful at segmenting words from the speech stream under all three training conditions. These data suggest that visual speech information has a positive effect on word segmentation performance, at least under some circumstances.     

World isolation and meaning in segmentation

The effect of meaning and isolation of words on the acquisition of segmentation of words in sentences was examined with an artificial miniature language composed of Mandarin Chinese quasi-elements. Forty undergraduate students participated in one of four groups: Word No Meaning, Word Meaning, Sentence No Meaning, or Sentence Meaning. In each group the subjects listened to the same set of words, either as isolated words or in sentences. Additionally, the meaning groups saw accompanying pictorial representations of isolated words or sentences. Pretest and posttest assessments indicated that isolation of words is a significant factor in word segmentation for an initial word set restricted in size when meaning is not provided. When meaning is provided, the isolation of words apparently does not influence word segmentation performance.     

Category induction from distributional cues in an artificial language

The ability to identify the grammatical category of a word (e.g., noun, verb, adjective) is a fundamental aspect of competence in a natural language. Children show evidence of categorization by as early as 18 months, and in some cases younger. However, the mechanisms that underlie this ability are not well understood. The lexical co-occurrence patterns of words in sentences could provide information about word categories--for example, words that follow the in English often belong to the same category. As a step in understanding the role distributional mechanisms might play in language learning, the present study investigated the ability of adults to categorize words on the basis of distributional information. Forty participants listened for approximately 6 min to sentences in an artificial language and were told that they would later be tested on their memory for what they had heard. Participants were next tested on an additional set of sentences and asked to report which sentences they recognized from the first 6 min. The results suggested that learners performed a distributional analysis on the initial set of sentences and recognized sentences on the basis of their memory of sequences of categories of words. Thus, mechanisms that would be useful in natural language learning were shown to be active in adults in an artificial language learning task.     

Hearing foreign voices: does knowing what is said affect visual-masked-speech detection?

We investigated audio-visual (AV) perceptual integration by examining the effect of seeing the speaker's synchronised moving face on masked-speech detection ability. Signal amplification and higher-level cognitive accounts of an AV advantage were contrasted, the latter by varying whether participants knew the language of the speaker. An AV advantage was shown for sentences whose mid-to-high-frequency acoustic envelope was highly correlated with articulator movement, regardless of knowledge of the language. For low-correlation sentences, knowledge of the language had a large impact; for participants with no knowledge of the language an AV inhibitory effect was found (providing support for reports of a compelling AV illusion). The results indicate a role for both sensory enhancement and higher-level cognitive factors in AV speech detection.     

Morphological representation in an endangered,polysynthetic language

This article presents the results from an initial psycholinguistic study of patterns of morphological representation in Dene Suliné (Chipewyan), an indigenous and highly endangered language spoken in Northwestern Canada. Our investigation focused on how morphological knowledge in this polysynthetic language is affected across various levels of language attrition by employing a morphological segmentation task and an off-line lexical decision task. We discuss the manner in which these tasks target different aspects of morphological ability and then turn to methodological issues associated with conducting psycholinguistic studies with language users that differ in levels of age, education, literacy, and bilingualism (Dene- English). Finally, we report on the challenges of doing psycholinguistic research outside the confines of a university setting and make some recommendations to other researchers who might wish to undertake similar studies.     

首词素位置概率信息未参与汉语阅读的词切分：基于副中央凹加工的证据

本研究采用边界范式,考察汉语阅读中读者是否在副中央凹处利用首词素的位置概率信息进行词切分和词识别。采用2（首词素位置概率：高、低）×２（预视类型：相同预视、假字预视）的被试内实验设计,以双字词为目标词,记录大学生阅读句子时的眼动轨迹。结果发现,在跳读率和第一遍阅读的眼动指标中,被试在高、低首词素位置概率条件中获得的预视效益量无显著差异。该结果表明,读者并未在副中央凹处加工首词素的位置概率信息。结合前期研究推断,首词素位置概率信息没有作用于汉语阅读的词切分和词识别。     

Test of Spanish sentences to measure speech intelligibility in noise conditions

This article describes the development of a test for measuring the intelligibility of speech in noise for the Spanish language, similar to the test developed by Kalikow, Stevens, and Elliot (Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 5, 1337–1360, 1977) for the English language. The test consists of six forms, each comprising 25 high-predictability (HP) sentences and 25 low-predictability (LP) sentences. The sentences were used in a perceptual task to assess their intelligibility in babble noise across three different signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions in a sample of 474 normal-hearing listeners. The results showed that the listeners obtained higher scores of intelligibility for HP sentences than for LP sentences, and the scores were lower for the higher SNRs, as was expected. The final six forms were equivalent in intelligibility and phonetic content.     

Perceptual simulation in developing language comprehension

We tested an embodied account of language proposing that comprehenders create perceptual simulations of the events they hear and read about. In Experiment 1, children (ages 7–13 years) performed a picture verification task. Each picture was preceded by a prerecorded spoken sentence describing an entity whose shape or orientation matched or mismatched the depicted object. Responses were faster for matching pictures, suggesting that participants had formed perceptual-like situation models of the sentences. The advantage for matching pictures did not increase with age. Experiment 2 extended these findings to the domain of written language. Participants (ages 7–10 years) of high and low word reading ability verified pictures after reading sentences aloud. The results suggest that even when reading is effortful, children construct a perceptual simulation of the described events. We propose that perceptual simulation plays a more central role in developing language comprehension than was previously thought.     

词切分对印-英双语者阅读影响的眼动研究

以25名印-英双语者为被试,采用EyeLink2000眼动仪,探讨词切分对印-英双语者阅读的影响。实验一要求被试阅读印地语句子,实验二要求被试阅读英语句子,词切分方式有三种：正常条件、无空格隔词加灰条件和无空格条件。结果发现：（1）对印-英双语者阅读自己的两种官方语言来说,空格因素在其阅读中发挥着积极作用,删除空格会明显影响他们的阅读;（2）在无空格隔词加灰条件和无空格条件下,印-英双语者阅读英语时下降的速度显著低于阅读印地语的,这表明空格因素的作用会受语言特点的制约。     

The underlying structures of sentences are the primary units of immediate speech processing

Two studies of the subjective location of clicks in spoken sentences indicate: (1) within-clause phrase structure boundaries do not significantly affect the segmentation of spoken sentences; (2) divisions between underlying structure sentences determine segmentation even in the absence of corresponding explicit clause divisions in the surface phrase structure. These results support a model of speech processing according to which listeners actively segment and organize spoken sequences into potential underlying syntactic structures.     

Infant ability to tell voices apart rests on language experience

A visual fixation study tested whether 7-month-olds can discriminate between different talkers. The infants were first habituated to talkers producing sentences in either a familiar or unfamiliar language, then heard test sentences from previously unheard speakers, either in the language used for habituation, or in another language. When the language at test mismatched that in habituation, infants always noticed the change. When language remained constant and only talker altered, however, infants detected the change only if the language was the native tongue. Adult listeners with a different native tongue from the infants did not reproduce the discriminability patterns shown by the infants, and infants detected neither voice nor language changes in reversed speech; both these results argue against explanation of the native-language voice discrimination in terms of acoustic properties of the stimuli. The ability to identify talkers is, like many other perceptual abilities, strongly influenced by early life experience.     

Support for context effects on segmentation and segments depends on the context

Listeners must adapt to differences in speech rate across talkers and situations. Speech rate adaptation effects are strong for adjacent syllables (i.e., proximal syllables). For studies that have assessed adaptation effects on speech rate information more than one syllable removed from a point of ambiguity in speech (i.e., distal syllables), the difference in strength between different types of ambiguity is stark. Studies of word segmentation have shown large shifts in perception as a result of distal rate manipulations, while studies of segmental perception have shown only weak, or even nonexistent, effects. However, no study has standardized methods and materials to study context effects for both types of ambiguity simultaneously. Here, a set of sentences was created that differed as minimally as possible except for whether the sentences were ambiguous to the voicing of a consonant or ambiguous to the location of a word boundary. The sentences were then rate-modified to slow down the distal context speech rate to various extents, dependent on three different definitions of distal context that were adapted from previous experiments, along with a manipulation of proximal context to assess whether proximal effects were comparable across ambiguity types. The results indicate that the definition of distal influenced the extent of distal rate effects strongly for both segments and segmentation. They also establish the presence of distal rate effects on word-final segments for the first time. These results were replicated, with some caveats regarding the perception of individual segments, in an Internet-based sample recruited from Mechanical Turk.     

Abstract Rule Learning in 11- and 14-Month-Old Infants

This study tests the hypothesis that distributional information can guide infants in the generalization of word order movement rules at the initial stage of language acquisition. Participants were 11- and 14-month-old infants. Stimuli were sentences in Russian, a language that was unknown to our infants. During training the word order of each sentence was transformed following a consistent pattern (e.g., ABC–BAC). During the test phase infants heard novel sentences that respected the trained rule and ones that violated the trained rule (i.e., a different transformation such as ABC–ACB). Stimuli words had highly variable phonological and morphological shapes. The cue available was the positional information of words and their non-adjacent relations across sentences. We found that 14-month-olds, but not 11-month-olds, showed evidence of abstract rule generalization to novel instances. The implications of this finding to early syntactic acquisition are discussed.     

Kindergarten literacy assessment of English Only and English language learner students: An examination of the predictive validity of three phonemic awareness measures

The study assessed the ability of English phonemic awareness measures to predict kindergarten reading performance and determine factors that contributed to growth trajectories on those measures for English Only (EO) and English language learner (ELL) students. Using initial sound fluency (ISF), phoneme segmentation fluency (PSF), and a combined phoneme segmentation task (CPST), students' beginning of kindergarten scores were used to predict end-of-kindergarten Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF) and reading (WRMT-R/NU). Regression analyses revealed that ISF and CPST early in kindergarten predicted variance in NWF and WRMT-R/NU. PSF did not predict reading performance over ISF or CPST. While gender was a significant factor in the growth curves across the measures, results revealed no significant difference for EO and ELL students.     

Selective impairment of thematic role assignment in sentence processing

We report the performance of a brain-damaged subject showing a particularly pure dissociation between impairment in processing thematic roles and spared ability to process the morphological structure of sentences. The thematic role processing impairment was observed in both comprehension and production of active and passive reversible sentences, although it was more severe for the latter sentence type. This pattern of performance poses interesting challenges for current conceptions of the nature of language breakdown in aphasia and for models of normal sentence processing.     

词边界信息在句中的分布

用经过删除的语音歧义句作材料,研究了词边界信息在句中的分布。结果说明,在歧义句中歧义音节是最重要的切分线索;向歧义音节的前后过渡也对词切分有贡献;歧义音节和过渡以外的部分在一定条件下对切分有帮助。     

The logic in language: How all quantifiers are alike,but each quantifier is different

Quantifier words like each, every, all and three are among the most abstract words in language. Unlike nouns, verbs and adjectives, the meanings of quantifiers are not related to a referent out in the world. Rather, quantifiers specify what relationships hold between the sets of entities, events and properties denoted by other words. When two quantifiers are in the same clause, they create a systematic ambiguity. “Every kid climbed a tree” could mean that there was only one tree, climbed by all, or many different trees, one per climbing kid. In the present study, participants chose a picture to indicate their preferred reading of different ambiguous sentences – those containing every, as well as the other three quantifiers. In Experiment 1, we found large systematic differences in preference, depending on the quantifier word. In Experiment 2, we then manipulated the choice of a particular reading of one sentence, and tested how this affected participants’ reading preference on a subsequent target sentence. We found a priming effect for all quantifiers, but only when the prime and target sentences contained the same quantifier. For example, all-a sentences prime other all-a sentences, while each-a primes each-a, but sentences with each do not prime sentences with all or vice versa. In Experiment 3, we ask whether the lack of priming across quantifiers could be due to the two sentences sharing one fewer word. We find that changing the verb between the prime and target sentence does not reduce the priming effect. In Experiment 4, we discover one case where there is priming across quantifiers – when one number (e.g. three) is in the prime, and a different one (e.g. four) is in the target. We discuss how these findings relate to linguistic theories of quantifier meaning and what they tell us about the division of labor between conceptual content and combinatorial semantics, as well as the mental representations of quantification and of the abstract logical structure of language.     

Language and age effects in children's processing of word order

We compare the processing of transitive sentences in young learners of a strict word order language (English) and two languages that allow noun omissions and many variant word orders: Turkish, a case-marked language, and Mandarin Chinese, a non case-marked language. Children aged 1–3 years listened to simple transitive sentences in the typical word order of their language, paired with two visual scenes, only one of which matched the sentence. Multiple measures of comprehension (percent of looking to match, latency to look to match, number of switches of attention) revealed a general pattern of early sensitivity to word order, coupled with language and age effects in children's processing efficiency. In particular, English learners showed temporally speedier processing of transitive sentences than Turkish learners, who also displayed more uncertainty about the matching scene. Mandarin learners behaved like Turkish learners in showing slower processing of sentences, and all language groups displayed faster processing by older than younger children. These results demonstrate that sentence processing is sensitive to crosslinguistic features beginning early in language development.     

The monolingual nature of speech segmentation by bilinguals.

Monolingual French speakers employ a syllable-based procedure in speech segmentation; monolingual English speakers use a stress-based segmentation procedure and do not use the syllable-based procedure. In the present study French-English bilinguals participated in segmentation experiments with English and French materials. Their results as a group did not simply mimic the performance of English monolinguals with English language materials and of French monolinguals with French language materials. Instead, the bilinguals formed two groups, defined by forced choice of a dominant language. Only the French-dominant groups showed syllabic segmentation and only with French language materials. The English-dominant group showed no syllabic segmentation in either language. However, the English-dominant group showed stress-based segmentation with English language materials; the French-dominant group did not. We argue that rhythmically based segmentation procedures are mutually exclusive, as a consequence of which speech segmentation by bilinguals is, in one respect at least, functionally monolingual.     

Neural Systems Mediating American Sign Language: Effects of Sensory Experience and Age of Acquisition

ERPs were recorded from deaf and hearing native signers and from hearing subjects who acquired ASL late or not at all as they viewed ASL signs that formed sentences. The results were compared across these groups and with those from hearing subjects reading English sentences. The results suggest that there are constraints on the organization of the neural systems that mediate formal languages and that these are independent of the modality through which language is acquired. These include different specializations of anterior and posterior cortical regions in aspects of grammatical and semantic processing and a bias for the left hemisphere to mediate aspects of mnemonic functions in language. Additionally, the results suggest that the nature and timing of sensory and language experience significantly impact the development of the language systems of the brain. Effects of the early acquisition of ASL include an increased role for the right hemisphere and for parietal cortex and this occurs in both hearing and deaf native signers. An increased role of posterior temporal and occipital areas occurs in deaf native signers only and thus may be attributable to auditory deprivation.