We investigated the word‐reading development of adult second‐language learners of English. A sample of 70 (Mandarin or Cantonese) Chinese‐speaking students enrolled in a university‐level English bridging program at a Canadian university silently read passages of text at the beginning and end of the program while their eye movements were recorded. At each timepoint, we also administered a battery of tests that measure key component skills of second‐language reading (phonological processing, vocabulary knowledge, and listening comprehension). We found longitudinal changes in lexical processing for long words in early (refixation probability and gaze duration) and late (go‐past time and total reading time) eye movement measures, indicating a shift from a sublexical to a holistic word‐processing strategy. We found the largest gains in sublexical processing among students with stronger phonological awareness upon entry to the program and students who acquired more vocabulary than their peers during the program. We interpret the results of this study as evidence of a transition from a lexical processing strategy that is heavily reliant on phonological decoding to word‐reading behavior that is more actively engaged in higher order cognitive processes, such as meaning integration. This research offers novel insights into predictors of reading skill in postsecondary English‐language bridging programs.
For the automatic punctuation of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) output, both prosodic and text based features are used, often in combination. Pure prosody based approaches usually have low computation needs, introduce little latency (delay) and they are also more robust to ASR errors. Text based approaches usually yield better performance, they are however resource demanding (both regarding their training and computational needs), often introduce high time latency and are more sensitive to ASR errors. The present paper proposes a lightweight prosody based punctuation approach following a new paradigm: we argue in favour of an all-inclusive modelling of speech prosody instead of just relying on distinct acoustic markers: first, the entire phonological phrase structure is reconstructed, then its close correlation with punctuations is exploited in a sequence modelling approach with recurrent neural networks. With this tiny and easy to implement model we reach performance in Hungarian punctuation comparable to large, text based models for other languages by keeping resource requirements minimal and suitable for real-time operation with low latency.
Current models of spoken word recognition have been predominantly based on studies of Indo-European languages. As a result, little is known about the recognition processes involved in the perception of tonal languages (e.g., Mandarin Chinese), and the role of lexical tone in speech perception. One view is that tonal languages are processed phonologically through individual segments, while another view is that they are processed lexically as a whole. Moreover, a recent study claimed to be the first to discover an early phonological processing stage in Mandarin (Huang et al., 2014). There seems to be a lack of investigations concerning tonal languages, as no clear conclusions have been made about the nature of tonal processes, or a model of spoken word recognition that best incorporates lexical tone. The current study addressed these issues by presenting 18 native Mandarin speakers with aural sentences with medial target words, which either matched or mismatched the preceding visually presented sentences with medial target words (e.g, 家 /jia1/ "home"). Violation conditions involved target words that differed in the following ways: tone violation, where only the tone was different (e.g., 价 /jia4/ "price"), onset violation, where only the onset was different (e.g., 虾 /xia1/ "shrimp"), and syllable violation, where both the tone and the onset were different (e.g., 糖 /tang2/ "candy"). We did not find evidence for an early phonological processing stage in Mandarin. Instead, our findings indicate that Mandarin syllables are processed incrementally through phonological segments and that lexical tone is strongly associated with semantic access. These results are discussed with respect to modifications for v existing models in spoken word recognition to incorporate the processes involved with tonal language recognition. vi Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been possible without the efforts of many. I am deeply indebted to my principal supervisor, Dr. John F. Connolly for his invaluable guidance and thoughtful perspectives on various aspects of this research. My appreciation for his contributions is beyond my words. I am truly grateful for my second supervisor, Dr. Anna L. Moro, for her warm support and valued insight on the formation of my research question and stimuli. My Mandarin instructor, Ms. Jun Wu (吴老师), played a significant role in creating sentential contexts for my target words, and I am incredibly thankful for her help. I specifically thank Daniel Schmidtke and Dr. Elisabet Service for their involvement with my statistical analyses. I would also like to thank Christine Zhang, Jing Wen, and Lisa Lin for recording my stimuli, and Kai Fan for reviewing my stimuli for native accuracy.I would like to extend my gratitude to the Language Memory and Brain Lab (LMBLab) for dedicating their time and effort in assisting me with collecting data and running participants. Of the LMBLab, Rober Boshra deserves a special mention for his much-appreciated assistance in programming my experiment and sincere reassurances.Fu...
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