Recent studies in the acquisition of a second language (L2) phonology have revealed that orthography can influence the way in which L2 learners come to establish target-like lexical representations (Escudero et al., 2008, 2014; Escudero and Wanrooij, 2010; Showalter, 2012; Showalter and Hayes-Harb, 2013). Most of these studies, however, involve language pairs relying on Roman-based scripts. In comparison, the influence of a foreign or unfamiliar written representation on L2 phonological acquisition remains understudied. The present study therefore considers the effects of three L2 scripts on the early acquisition of an Arabic consonantal contrast word-initially (e.g. /ħal/–/χal/). Monolingual native speakers of English with no prior knowledge of Arabic participated in a word-learning experiment where they were instructed to learn six pairs of minimally contrastive words, each associated with a unique visual referent. Participants were assigned to one of four learning conditions: no orthography, Arabic script, Cyrillic script, and Roman/Cyrillic blended script. After an initial learning phase, participants were then tested on their phonological knowledge of these L2 minimal pairs. The results show that the degree of script unfamiliarity does not in itself seem to significantly affect the successful acquisition of this particular phonological contrast. However, the presence of certain foreign scripts in the course of phonological acquisition can yield significantly different learning outcomes in comparison to having no orthographic representation available. Specifically, the Arabic script exerted an inhibitory effect on L2 phonological acquisition, while the Cyrillic and Roman/Cyrillic blended scripts exercised differential inhibitory effects based on whether grapheme–phoneme correspondences activated first language (L1) phonological units. Besides revealing, for the first time, that foreign written input can significantly hinder learners’ ability to reliably encode an L2 phonological contrast, this study also provides further evidence for the irrepressible hold of native orthographic rules on L2 phonological acquisition.
This paper presents a formal account of the influence of orthography in the adaptation of Romanian loanwords from French and Japanese loanwords from English. It agues that, in the course of adaptation, the accompanying presence of a written representation does play a part in shaping the phonological content of borrowed words. To explain such orthographic manifestations in loanwords, a grammatical mechanism is devised in which underlying input representations are composed of linguistic information emanating from both the native perceptual system and the grapheme-phoneme mapping procedure. Cast in the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993/2004), the bulk of the analysis rests in determining how the grammar evaluates output forms resulting from such amalgamated inputs. Theoretical implications of such a proposal are also discussed, in particular as it concerns the nature of input coding and representation. In short, phonological representations are assumed to embrace the segmental richness imparted by both speech and print.
Scots Gaelic, an endangered language, has several typologically unusual sound distinctions. Work on English or other languages cannot predict what perceptual cues Gaelic listeners might use to perceive these distinctions. The current work uses gating experiments, run in Scotland with 16 native listeners (monolingual in Gaelic until at least school age), to investigate timing of perceptual cues to the palatalization, preaspiration, and nasal frication contrasts. Results show that perceptual information about consonant palatalization is located primarily in the consonant itself, with weaker cues in the preceding vowel. For preaspiration, there is no perceptual information in the preceding vowel, but even half of the preaspiration provides a sufficient cue. The claimed nasal fricatives are particularly interesting, as true nasalized fricatives may be aerodynamically impossible, but nasalization could be realized on the preceding vowel, or without frication. The results show that listeners are only marginally able to hear this distinction, and that information does not increase through the signal: The little perceptual information present is already available during the preceding vowel. This confirms aerodynamic results showing some neutralization of this distinction and some nasalization during the preceding vowel. Overall, the results help us determine how information is conveyed using typologically unusual distinctions.
L’accueil des personnes transgenres au sein des dispositifs de soins dédiés à l’accompagnement des parcours de transition permet la rencontre d’une pluralité de trajectoires qui remettent en question les procédures médicales d’accompagnement et les pré-pensés sur lesquels elles s’établissent. En appui des évolutions socio-culturelles et de l’évolution des expressions de genre, l’émergence de la non-binarité vient renverser les stéréotypes de genre dans l’espace public. Il s’agit dans cette réflexion de proposer une relecture du conflit originaire des consciences développé chez Sartre en résonnance avec les mouvements de l’expression de soi dans le champ des transidentités, et penser la souffrance clinique à l’épreuve des modèles de violence intersubjective. Du vécu intime à la demande de transition, il s’agit alors de confronter le concept de projet chez le philosophe existentialiste à celui d’identité.
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