The main goal of this study was to determine whether the geminate-singleton consonant length contrast attrites across three different generations of Farsi-English-speaking bilinguals living in Canada. The secondary aim of the study was to shed light on the role of universal phonetic factors on the process of geminate-singleton length contrast attrition in the same population. The effect of manner/class of sounds and voicing were examined as predictors of geminate attrition in eight Farsi-English-speaking bilinguals living in Toronto forming three categories of generations: first generation, 1.5 generation and second generation. The inclusion of the 1.5 generation category is novel and it refers to children of immigrants who came to Canada between the ages of five to fourteen. The productions of the bilinguals were compared with the productions of three homeland variety controls. A word-naming task, which included 108 words was conducted. 2398 tokens were analyzed acoustically using PRAAT. Attrition was defined in terms of changes in mean duration of geminates relative to their singleton counter-parts and percentage geminate-singleton degemination/category overlap. Mean durations were then analyzed using a 3-way, mixed-model, repeated-measures ANOVA. Results showed that geminates attrite across different successive generations. Moreover, there was some evidence to suggest that geminate realization across generations patterns with typological patterns previously reported, showing that universal phonetic principles such as aerodynamic constraints/articulatory difficulty and acoustic salience also constrain geminate realization in bilingual Farsi-English speakers. However, there was no evidence to suggest that more marked geminates suffer a higher degree of attrition. This is the first study to examine the attrition of a typologically marked contrast, which considers the role of universal phonetic principles, markedness in an understudied bilingual community across different generations.
We investigated first-language (L1) orthographic effects on second-language (L2) speech production in Korean–English and Farsi–English bilinguals, as compared to English monolinguals. We used a word-reading and word-naming task to compare the production of the single grapheme (letter) (e.g, ) with the digraph (e.g., ). An acoustic analysis of 600 tokens in Praat revealed that Korean–English bilinguals exhibited significantly longer [m:] productions compared to English monolinguals, but that the Farsi–English bilinguals did not. Longer/geminate [m:] productions are attributed to orthography-induced L1 transfer. We concluded that orthography does affect L2 word-reading and phonological mental representations, even when the L1 and L2 may have different scripts. We recommend that L2 speech learning be treated as a multi-modal event.
Recent work has shown that exposure to orthographic effects can promote first-language (L1) phonological transfer. However, it is relatively unknown whether orthographic effects persist in highly proficient bilinguals. Here, we examined how L1 orthographic depth (regularity in grapheme-phoneme correspondences) modulated Korean-English and Farsi-English bilinguals’ (n = 25 each) production of fricatives in English words (e.g., <mellow> /ˈmeloʊ/ vs. <melon> /ˈmelən/). Native English speakers (n = 25) served as a control group. Because fricatives are produced as geminate sounds in both Korean and Farsi, we expected L1-based transfer. Participants completed four tasks: an eye-movement reading task, word-naming task, cloze test, and language background questionnaire. The stimuli were controlled for word frequency, word length, number of syllables, and stress. We expect language-specific differences, corroborating previous neuro-linguistic evidence that shallow and deep orthographies differentially rely more heavily on phonological and lexical pathways, depending on language-specific demands. To explore this aspect, we employed an acoustic classification method for fricatives extracting cepstral coefficients and using HMMs to divide the sounds in regions based on their internal variance, aimed at determining whether fricatives produced by different groups can be classified correctly. This work has implications for both second-language (L2) speech learning models and classroom instruction.
Two forced-choice identification and two visual world eyetracking experiments examined perception of the place of articulation (PoA) of word-final nasal and oral stops either in canonical (coronal) or assimilated form (coronal-to-labial place assimilation, e.g., ‘phonem /batp button’). Listeners’ response times (RT) and eye fixations were measured as they heard and, using a screen-based paradigm, identified assimilated or unassimilated words presented auditorily either in isolation (excised from recorded sentences) or with the assimilation-triggering context present (next word began with a labial consonant). Listeners were slower to identify isolated words ending in nasals, especially when words were assimilated. When the triggering context was present, RTs were overall faster and no longer different between nasal and oral stops. The eye fixation data further showed an early sensitivity to PoA cues carried by vowel transitions for assimilated oral stops. For words ending in assimilated nasal stops, however, fixation patterns only showed sensitivity to the PoA cues at a later point where the assimilation-triggering context was heard. These findings indicate a distinction in terms of perceptual uptake of acoustic cues between nasal and oral stops. The results also suggest the precise mechanisms involved in compensation for assimilation may vary across sound classes (nasal vs. oral stops).
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