Adaptive and selective production of syllable duration and fundamental frequency as word segmentation cues by French-English bilinguals

Abstract

The effects of musicality and language background on cue integration in pitch perception

Phrase parsing in a second language as indexed by the closure positive shift: The impact of language experience and acoustic cue salience

“…Nineteen participants had a relative language dominance index below 1, suggesting that they were more proficient in French than in English, regardless of their L1, and one participant obtained a relative language dominance index of 1, indicating that they performed equally well in both versions of the task (Birdsong, 2015; Treffers‐Daller & Korybski, 2015). Although verbal fluency tasks are generally used to probe vocabulary size and not participants' speech processing abilities, previous papers reported that relative language dominance scores based on verbal fluency tasks can predict bilingual participants' processing of specific prosodic cues (Gilbert et al, 2021) as well as their use of the same cues in production (Gilbert et al, 2019). Table 1 summarizes age of acquisition and language proficiency measures for the 42 participants included in the analyses.…”

“…Thus, the present study allows us to disentangle language‐specific effects (English vs. French) from effects related to order of acquisition (first vs. second language) and proficiency. This approach also allows the observation of potential directional effects as observed in previous research, where going from English‐L1 to French‐L2 might present different challenges compared to going from French‐L1 to English‐L2 (Gilbert et al, 2019).…”

“…French listeners, on the other hand, were found to rely instead on phrase boundaries (marked by a final lengthening with optional F0 rise; Jun & Fougeron, 2002;Welby, 2006) to locate word offsets (Christophe et al, 2001(Christophe et al, , 2003(Christophe et al, , 2004(Christophe et al, , 2008Cutler et al, 1997;Rietveld, 1980). Regardless of these differences, a growing body of research on word segmentation has shown that L2 listeners can learn to process L2-specific prosodic cues, although their performance may vary as a function of their language experience (Gilbert et al, 2019(Gilbert et al, , 2021Kim, 2020;Tremblay et al, 2012Tremblay et al, , 2016Tremblay et al, , 2017Tremblay et al, , 2018 and the specifics of the languages involved. More specifically, two different yet complementary models have been shown to effectively predict the ability of non-native listeners to learn to rely on L2-specific segmentation cues based on the differences between L1 and L2: the cue-weighting theory of speech perception (e.g., Francis et al, 2000) and the Prosodic-Learning Interference Hypothesis (P-LIH; Tremblay et al, 2016).…”

Spoken Word Segmentation in First and Second Language: When ERP and Behavioral Measures Diverge

“…Auditory stimuli consisted of recordings of the sentence pairs used in Gilbert et al (2019). These sentences involve twosyllable strings that represent either one bisyllabic word or two monosyllabic words (e.g., in English, [kiwi] can be interpreted as "kiwi" or "key we"; in French, [O R lOZ] can be interpreted as "horloge" -Eng.…”

“…The selected recordings were also manually annotated by a trained bilingual coder in Praat (Boersma, 2001) following the method used in Gilbert et al (2019). Acoustic information about each syllable of interest was extracted using custom scripts developed onsite.…”