Automaticity of speech processing in early bilingual adults and children

Datta, Hia; Hestvik, Arild; Vidal, Nancy; Tessel, Carol A.; Hisagi, Miwako; Wróbleski, Marcin; Shafer, Valerie L.

doi:10.1017/s1366728919000099

Cited by 13 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 82 publications

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“…Negative deflections in this study also occurred around 316 ms -440 ms post-stimulus onset, which is later than the normal MMN window (Čeponienė et al, 2002;Cheour et al, 2001;Martynova et al, 2003;Strotseva-Feinschmidt et al, 2015). Late negativities have been observed in both speech (Datta et al, 2020;Fu & Monahan, 2021;Hestvik & Durvasula, 2016) and non-speech paradigms (Peter et al, 2012;Zachau et al, 2005). These late negativities typically appear with the traditional MMN but can also appear independently (Strotseva-Feinschmidt et al, 2015).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 42%

Unified Coding of Spectral and Temporal Phonetic Cues: Electrophysiological Evidence for Abstract Phonological Features

Monahan¹,

Schertz²,

Fu³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Understanding how the brain represents speech sounds is necessary to delineate the mapping between the acoustic signal and words stored in long-term memory. Spoken word recognition models and phonological theory propose that abstract features are linguistic units that play a central role in speech processing. The current goal was to determine whether the brain represents abstract phonological features. English phonology functionally codes stops and fricatives as voiced or voiceless. Fricatives and stops, however, encode voicing in distinct phonetic manners. Fricatives use a spectral cue, while stops use a temporal cue. Participants listened to syllables in a many-to-one oddball design while their EEG was recorded. A critical design element was the presence of inter-category variation within the standards. In one block, both voiceless stops and fricatives were the standard. In the other block, both voiced stops and fricatives were the standards. A many-to-one relationship exists only if the standards are grouped together. Oscillatory activity was also measured. Results show an MMN effect in the voiceless standards block–an asymmetric MMN–and increased beta-band oscillatory power prior to voiceless standards stimulus-onset. These findings suggest that (i) the brain constructed an auditory memory trace of the standards based on the shared [voiceless] feature, which is only functionally defined, (ii) voiced consonants are underspecified and, (iii) features can serve as a basis for predictive processing. Taken together, these results point toward the brain’s ability to functionally code distinct phonetic cues together and that abstract features can be used to parse the continuous acoustic signal.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 42%

Unified Coding of Spectral and Temporal Phonetic Cues: Electrophysiological Evidence for Abstract Phonological Features

Monahan¹,

Schertz²,

Fu³

et al. 2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Thus, in the current study, we first looked for independent evidence that would allow predictions to be made with regards to the vowel contrast vs. . We chose this contrast because we have used it to test a range of questions related to infant development, child language disorders and second language learning (e.g., clinical population: Shafer et al, 2005;Datta et al, 2010;developmental populations: Shafer et al, 2010developmental populations: Shafer et al, , 2011Yu et al, 2019;second language: Hisagi et al, 2015a;Datta et al, 2020). In all of these papers, which focused on group differences, served as the standard and as the deviant (and this order was selected based on pilot data that indicated a larger MMN for this direction; see Morr, 2002).…”

Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural Representation of the English Vowel Feature [High]: Evidence From /ε/ vs. /ɪ/

Shafer

2021

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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Many studies have observed modulation of the amplitude of the neural index mismatch negativity (MMN) related to which member of a phoneme contrast [phoneme A, phoneme B] serves as the frequent (standard) and which serves as the infrequent (deviant) stimulus (i.e., AAAB vs. BBBA) in an oddball paradigm. Explanations for this amplitude modulation range from acoustic to linguistic factors. We tested whether exchanging the role of the mid vowel /ε/ vs. high vowel /ɪ/ of English modulated MMN amplitude and whether the pattern of modulation was compatible with an underspecification account, in which the underspecified height values are [−high] and [−low]. MMN was larger for /ε/ as the deviant, but only when compared across conditions to itself as the standard. For the within-condition comparison, MMN was larger to /ɪ/ deviant minus /ε/ standard than to the reverse. A condition order effect was also observed. MMN amplitude was smaller to the deviant stimulus if it had previously served as the standard. In addition, the amplitudes of late discriminative negativity (LDN) showed similar asymmetry. LDN was larger for deviant /ε/ than deviant /ɪ/ when compared to themselves as the standard. These findings were compatible with an underspecification account, but also with other accounts, such as the Natural Referent Vowel model and a prototype model; we also suggest that non-linguistic factors need to be carefully considered as additional sources of speech processing asymmetries.

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“…However, when attention was focused away from the stimuli, many of these bilingual listeners showed attenuated MMN to the contrast. In a follow-up study, which was designed to examine more directly how attention to the speech modality modulated neural processing in early Spanish-English bilinguals, no difference in MMN was observed between monolinguals and bilinguals, although other attention-related responses did differ between groups (Datta et al, 2020).…”

Section: Automatic Selective Perception Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perception of American English consonants /v/ and /w/ by Hindi speakers of English

Grover

Shafer

Campanelli

et al. 2021

JSLP

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This study examined perception of the American English (AE) /v/-/w/ consonant contrast by Hindi speakers of English as a second language (L2). A second aim was to determine whether residence in the US modulated perception of this difficult contrast for proficient bilingual Hindi-English listeners. Two groups of Hindi-English bilinguals (the first resided in the US for more than five years, the second lived in India) and a group of AE-speaking listeners participated in the study. Listeners’ identification and discrimination of nonsense words (e.g., “vagag” vs. “wagag”) were examined. Hindi listeners performed significantly less accurately than AE controls. Accuracy by Hindi listeners was near chance for identification and higher-than-chance for discrimination. Exposure to AE in the US did not improve performance. These results are consistent with previous studies of late L2 learners and extend findings to a population that was proficient in an L2 before arriving in the L2 environment.

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Automaticity of speech processing in early bilingual adults and children

Cited by 13 publications

References 82 publications

Unified Coding of Spectral and Temporal Phonetic Cues: Electrophysiological Evidence for Abstract Phonological Features

Unified Coding of Spectral and Temporal Phonetic Cues: Electrophysiological Evidence for Abstract Phonological Features

Neural Representation of the English Vowel Feature [High]: Evidence From /ε/ vs. /ɪ/

Perception of American English consonants /v/ and /w/ by Hindi speakers of English

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