Cross‐Language and Second Language Speech Perception

Bohn, Ocke‐Schwen

doi:10.1002/9781118829516.ch10

Cited by 31 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 116 publications

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“…At the other end of the discriminability scale, if the two non-native speech sounds are acceptable exemplars of two different L1 categories, very good or excellent discrimination is expected. This has been attested for the perception of the English [w-ɫ] contrast by German learners, who assimilated these sounds to the L1 phones /v/ (usually realized as an approximant [ʋ] in German) and /l/, respectively [3]. Being a perception model, PAM-L2 makes important claims about the perceptual categorization of L2 speech sounds in terms of the closest L1 sounds.…”

Section: Pam-l2mentioning

confidence: 91%

“…Untypical L2 productions of these sounds are likely to reduce their comprehensibility to native listeners, so that Uncategorized-Categorized (UC), Non-Assimilated (NA) and Uncategorized-Uncategorized (UU) assimilations may cause bigger problems in communication than they do in L2 perception (cf. [3]). This remains to be evaluated in further investigations.…”

Section: Pam-l2mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Category Similarity in Multilingual Pronunciation Training

Koreman

2018

Interspeech 2018

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Learners with different native languages (L1) meet different challenges when they learn a foreign language (L2). The Speech Learning Model and the Perceptual Assimilation Model PAM-L2 have led to important insights about these challenges. Among other things, they have shown that the learnability of L2 sounds depends on their similarity to sounds in the L1: L2 sounds are more likely to lead to the formation of new phonetic categories if they differ strongly from L1 categories than if they are similar. The similarity of sounds is hard to quantify objectively, especially if the aim is to do this for many L1-L2 pairs. This limits the models' practical applicability. The multilingual pronunciation training platform CALST offers exercises for all new L2 sounds. Two implementations of category (dis)similarity are proposed to identify new sounds, one at the level of functional similarity maintaining all L2 phonemic contrasts, the other based on a more fine-grained, multilingual similarity measure, where L2 sounds are considered new if they can contrast phonemically with the most similar L1 sound in any one language. This level of granularity reflects phonetically salient differences between sounds which, when perceived and produced adequately, suffice for high intelligibility and comprehensibility in L2.

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Section: Pam-l2mentioning

confidence: 91%

Section: Pam-l2mentioning

confidence: 99%

Category Similarity in Multilingual Pronunciation Training

Koreman

2018

Interspeech 2018

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“…This is an important point because what happens in the second half of the fi rst year of life is a reversible shift of attention away from those acoustic cues that are not phonologically informative. There is a very large body of research, especially on cross-language and second language speech perception, which clearly shows that the universal perceptual abilities that all humans had as newborns are never completely lost (e.g., due to neurophysiological ageing), but remain latent and can be re-learned, through immersion or perceptual training, at any of the adult ages which have been examined (for a review, see Bohn 2018). A more appropriate characterization of the infl uence of the ambient language on speech perception in the second half of the fi rst year of life (instead of maintenance vs. "loss" of initial, most likely innate abilities) would be maintenance vs. latency.…”

Section: Infant Speech Perception From Newborn To Toddler (And Beyond) 31 Perceptual Narrowingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language in the genes: Where’s the evidence?

Bohn

2019

The Sign of the V: Papers in Honour of Sten Vikner

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Evidence regarding the genetic bases of human language abilities comes from many sources, but none is as rich and reliable as the one that comes from infant speech perception studies. This contribution provides an overview of how research on infant speech perception informs the debate on the genetic basis of human language abilities. Specifi cally, this contribution reviews fi ndings which document infants' abilities to learn from pre-and postnatal experience, and fi ndings which strongly suggest that humans possess language-specifi c abilities as part of their genetic makeup.

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“…English vowel sounds have been widely reported to be challenging for adult learners with different L1 backgrounds. Several studies on L2 English vowel acquisition by L1 speakers of different Romance languages with small vowel inventories such as Spanish (Aliaga-Garcia, 2010Carlet & Cebrian, 2015;Carlet, 2017;Cebrian, 2006;Cebrian, Mora & Aliaga-Garcia, 2010;Flege, Bohn, & Jang, 1997), Italian (Flege, MacKay, & Meador, 1999;Flege & MacKay, 2004) and Portuguese (Nobre-Oliveira, 2007;Rato, 2018;Rato, & Rauber, 2015;Rato, 2014;Rato, Rauber, Soares, & Lucas, 2014, Rauber, 2010Rauber, Escudero, Bion & Baptista, 2005) have revealed that the perception of the larger inventory of English L2 vowels is difficult due to an L2-to-L1 mapping issue (Bohn, 2017), that is, to how learners perceptually map the vowel sounds of the target language onto the vowel categories of the native language. Current models of L2 speech learning such as the Speech Learning Model (SLM, Flege, 1995) and Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM-L2, Best & Tyler, 2007) propose that the perceptual similarity between L1 and L2 vowels is one of the most important predictors of difficulty/ease in L2 vowel learning, with more target-like acquisition expected to occur when the L2 sound is perceived as different to the existing L1 sounds.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Second language perception of English vowels by Portuguese learners: The effect of stimulus type

Rato

Carlet

2020

R. Ilha do Desterro A J. of En. Language Lit. in English and Cu

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The present study investigated L2 English vowel perception and the effect of stimulus type on the identification of vowel segments that present difficulties for Portuguese learners. It also examined the effect of subject factors such as age of acquisition, length of formal instruction, language use and vocabulary size, on the L2 learners’ perceptual performance. Twenty-nine adult Portuguese learners of English were tested on six English vowels (/iː ɪ ɛ æ ɜː ʌ/) with two tasks, differing in stimulus type, i.e., in the lexical status of trials (real words and pseudo words) in which the target vowels were auditorily presented. The testing stimuli consisted of 72 trials with real CVC words and 72 trials with pseudo CVC words, naturally produced by two speakers of standard southern British English (SSBE). The L2 vocabulary size of the participants was measured with two receptive vocabulary size tests and the language background data, viz. age of learning, length of formal instruction and L2 use was collected with a questionnaire. Results confirmed the Portuguese learners’ difficulties in accurately categorizing the target vowels, particularly when identifying the vowel target sounds embedded in pseudo words, which suggests that L2 phonological categories may be established after lexical forms. Furthermore, a significant correlation was found between L2 language use and accurate perception of four of the target vowels, which indicates that the more frequently learners use the target language, the more accurate is their L2 English vowel perception.

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Cross‐Language and Second Language Speech Perception

Cited by 31 publications

References 116 publications

Category Similarity in Multilingual Pronunciation Training

Category Similarity in Multilingual Pronunciation Training

Language in the genes: Where’s the evidence?

Second language perception of English vowels by Portuguese learners: The effect of stimulus type

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