Listening to a second language through the ears of a first

Cutler, Anne

doi:10.1075/intp.5.1.02cut

Cited by 103 publications

(61 citation statements)

References 63 publications

(66 reference statements)

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“…The results so far are consistent with Cutler's (2001) observation that L2 listeners tend to segment words in continuous speech on the basis of their usual L1 segmentation procedures. Indeed, when Weber and Cutler (2006) asked proficient German users of English as a second language to listen to nonsense sequences and respond whenever they heard an English word, they found that while the proficient L2 listeners used the permitted sound sequences of a language (the L2 phonotactics), there was still interference from the L1 phonotactics.…”

supporting

confidence: 80%

What makes listening difficult? Factors affecting second language listening comprehension

Bloomfield¹,

Wayland²,

Rhoades³

et al. 2010

123

120

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Factors affecting second language listening comprehension gies-that is, those who are aware of and use effective strategies, such as avoiding mental translation-demonstrate better L2 listening comprehension. 2 In addition to these general cognitive abilities, a number of factors pertaining to experience with the L2 influence listening skill. These factors include the amount of prior exposure to the language; familiarity with and an ability to understand the non-native language's phonology; vocabulary size; and background knowledge about the topic, text, structure, schema, and culture.Familiarity with the L2 changes the extent to which the L2 listener uses top-down or bottom-up strategies in listening. For example, expert listeners use both types of strategies: They are able to accurately make sense of the speech signal (bottom-up information) 3 and integrate this information with PurPose-To establish what is currently known about factors that affect foreign language listening comprehension, with a focus on characteristics of the listener, passage, and testing conditions.ConClusions-Research on second language (L2) listening comprehension strongly supports the importance of a number of factors, for example, a listener's working memory capacity and the number of ideas in a passage. Much of the research, however, reports weak or inconclusive results, leaving many factors and complex interactions among factors unresolved and in need of further investigation.relevanCe-Identifying the factors that affect L2 listening comprehension will help Defense Language Institute Proficiency Test (DLPT) designers anticipate how qualities of selected authentic materials will impact listening comprehension. Executive Summary PurPoseThe U.S. Government administers the Defense Language Proficiency Test (DLPT) to military linguists and other government personnel to assess their listening and reading comprehension in a number of foreign languages, including critical languages such as Mandarin, Modern Standard Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, and Persian Farsi. The DLPT is updated every 10 to 15 years, and the most recent transition-from DLPT IV to DLPT5-included a greater emphasis on testing listening comprehension with authentic materials. In turn, this has led to a growing interest in the factors that make second language (L2) listening difficult.To examine these factors, CASL reviewed the current scientific literature and summarized the characteristics of listeners, passages, and testing conditions. The review targeted features of particular interest to stakeholders at the Defense Language Institute (DLI). The long-term goal of the project is to support the selection of authentic listening materials that accurately reflect different proficiency levels. ConClusionsAlthough the available research on L2 listening comprehension is limited, CASL's literature review identified several factors that affect listening comprehension. These factors are summarized below and in Tables 1, 2, and 3. 1 Characteristics of the listenerUnderstanding a fo...

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supporting

confidence: 80%

What makes listening difficult? Factors affecting second language listening comprehension

Bloomfield¹,

Wayland²,

Rhoades³

et al. 2010

123

120

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Together, this body of work shows that a series of potentially conflicting word boundary cues, including lexical, acoustic-phonetic, and segment-specific distributional information, are available to and utilized by L1-French listeners to compensate for liaison during the segmentation of continuous speech. Moreover, a large body of empirical results, including those reported above (e.g., Spinelli et al, 2002), supports the claim that high-level cues (i.e., lexical knowledge) rather than lowlevel cues (i.e., acoustic-phonetic information) predominate for L1 segmentation when both are available and especially when they may not converge on the same lexical parse (Cutler, 2001; see also Mattys, Brooks, & Cooke, 2009;Mattys, Melhorn, & White, 2007;Mattys, White, & Melhorn, 2005).…”

Section: L1-french Speech Segmentationmentioning

confidence: 55%

French Speech Segmentation in Liaison Contexts by L1 and L2 Listeners

Gustafson

Bradlow

2016

Laboratory Phonology

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In this study, we consider how native status and signal degradation influence French listeners' segmentation of an incoming speech stream containing liaison, a phonological process that misaligns word and syllable boundaries. In particular, we investigate how both first language (L1) and second language (L2) French listeners compensate for the syllable-word misalignment associated with liaison while segmenting French speech, and whether compensation-for-liaison strategies differ with decreasing signal-to-noise ratios. We consider the degree to which listeners rely on lexical knowledge, acoustic-phonetic cues, and distributional information to accomplish this compensation. Listeners completed a word identification task in which they heard adjective-noun sequences with or without liaison and were presented with the word or nonword alternatives for each noun that would result depending on whether the listener did or did not compensate for liaison. Results showed that both L1-French and L2-French listeners generally preferred lexically acceptable parses over those that resulted in a stranded nonword, and both groups gave significantly fewer lexically acceptable parses under harder listening conditions. However, the L2-French listeners demonstrated a pattern of boundary placement that indicated over-compensation for liaison, suggesting that they had successfully acquired, but not fully constrained, rules about liaison.

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“…Perhaps foremost is the extent to which any cultural differences, if found, are relatively permanent features of an individual's perceptual tendencies (as has been suggested for word segmentation strategies, e.g. Cutler, 2000), or if they are more labile, and dependent on recent context. Such a consideration is especially important in accounting for bilingual participants, such as the Korean students in the present study, and can be addressed using studies of bilinguals and longitudinal designs.…”

Section: Commentary On Interpretationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Review of "Perception and production of linguistic and musical rhythm by Korean and English middle school students" by Lydia N. Slobodian

Iversen¹

2008

Empirical Musicology Review

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Interest in possible cultural influences on basic rhythm perception and production has been growing, and the paper by Slobodian (2008) fits squarely in this trend, studying rhythm perception and production in a large number English and Korean native speakers. The findings were interpreted in terms of cross-cultural similarity, suggesting that preferences, e.g. for binary meter, are broadly shared across cultures. As is commonly encountered in cross-cultural research, however, there were several difficulties in offering a clear interpretation of the results, such as the large extent of Western music enculturation of the Korean participants. This commentary will review Slobodian's findings, offering an alternative interpretation of one result, suggesting there may be a cultural difference in meter perception. It will also review other relevant research and integrate lessons learned from a recent study of rhythm perception in Korean, American and Japanese listeners. Throughout, it aims to offer suggestions of how to improve the chances of reaching the ultimate goal of understanding what aspect of culture shapes rhythm perception and production, and the mechanisms by which they do so. KEYWORDS: rhythm, meter, language, cross-cultural methodologyIN a creative and ambitious study in this issue (Slobodian, 2008), Korean and English speakers were tested with a battery of rhythm perception and production tasks, covering both speech and musical rhythm, in order to determine if culture plays a role in shaping such behaviors. Several tendencies (toward binary meters and reproducing rhythms using small integer duration ratios) have been found in prior work (and are summarized by Slobodian), but their universality is a matter of debate, for there is evidence that they might depend on culture (Hannon and Trehub, 2005;Sadakata, et al., 2004;Ohgushi, 2006), but also that there might exist predispositions for duple meter (Bergeson and Trehub, 2006). The present work seeks to expand the range of this question to include Korean.Two culture-dependent areas of experience are typically proposed to account for differences in rhythmic perception and production: language and music. (The alternative, genetic difference, is infrequently proposed.) Slobodian follows this trend, citing studies by Patel, Huron and colleagues, that show the rhythm of a language (as measured by a simple metric) is reflected in the rhythms of composed concert music. This earlier research suggests the existence of links between language and music rhythm, but examines the rather rarefied domain of historical composition in looking for such expression. The search for the substance of such links is generally conducted using behavioral studies in the field or lab. The current research thus falls within two traditions: the comparison of language and musical rhythm using simple metrics, and the drive to test if results in music cognition hold cross-culturally, as a way to understand to what extent they may be universal versus learned (e.g. Grabe and Low, 200...

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Listening to a second language through the ears of a first

Cited by 103 publications

References 63 publications

What makes listening difficult? Factors affecting second language listening comprehension

What makes listening difficult? Factors affecting second language listening comprehension

French Speech Segmentation in Liaison Contexts by L1 and L2 Listeners

Review of "Perception and production of linguistic and musical rhythm by Korean and English middle school students" by Lydia N. Slobodian

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