The Use of Prosodic Cues in Learning New Words in an Unfamiliar Language

Abstract

The artificial language learning paradigm was used to investigate to what extent the use of prosodic features is universally applicable or specifically language driven in learning an unfamiliar language, and how nonnative prosodic patterns can be learned. Listeners of unrelated languages—Dutch (n= 100) and Korean (n= 100)—participated. The words to be learned varied with prosodic cues: no prosody, fundamental frequency (F0) rise in initial and final position, final lengthening, and final lengthening plus F0 rise. Both listener groups performed well above chance level with the final lengthening cue, confirming its crosslinguistic use. As for final F0 rise, however, Dutch listeners did not use it until the second exposure session, whereas Korean listeners used it at initial exposure. Neither group used initial F0 rise. On the basis of these results, F0 and durational cues appear to be universal in the sense that they are used across languages for their universally applicable auditory-perceptual saliency, but how they are used is language specific and constrains the use of available prosodic cues in processing a nonnative language. A discussion on how these findings bear on theories of second language (L2) speech perception and learning is provided.

Effects of rhythm and phrase-final lengthening on word-spotting in Korean

“…Local cues are exploited by listeners in artificial language learning tasks as well: Tyler & Cutler (2009) have shown that English, French and Dutch speakers use lengthening as a cue to phrase-finality and this helps them detect upcoming word onsets. Kim et al (2012) report similar results with speakers of Dutch and Korean.…”

Phonetic richness can outweigh prosodically-driven phonological knowledge when learning words in an artificial language

“…In particular, as discussed in the introduction, the fact that Korean listeners perceive (phonetically poorer) unreleased stops better than (phonetically richer) released stops in processing non-native speech has provided a concrete example of a situation where phonological experience overrides phonetic richness in non-native speech perception (Cho & McQueen, 2006). The language-specificity of speech perception has also been observed in lexical segmentation of unfamiliar artificial languages or non-native languages-e.g., the use of language-specific phonotactics (Weber & Cutler, 2006) and rhythmic/prosodic cues (Cutler & Otake, 1994;Kim et al, 2012;Tyler & Cutler, 2009) in processing non-native speech. The results of the present study therefore appear to be in contrast to the generally observed dependency that listeners have on their phonological knowledge in the perception of unfamiliar or non-native speech.…”

“…Listeners had to identify the words in the test phase. This paradigm has been shown to be effective in testing effects of specific cues in the speech signal without recourse to any prior lexical knowledge and it has also revealed listeners' use of native segmentation cues in lexical segmentation of these unfamiliar, non-native languages (e.g., Bagou et al, 2002;Kim et al, 2012;Saffran et al, 1996;Tyler & Cutler, 2009).…”

“…Listeners can use the acoustic correlates of prosodic structure to decode those structures, facilitating segmentation of words at prosodic boundaries (e.g., Christophe, Peperkamp, Pallier, Block, & Mehler, 2004). For instance, word-and phrase-final lengthening appears to facilitate segmentation of words not only in continuous native-language speech (Kim & Cho, 2009;Salverda, Dahan, & McQueen, 2003), but also in artificial-language speech streams (Bagou, Fougeron, & Frauenfelder, 2002;Kim, Broersma, & Cho, 2012;Saffran, Newport, & Aslin, 1996;Tyler & Cutler, 2009). Likewise, it is well-known that stress patterns (cued e.g., by longer duration of stressed syllables in English and Dutch) are exploited in lexical segmentation (Cutler & Norris, 1988;Quené , 1993;Sluijter & van Heuven, 1996).…”

“…Cho and McQueen's (2006) phoneme monitoring study, for example, found that Korean listeners, who are always exposed to unreleased word-final stops in their native language, detected unreleased stops (phonologically viable in their native language yet phonetically poorer) more efficiently than released stops (phonologically unviable in Korean yet phonetically richer) in processing speech in Dutch and English, while Dutch listeners showed the opposite pattern. Recent studies which employed an artificial language learning paradigm have also shown that listeners are not able to use an acoustically salient cue (i.e., high pitch) in lexical segmentation when the cue appeared in a position where listeners would not normally expect that cue (Kim et al, 2012;Tyler & Cutler, 2009).…”