Variation in children’s vowel production: Effects of language exposure and lexical frequency

Levy, Helena; Hanulíková, Adriana

doi:10.5334/labphon.131

Cited by 15 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 78 publications

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“…The fact that these never occur in monolinguals' English descriptions supports an analysis in terms of a structural innovation from French, boosting structural variability within English. Such bilingual increase in variation would be in line with what has been found in other linguistic domains, such as phonology (e.g., see Levy and Hanulíková, 2019…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

Entropy convergence in early bilinguals’ syntactic packaging

Engemann

2022

Front. Psychol.

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A core question in developmental and cognitive research concerns the way linguistic variation affects the acquisition process. Previous research on monolinguals suggests that children, but not adults, tend to regularize inconsistent input, resulting in reduced variation. Some recent claims explain regularization as a general bias linked to cognitive load. However, little is known about bilingual acquisition contexts where children naturally experience both increased variability and cognitive load. This study investigated the impact of between- and within-language variability in syntactic packaging (i.e., how semantic elements are mapped onto syntactic units) on simultaneous bilinguals’ acquisition of motion event encoding. In this domain, French is considered highly variable, in contrast to low variability demonstrated by English. Based on this crosslinguistic contrast, 96 English–French bilingual children (aged 4–11 years) and 96 age-matched monolinguals of each language described 32 animated cartoons showing complex motion events. Children’s variability of selected syntactic patterns was measured using the information-theoretical concept of entropy. Results indicated that bilingual children significantly reduced syntactic variation relative to monolingual peers, but only in French, the more variable language. Moreover, bilingual children converged in entropy levels across the two languages and patterned mid-way between respective monolinguals. These findings suggest that the cognitive load inherent in bilingualism is not sufficient to explain reduced linguistic variation. Instead, the asymmetric drop in entropy highlights the strong impact of crosslinguistic differences and thus underlines the importance of taking language-specific factors into account in theories of cognitive load.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

Entropy convergence in early bilinguals’ syntactic packaging

Engemann

2022

Front. Psychol.

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“…Specifically, listeners with exposure to other varieties appear to be more tolerant to deviant exemplars, which leads the authors to conclude that phonological categories in these individuals might be less rigid than those for individuals without exposure. More recently, Levy and Hanulíková (2019) report that variability in vowel production on the part of children is related to their levels of non-native dialectal exposure.…”

Section: Individual Variability In the Tune-meaning Mappingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual empathy levels affect gradual intonation-meaning mapping: The case of biased questions in Salerno Italian

Orrico

D’Imperio

2020

Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology

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The paper investigates the interplay between intonational cues and individual variability in the perceptual assessment of speakers' epistemic bias in Salerno Italian yes-no questions. We present a perception experiment in which we manipulated pitch span within the nuclear configuration (both nuclear accent and boundary tone) to predict degree of perceived positive bias (i.e., expected positive answer) to yes-no question stimuli. Our results show that a wider pitch span within the nuclear region predicts a higher degree of perceived positive bias, while negative bias is predicted by narrow pitch span. Crucially, though, two interacting sources of listener variability were uncovered, i.e., prolonged exposure to a non-native dialect as well as degree of empathy (i.e., Empathy Quotient, EQ). Exposure to non-native phonological systems was found to affect the way pitch span is mapped onto perceived epistemic bias, through category interference, though mediated by EQ levels. Specifically, high-empathy listeners were more affected by degree of non-native dialect exposure. EQ scores were hence found to have an effect on gradual span manipulation by interacting with the dialect exposure effect. These results advance our understanding of the intonation-meaning mapping by taking into account both the impact of gradual phonetic cues on meaning processing as well as uncovering sources of cognitive variability at the perceiver's level.

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“…Relatedly, Babel et al (2019) suggest that social biases do not necessarily warp perception but exert their influences post-perceptually: They found that the pleasantness of the voice has little influence on listener adaptation to a new accent. Levy and Hanulíková (2019) show that vowel production by school-aged children was unaffected by whether they grow up bilingually or in a monolingual German home. Rather, variability in their own production was predicted by the variability across both foreign and regional accents to which they were exposed.…”

mentioning

confidence: 81%

“…Bradlow, Blasingame, and Lee (2018) conducted a sentence recognition experiment in order to determine how first and second language processing are affected by speaker intelligibility. Levy and Hanulíková (2019) asked how variable input due to word-frequency, dialect, and foreign accent affects school-aged children's vowel production.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In summary, the seven papers are collectively both broad in scope and go to heart of so many active issues in laboratory phonology including how social information (Babel et al, 2019;Zellou & Pycha, 2018) and foreign accent (Bradlow et al, 2018;Levy & Hanulíková, 2019) are to be incorporated into phonological processing, the way that social and linguistic information become attached to each other (Needle & Pierrehumbert, 2018), the mechanisms by which sound change (Zellou & Pycha, 2018) and phonologization (Carignan, 2018) emerge, and how phonological signatures in articulatory patterns can be compromised in speech disorders (Hermes et al, 2019).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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