Cross-Linguistic Phonetic Variation in Bilingual Speech: Cantonese /n/ > [l] Merger in Early Cantonese-English Bilinguals.

/n/ is merging with /l/ in Cantonese, as well as in several other Chinese languages. The Cantonese merger appears categorical, with /n/ becoming /l/ syllable-initially. This project aims to describe /n/ and /l/ in Cantonese and English speech from early Cantonese-English bilinguals to better understand the status of the merger in Cantonese and its potential for cross-linguistic mutual influence.

Language-general versus language-specific processes in bilingual voice learning.

Language experience confers a benefit to voice learning, a concept described in the literature as the language familiarity effect (LFE). What experiences are necessary for the LFE to be conferred is less clear. We contribute empirically and theoretically to this debate by examining within and across language voice learning with Cantonese-English bilingual voices in a talker-voice association paradigm.

Receptive vocabulary predicts multilinguals' recognition skills in adverse listening conditions.

Adverse listening conditions are known to affect bilingual listeners' intelligibility scores more than those of monolingual listeners. To advance theoretical understanding of the mechanisms underpinning bilinguals' challenges in adverse listening conditions, vocabulary size and language entropy are compared as predictors in a sentence transcription task with a heterogeneous multilingual population representative of a speech community. Adverse listening was induced through noise type, bandwidth manipulations, and sentences varying in their semantic predictability.

Quantitative, not qualitative, differences in word classification errors as a function of language dominance.

This paper reports the results of a Cantonese word categorization task that maximized lexical competition. Cantonese-English early bilinguals were presented with a Cantonese word, followed by four images depicting the target word and a tone, rhyme, and onset competitor. English-dominant listeners made more errors than Cantonese-dominant listeners, but the proportions of error types were equivalent across language dominance profiles.

Language Contact Within the Speaker: Phonetic Variation and Crosslinguistic Influence.

A recent model of sound change posits that the direction of change is determined, at least in part, by the distribution of variation within speech communities. We explore this model in the context of bilingual speech, asking whether the less variable language constrains phonetic variation in the more variable language, using a corpus of spontaneous speech from early Cantonese-English bilinguals. As predicted, given the phonetic distributions of stop obstruents in Cantonese compared with English, intervocalic English /b d g/ were produced with less voicing for Cantonese-English bilinguals and word-final English /t k/ were more likely to be unreleased compared with spontaneous speech from two monolingual English control corpora.

The structure of acoustic voice variation in bilingual speech.

When a bilingual switches languages, do they switch their voice? Using a conversational corpus of speech from early Cantonese-English bilinguals (n = 34), this paper examines the talker-specific acoustic signatures of bilingual voices. Following the psychoacoustic model of voice, 24 filter and source-based acoustic measurements are estimated. The analysis summarizes mean differences for these dimensions and identifies the underlying structure of each talker's voice across languages with principal component analyses.

The own-voice benefit for word recognition in early bilinguals.

The current study examines the self-voice benefit in an early bilingual population. Female Cantonese-English bilinguals produced words containing Cantonese contrasts. A subset of these minimal pairs was selected as stimuli for a perception task.

Adaptation to Social-Linguistic Associations in Audio-Visual Speech.

Listeners entertain hypotheses about how social characteristics affect a speaker's pronunciation. While some of these hypotheses may be representative of a demographic, thus facilitating spoken language processing, others may be erroneous stereotypes that impede comprehension. As a case in point, listeners' stereotypes of language and ethnicity pairings in varieties of North American English can improve intelligibility and comprehension, or hinder these processes.

Acoustically distinct and perceptually ambiguous: ʔayʔaǰuθəm (Salish) fricatives.

ʔayʔaǰuθəm (Comox-Sliammon) is a Central Salish language spoken in British Columbia with a large fricative inventory. Previous impressionistic descriptions of ʔayʔaǰuθəm have noted perceptual ambiguity of select anterior fricatives. This paper provides an auditory-acoustic description of the four anterior fricatives /θ s ʃ ɬ/ in the Mainland dialect of ʔayʔaǰuθəm.

Lexically-guided perceptual learning in early Cantonese-English bilinguals.

Bilinguals are capable of retuning phonetic categories in both languages through lexically-guided perceptual learning, but recent work suggests that some bilingual speakers may lose the ability to adapt in the native language. In the study reported here, early Cantonese-English bilinguals, who are on average English-dominant, successfully retuned Cantonese /f/. Scores of Cantonese-English dominance were not shown to correlate with phonetic retuning.

The Goldilocks Zone of Perceptual Learning.

Background/aims: Lexically guided perceptual learning in speech is the updating of linguistic categories based on novel input disambiguated by the structure provided in a recognized lexical item. We test the range of variation that allows for perceptual learning by presenting listeners with items that vary from subtle within-category variation to fully remapped cross-category variation.

Methods: Experiment 1 uses a lexically guided perceptual learning paradigm with words containing noncanonical /s/ realizations from s/ʃ continua that correspond to "typical," "ambiguous," "atypical," and "remapped" steps.

The role of unfamiliar accents in competing speech.

A listeners' ability to comprehend one speaker against a background of other speech-a phenomenon dubbed the cocktail party problem-varies according to the properties of the speech streams and the listener. Although a number of factors that contribute to a listener's ability to successfully segregate two simultaneous speech signals have been identified, comparably little work has focused on the role accents may play in this process. To this end, familiar Canadian-accented voices and unfamiliar British-accented voices were used in a competing talker task.

Cognitive Load Reduces Perceived Linguistic Convergence Between Dyads.

Speech convergence is the tendency of talkers to become more similar to someone they are listening or talking to, whether that person is a conversational partner or merely a voice heard repeating words. To elucidate the nature of the mechanisms underlying convergence, this study uses different levels of task difficulty on speech convergence within dyads collaborating on a task. Dyad members had to build identical LEGO® constructions without being able to see each other's construction, and with each member having half of the instructions required to complete the construction.

Stimulus-directed attention attenuates lexically-guided perceptual learning.

Studies on perceptual learning are motivated by phonetic variation that listeners encounter across speakers, items, and context. In this study, the authors investigate what control the listener has over the perceptual learning of ambiguous /s/ pronunciations through inducing changes in their attentional set. Listeners' attention is manipulated during a lexical decision exposure task such that their attention is directed at the word-level for comprehension-oriented listening or toward the signal for perception-oriented listening.

Expectations and speech intelligibility.

Socio-indexical cues and paralinguistic information are often beneficial to speech processing as this information assists listeners in parsing the speech stream. Associations that particular populations speak in a certain speech style can, however, make it such that socio-indexical cues have a cost. In this study, native speakers of Canadian English who identify as Chinese Canadian and White Canadian read sentences that were presented to listeners in noise.

Perceptual fluency and judgments of vocal aesthetics and stereotypicality.

Research has shown that processing dynamics on the perceiver's end determine aesthetic pleasure. Specifically, typical objects, which are processed more fluently, are perceived as more attractive. We extend this notion of perceptual fluency to judgments of vocal aesthetics.

Towards a more nuanced view of vocal attractiveness.

This study reports on male and female Californians' ratings of vocal attractiveness for 30 male and 30 female voices reading isolated words. While ratings by both sexes were highly correlated, males generally rated fellow males as less attractive than females did, but both females and males had similar ratings of female voices. Detailed acoustic analyses of multiple parameters followed by principal component analyses on vowel and voice quality measures were conducted.

Listener expectations and gender bias in nonsibilant fricative perception.

The nonsibilant English fricatives /f/ and /θ / are known to be acoustically nonrobust. Using /f/ and /θ/ stimuli produced in CV, VCV, and VC syllables in /i α u/ contexts spoken by 10 talkers (5 male), we first replicate previous research suggesting that the most robust cues to this contrast are in the formant transitions in adjacent vowels. We also demonstrate vowel and syllable contextual differences that point to the contrast being most robust in /u/ contexts.

Can mergers-in-progress be unmerged in speech accommodation?

This study examines spontaneous phonetic accommodation of a dialect with distinct categories by speakers who are in the process of merging those categories. We focus on the merger of the NEAR and SQUARE lexical sets in New Zealand English, presenting New Zealand participants with an unmerged speaker of Australian English. Mergers-in-progress are a uniquely interesting sound change as they showcase the asymmetry between speech perception and production.

The role of fundamental frequency in phonetic accommodation.

Previous research has argued that fundamental frequency is a critical component of phonetic accommodation. We tested this hypothesis in an auditory naming task with two conditions. Participants in an unfiltered condition completed an auditory naming task with a single male model talker.