The Development of Voice Quality in Second Language Speech Acquisition: A Case Study of the Parallel Speech Corpus of Chinese Natives and Arabic Natives.

Objectives: The primary objective of this study is to investigate whether the voice quality in second language (L2) speech production changes over time as learners progress in their L2 acquisition.

Methods: A total of 83 Arabic native speakers learning Chinese (59 males and 24 females) and 62 Chinese native speakers learning Arabic (23 males and 39 females) participated in the study. The participants had varying durations of L2 learning (DOL) experience.

Shared structure of fundamental human experience revealed by polysemy network of basic vocabularies across languages.

How are concepts related to fundamental human experiences organized within the human mind? Our insights are drawn from a semantic network created using the Cross-Linguistic Database of Polysemous Basic Vocabulary, which focuses on a broad range of senses extracted from dictionary entries. The database covers 60 basic vocabularies in 61 languages, providing 11,841 senses from 3736 entries, revealing cross-linguistic semantic connections through automatically generated weighted semantic maps. The network comprises 2941 nodes connected by 3573 edges.

Temperature shapes language sonority: Revalidation from a large dataset.

Multiple factors of the natural environment have been found to impact and mold the phonetic patterns of human speech, among which the potential correlation between sonority and temperature has garnered significant attention. We leverage a large database containing basic vocabularies of 5,293 languages and calculate the average sonority for each language by adopting a universal sonority scale. Our findings confirm a positive correlation between sonority and temperature across macroareas and language families, whereas this relationship cannot be discerned within language families.