English Speakers' Perception of Non-native Vowel Contrasts in Adverse Listening Conditions: A Discrimination Study on the German Front Rounded Vowels /y/ and /ø/.

Previous research has shown that it is difficult for English speakers to distinguish the front rounded vowels /y/ and /ø/ from the back rounded vowels /u/ and /o/. In this study, we examine the effect of noise on this perceptual difficulty. In an Oddity Discrimination Task, English speakers without any knowledge of German were asked to discriminate between German-sounding pseudowords varying in the vowel both in quiet and in white noise at two signal-to-noise ratios (8 and 0 dB). In test trials, vowels of the same height were contrasted with each other, whereas a contrast with /a/ served as a control trial. Results revealed that a contrast with /a/ remained stable in every listening condition for both high and mid vowels. When contrasting vowels of the same height, however, there was a perceptual shift along the F2 dimension as the noise level increased. Although the /ø/-/o/ and particularly /y/-/u/ contrasts were the most difficult in quiet, accuracy on /i/-/y/ and /e/-/ø/ trials decreased immensely when the speech signal was masked. The German control group showed the same pattern, albeit less severe than the non-native group, suggesting that even in low-level tasks with pseudowords, there is a native advantage in speech perception in noise.

Processing of Plural Marking in Nouns by German-Speaking Children With Normal Hearing and Children With Cochlear Implants: An Eye-Tracking Study.

PURPOSE: Our goal is to understand how the different types of plural marking are understood and processed by children with cochlear implants (CIs): (a) how does salience affect the processing of plural marking, (b) how is this processing affected by the incomplete signal provided by the CIs, and (c) is it linked to individual factors such as chronological age, vocabulary development, and phonological working memory? METHOD: Sixteen children with CIs and 30 age-matched children with normal hearing (NH) participated in an eye-tracking study. Their task was to choose the corresponding picture to an auditorily presented singular or plural noun. Accuracy, reaction time, and gaze fixation were measured and analyzed with mixed-effect models. RESULTS: Group differences were found in accuracy but not in reaction time or gaze fixation. Plural processing is qualitatively similar in children with CIs and children with NH, with more difficulties in processing plurals involving stem-vowel changes and less with those involving suffixes. Age effects indicate that processing abilities still evolve between 5 and 11 years, and processing is further linked to lexical development. CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicate that early implantation seems to be beneficial for the acquisition of plural as indicated by very small between-group differences in processing and comprehension. Processing is furthermore affected by the type of material (i.e., phonetic, phonological, or morphological) used to mark plural and less so by their segmental salience. Our study emphasizes the need to take into account the form of the linguistic material in future investigations at higher levels of processing.

Processing of noun plural marking in German-speaking children: an eye-tracking study.

The ability to process plural marking of nouns is acquired early: at a very young age, children are able to understand if a noun represents one item or more than one. However, little is known about how the segmental characteristics of plural marking are used in this process. Using eye-tracking, we aim at understanding how five to twelve-year old children use the phonetic, phonological, and morphological information available to process noun plural marking in German (i.e., a very complex system) compared to adults. We expected differences with stem vowels, stem-final consonants or different suffixes, alone or in combination, reflecting different processing of their segmental information. Our results show that for plural processing: 1) a suffix is the most helpful cue, an umlaut the least helpful, and voicing does not play a role; 2) one cue can be sufficient and 3) school-age children have not reached adult-like processing of plural marking.

L1 variation and L2 acquisition: L1 German /eː/-/ɛː/ overlap and its effect on the acquisition of L2 English /ɛ/-/æ/.

A person's first language (L1) affects the way they acquire speech in a second language (L2). However, we know relatively little about the role different varieties of the L1 play in the acquisition of L2 speech. This study focuses on German (L1) learners of English (L2) and asks whether the degree to which German speakers distinguish between the two vowels /eː/ and /ɛː/ in their L1 has an impact on how well these individuals identify /æ/ and discriminate between the two English vowels /ɛ/ and /æ/. These two English vowels differ in both vowel quality and duration (/æ/ is longer than /ɛ/). We report on an identification and a discrimination experiment. In the first study, participants heard a sound file and were asked to indicate whether they heard "pen" or "pan" (or "pedal" or "paddle"). The stimuli differed from each other in terms of both vowel quality (11 steps on a spectral continuum from an extreme /æ/ to an extreme /ɛ/) and duration (short, middle, long). In the second study, participants had to signal whether two sound files they were exposed to differed from each other. We modeled the percentage of /æ/ ("pan," "paddle") selection (identification task only, binomial logistic regression), accuracy (discrimination task only, binomial logistic regression), and reaction time (identification and discrimination tasks, linear mixed effects models) by implementing the German Pillai score as a measure of vowel overlap in our analysis. Each participant has an individual Pillai score, which ranges from 0 (= merger of L1 German /eː/ and /ɛː/) to 1 (=maintenance of the contrast between L1 German /eː/ and /ɛː/) and had been established, prior to the perception experiments reported here, in a production study. Although the findings from the discrimination study remain inconclusive, the results from the identification test support the hypothesis that maintaining the vowel contrast in the L1 German leads to a more native-like identification of /æ/ in L2 English. We conclude that sociolinguistic variation in someone's L1 can affect L2 acquisition.

Do We Pronounce Quotation? An Analysis of Name-informing and Non-name-informing Contexts.

Quotation marks are a tool to refer to the linguistic form of an expression. For instance, in cases of so-called pure quotation as in "Hanover" has three syllables, they point to the syllabic characteristics of the name of the town of Hanover. Cases of this nature differ from sentences like Hanover is a town in New Hampshire, in which Hanover is used denotationally and, thus, refers to the town of Hanover itself. Apart from quotation marks, other means such as italics, bold, capitalization, or air quotes represent potential means to signal a non-stereotypical use of an item in the written or gestural mode. It is far less clear, however, whether acoustic correlates of quotation marks exist. The present contribution aims at investigating this issue by focusing on instances of quotation, in which the conventionalized name of a lexical concept is highlighted by means of quotation marks, either together with or without an additional lexical quotational marker, such as so-called, on the lexical level (cf. The so-called "vuvuzela" is an instrument from South Africa vs. The "vuvuzela" is an instrument from South Africa). The data clearly show that quotation marks are pronounced, primarily triggering a lengthening effect, independently of whether they appear together with or without a name-informing context. The results of the experiments are interpreted against the background of a pragmatic implementation of quotation marks in general as well as in spoken discourse in particular.