Unpacking the multilingualism continuum: An investigation of language variety co-activation in simultaneous interpreters.

This study examines the phonological co-activation of a task-irrelevant language variety in mono- and bivarietal speakers of German with and without simultaneous interpreting (SI) experience during German comprehension and production. Assuming that language varieties in bivarietal speakers are co-activated analogously to the co-activation observed in bilinguals, the hypothesis was tested in the Visual World paradigm. Bivarietalism and SI experience were expected to affect co-activation, as bivarietalism requires communication-context based language-variety selection, while SI hinges on concurrent comprehension and production in two languages; task type was not expected to affect co-activation as previous evidence suggests the phenomenon occurs during comprehension and production. Sixty-four native speakers of German participated in an eye-tracking study and completed a comprehension and a production task. Half of the participants were trained interpreters and half of each sub-group were also speakers of Swiss German (i.e., bivarietal speakers). For comprehension, a growth-curve analysis of fixation proportions on phonological competitors revealed cross-variety co-activation, corroborating the hypothesis that co-activation in bivarietals' minds bears similar traits to language co-activation in multilingual minds. Conversely, co-activation differences were not attributable to SI experience, but rather to differences in language-variety use. Contrary to expectations, no evidence for phonological competition was found for either same- nor cross-variety competitors in either production task (interpreting- and word-naming variety). While phonological co-activation during production cannot be excluded based on our data, exploring the effects of additional demands involved in a production task hinging on a language-transfer component (oral translation from English to Standard German) merit further exploration in the light of a more nuanced understanding of the complexity of the SI task.

Thinking fast and slow about words and voices: RT-distributional analyses of voice-specific priming in auditory word recognition.

Studies have demonstrated that listeners can retain detailed voice-specific acoustic information about spoken words in memory. A central question is when such information influences lexical processing. According to episodic models of the mental lexicon, voice-specific details influence word recognition immediately during online speech perception. Another view, the Time-Course Hypothesis, claims that voice-specific details influence word recognition only when processing is slow and effortful. The present study investigates the latter proposal by employing reaction time (RT)-distributional analyses. A long-term repetition priming experiment was conducted using an auditory lexical-decision task. In 2 blocks, participants made speeded responses to existing and nonexisting spoken words. In the second block, stimuli consisted of items that had not been presented in the first block and of items that were either repeated in the same voice or in a different voice. Ex-Gaussian and Vincentile analyses of the RT distributions in the second block revealed that voice-specific priming is reflected in distributional shifting rather than in distributional skewing. This indicates that voice-specific priming is not limited to very slow responses but that it affects both fast and slow responses. This finding is inconsistent with a strict version of the Time-Course Hypothesis, which claims that voice-specific priming occurs only during offline processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

How much does orthography influence the processing of reduced word forms? Evidence from novel-word learning about French schwa deletion.

This study examines the influence of orthography on the processing of reduced word forms. For this purpose, we compared the impact of phonological variation with the impact of spelling-sound consistency on the processing of words that may be produced with or without the vowel schwa. Participants learnt novel French words in which the vowel schwa was present or absent in the first syllable. In Experiment 1, the words were consistently produced without schwa or produced in a variable manner (i.e., sometimes produced with and sometimes produced without schwa). In Experiment 2, words were always produced in a consistent manner, but an orthographic exposure phase was included in which words that were produced without schwa were either spelled with or without the letter . Results from naming and eye-tracking tasks suggest that both phonological variation and spelling-sound consistency influence the processing of spoken novel words. However, the influence of phonological variation outweighs the effect of spelling-sound consistency. Our findings therefore suggest that the influence of orthography on the processing of reduced word forms is relatively small.

Increased exposure and phonetic context help listeners recognize allophonic variants.

This study examines the influence of increased exposure and phonetic context on the recognition of words that are produced with nasal flaps in American English (e.g., the word center produced as cenner). Previous work has shown that despite their high frequency of occurrence, words produced with nasal flaps are recognized more slowly and less accurately compared with canonical pronunciation variants produced with /nt/, which occur less frequently. We conducted two experiments in order to investigate how exposure and phonetic context influence this reported processing disadvantage for flapped variants. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the time to recognize flapped variants presented in isolation decreased over the course of the experiment, while accuracy increased. Experiment 2 replicated this finding and showed further that flapped variants that were presented in a casually produced sentence context were recognized faster compared with flapped variants presented in a carefully produced sentence context. Interestingly, the effect of context emerged only in late responses and was present only for flapped but not for canonical variants. Our results thus show that increased exposure and phonetic context help listeners recognize allophonic variants. This finding provides further support for the notion that listeners are flexible and adapt to phonetic variation in speech.

Speaking Style Influences the Brain's Electrophysiological Response to Grammatical Errors in Speech Comprehension.

This electrophysiological study asked whether the brain processes grammatical gender violations in casual speech differently than in careful speech. Native speakers of Dutch were presented with utterances that contained adjective-noun pairs in which the adjective was either correctly inflected with a word-final schwa (e.g., een spannende roman, "a suspenseful novel") or incorrectly uninflected without that schwa ( een spannend roman). Consistent with previous findings, the uninflected adjectives elicited an electrical brain response sensitive to syntactic violations when the talker was speaking in a careful manner. When the talker was speaking in a casual manner, this response was absent. A control condition showed electrophysiological responses for carefully as well as casually produced utterances with semantic anomalies, showing that listeners were able to understand the content of both types of utterance. The results suggest that listeners take information about the speaking style of a talker into account when processing the acoustic-phonetic information provided by the speech signal. Absent schwas in casual speech are effectively not grammatical gender violations. These changes in syntactic processing are evidence of contextually driven neural flexibility.

Syntactic predictability in the recognition of carefully and casually produced speech.

The present study investigated whether the recognition of spoken words is influenced by how predictable they are given their syntactic context and whether listeners assign more weight to syntactic predictability when acoustic-phonetic information is less reliable. Syntactic predictability was manipulated by varying the word order of past participles and auxiliary verbs in Dutch subordinate clauses. Acoustic-phonetic reliability was manipulated by presenting sentences either in a careful or a casual speaking style. In 3 eye-tracking experiments, participants recognized past participles more quickly when they occurred after their associated auxiliary verbs than when they preceded them. Response measures tapping into later stages of processing suggested that this effect was stronger for casually than for carefully produced sentences. These findings provide further evidence that syntactic predictability can influence word recognition and that this type of information is particularly useful for coping with acoustic-phonetic reductions in conversational speech. We conclude that listeners dynamically adapt to the different sources of linguistic information available to them.

Tracking recognition of spoken words by tracking looks to printed words.

Eye movements of Dutch participants were tracked as they looked at arrays of four words on a computer screen and followed spoken instructions (e.g., "Klik op het woord buffel": Click on the word buffalo). The arrays included the target (e.g., buffel), a phonological competitor (e.g., buffer, buffer), and two unrelated distractors. Targets were monosyllabic or bisyllabic, and competitors mismatched targets only on either their onset or offset phoneme and only by one distinctive feature. Participants looked at competitors more than at distractors, but this effect was much stronger for offset-mismatch than onset-mismatch competitors. Fixations to competitors started to decrease as soon as phonetic evidence disfavouring those competitors could influence behaviour. These results confirm that listeners continuously update their interpretation of words as the evidence in the speech signal unfolds and hence establish the viability of the methodology of using eye movements to arrays of printed words to track spoken-word recognition.