Mondays 1-2pm (unless otherwise noted), Field Lab (AP&M 2452)

Mondays 1-2pm (unless otherwise noted), Field Lab (AP&M 2452)

Mondays 12-1pm (unless otherwise noted), Fieldwork Lab (AP&M 2452)

Mondays 1-2pm (unless otherwise noted), Fieldwork Lab (AP&M 2452)

Monday, November 5, 2018
12:30pm, Field Lab

Wendy comes from San Cristóbal de Las Casas (Chiapas, Mexico) and is a native speaker of Sierra Popoluca, a Mixe-Zoquean language spoken in the southern part of the Mexican State of Veracruz. She recently received her MA in Linguistics at CIESAS Sureste in San Cristóbal de Las Casas with a thesis on “Morphosyntactic mechanisms of valency changes in Sierra Popoluca” with Roberto Zavala. If you want to know more about Wendy and her work, feel free to check the brief video interview she recorded for Ivano and his colleagues’ project, “Headless Relative Clauses in Mesoamerican Languages”. Wendy speaks in Sierra Popoluca up to 1:42 min, then repeats and further elaborates in Spanish.

If you would like to meet with Wendy during her visit, please let Sharon or Ivano know.

Mondays 12:30-1:30pm (unless otherwise noted), Fieldwork Lab (AP&M 2452)

Mondays 1-2pm (unless otherwise noted), Fieldwork Lab (AP&M 2452)

Please join us on Monday, Feb. 5, for Yuan Chai’s practice talk for BLS!

Title:
Less Proficient, More Gestures?

Abstract:
The theory of compensatory gesture (Brown & Gullberg, 2008; Gullberg, 1998) suggests that gesture facilitates speech. The lower the language proficiency is, the higher the gesture rate will be. However, gesture is not the only approach to solve expression difficulties. There are alternative strategies such as code-switching, using alternative words, or omitting the information. The current study asks whether people prioritize gesture for the purpose of compensation and tests this hypothesis by comparing the gesture frequency 1) between narrations in native (Mandarin) and non-native language (English), and 2) between people with different non-native language proficiencies. According to the compensatory gesture theory, Mandarin speakers will gesture more frequently in English than in Mandarin. Additionally, Mandarin speakers with a low English proficiency will gesture more frequently than those with a high English proficiency.

The results show that first, the subjects gesticulate more frequently on average in non-native language than in native language. Specifically, those gestures co-occur with word repetition, word correction, and stressed words and syllables, indicating that speakers use gesture for self-repair and sentence segmenting, both of which function as compensations to the oral skill deficiencies in the non-native language. Second, contrary to the hypothesis, the high-proficiency group on average produces a higher mean gesture rate than the low-proficiency group, though not statistically significant. A qualitative analysis suggests that it is because the low-proficiency group uses different compensatory strategies such as skipping complex details and code-switching to native language, both of which suppress the production of gestures.

This study acknowledges the compensatory function of gesture in speech. However, a low language proficiency does not always lead to a high gesture frequency because low-proficiency speakers may prefer other speech compensatory approaches. Using this study as a reference, language educators can encourage foreign language learners to adopt gesticulation when facilitating speech in order to improve their oral language skills.

Mondays 1-2pm (unless otherwise noted), Fieldwork Lab (AP&M 2452)

Perception of all English Sound Sequences: The Diphones Project
Natasha Warner, University of Arizona
collaborators: Anne Cutler, James McQueen, Seongjin Park, Priscilla Shin, Maureen Hoffmann

[Background reading: Warner, McQueen, & Cutler (2014)]

Most speech perception experiments test perception of specific sequences of speech sounds in order to test specific hypotheses. In this study, we tested perception of the 2288 possible two-sound sequences (diphones) of English, such as /an, tʃɛ, pt, oʲæ/ as well as the more usual /ba, ab/ etc. For each diphone, we created six gates, with end points at thirds of each phoneme (e.g. one-third through /a/, two-thirds through it, at the end of /a/, one-third through /n/ in /an/, etc.). Listeners heard each gated stimulus (a total of 13,464 stimuli) and were asked to respond with what two sounds they heard or heard the beginning of. The total dataset comprises over 500,000 perceptual judgments. This allows us to ask questions about how American English listeners use acoustic cues as they become available over time for all possible combinations of sounds. A complementary study on Dutch is available from Warner, Smits, McQueen, and Cutler’s previous work. We have made this data publicly available. In the current talk, I will address several effects on perception, such as the effect of vowel stress, the effect of phonological environment, and the effect of segment probability. The perceptual data also forms the input to the Shortlist-B model of spoken word recognition.