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.

Join us Monday, Oct. 23, at 1pm in the Field Lab to hear Andy Wedel (University of Arizona) speak about Signal evolution within the word. Here’s an abstract.

Languages have been shown to optimize their lexicons over time with respect to the amount of signal allocated to words relative to their informativity: words that are on average less predictable in context tend to be longer, while those that are on average more predictable tend to be shorter (Piantadosi et al 2011, cf. Zipf 1935).

Further, psycholinguistic research has shown that listeners are able to incrementally process words as they are heard, progressively updating inferences about what word is intended as the phonetic signal unfolds in time. As a consequence, phonetic cues early in the signal for a word are more informative about word-identity because they are less constrained by previous segmental context. This suggests that languages should not only optimize the total amount of signal allocated to different words, but optimize the distribution of that information across the word relative to existing competitors in the lexicon. Specifically, words that are on average less predictable in context should evolve highly informative phonetic cues early in the word, while tending to preserve a ‘long tail’ of redundant cues later in the word. In this talk I will review recent work in our group showing that these predictions are borne out in several languages.

I will also present recent statistical work in our group supporting the hypothesis that languages tend to develop phonological rules which enhance phonetic cue informativity at the beginnings of words, but reduce cue informativity later in words. I will argue that this typological tendency plausibly arises from the word-level tendency to preserve higher informativity cues at word beginnings.

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

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

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

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

Mondays, 10am, Field Lab

Mondays 11am to 12pm, Fieldwork Lab (AP&M 2452)