Search

Aims and objectives: This study examines how social information is utilized in processes of bilingual speech perception. Specifically, we investigate whether racialized expectations of native language background trigger language-specific processing strategies in early or simultaneous Spanish–English bilinguals. Methodology: We coupled a visually-primed phoneme categorization task with a social evaluation questionnaire to test whether Spanish–English bilingual adults living in the United States (n = 30) drew on racialized ideologies about what speakers of certain languages look like during speech perception. We predicted that, if participants drew on these ideologies during the phoneme categorization task, they would cue an expectation of what language was being spoken and, consequently, a shift in the identification boundary. Data and analysis: Mixed logistic regression was used to investigate the effects of photograph (the visual prime) and voice on how participants categorized the continua while paired, two-tailed t -tests were used to compare how participants socially evaluated the two speakers. Findings: Raciolinguistic evaluations appeared to influence bilingual speech perception, significantly affecting how the continua were categorized, but they did not work the same way for every voice. Originality: Prior work has posited that interactional context influences bilingual language control (e.g., Grosjean, 2001); the ideological nature of this context has, however, been understudied. This paper offers insight into how ideologies related to race may shape language perception and use in bilinguals. Implications: The findings provide evidence for the role of social information in bilingual speech perception, suggest that multiple cues (acoustic and social) integrate to determine the interactional context, and indicate that the influence of raciolinguistic ideologies is neither straightforward nor homogeneous but rather contingent on complex aspects of the perceived speaker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explored the lexical coverage of corpus-based vocabulary lists (general, academic, and content-specific) across several million tokens gathered from digital science resources (DSR) for middle school (6-8 grade) students in the United States. The goal was to estimate the extent to which a combination of well-known word lists, mostly designed for the needs of L2 learners, might help students reach text coverage that could result in reasonable comprehension of science texts. The findings of this study show that: (a) the top 570 word families in the newer Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) provide 75% more lexical coverage in the corpus than the 570 word families in the older Academic Word List (AWL), (b) a series of lists designed for second language learners, such as General Service List (GSL), Academic Word List (AWL), and the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) Science List (about 2,900 word families) offer 88.33% coverage, and (c) the GSL and the Middle School Vocabulary List (MSVL) for Science (fewer than 2,500 word families) provide 87.77% coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study examined how learners' motivational dispositions predict the complexity, accuracy, fluency of their oral task performance and their overall second language proficiency. Eighty-one speakers of English as a second language in the United States completed a regulatory focus and a regulatory mode questionnaire, an oral interview task, and a picture description task. Regression analyses showed a meaningful pattern of results. The assessment mode (concerned with analysis, evaluation, and comparison) contributed to syntactic and lexical complexity, the reduction of dysfluencies, and overall English proficiency, whereas the locomotion mode (concerned with acting without deliberation) positively predicted the speed measure of fluency and the total number of errors. The prevention focus (concerned with stability, security, and safety) negatively predicted lexical sophistication, whereas the promotion focus (concerned with advancement, accomplishments, and growth) predicted overall English proficiency. Theoretical and instructional implications were discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective This paper identifies general properties of language style in social media to help identify areas of need in disasters. Background In the search for metrics of need in social media data, much of the existing literature ignores processes of language usage. Psychological concepts, such as narrative breach, Gricean maxims, and lexical marking in cognition, may assist the recovery of disaster-relevant metrics from altered patterns of word prevalence. Method We analyzed several hundred thousand location-specific microblogs from Twitter for Hurricane Sandy, Oklahoma tornadoes, and the Boston Marathon bombing along with a fantasy football control corpus, examining the relative frequency of words in 36 antonym pairs. We compared the ratio of words within these pairs to the corresponding ratios recovered from an online word norm database. Results Partial rank correlation values between observed antonym ratios demonstrate consistent patterns across disasters. For Hurricane Sandy data, 25 antonym pairs have moderate to large effect sizes for discrepancies between observed and normative ratios. Across disasters, 7 pairs are stable and meet effect size criteria. Sentiment analysis, supplementary word frequency counts with respect to disaster proximity, and examples support a "breach" account for the observed results. Conclusion Lexical choice between antonyms, only somewhat related to sentiment, suggests that social media capture wide-ranging breaches of normal functioning. Application Antonym selection contributes to screening tools based on language style for identifying relevant content and quantifying disruption using social media without the a priori specification of content keywords. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the discursive strategies deployed in the linguistic production of homelessness and homeless persons in the context of city-level policies on urban camping in a major urban center in the USA, and outlines the ways that homeless activists contested their use in the public sphere. Homelessness has historically been defined as a deviant form of behavior and the subjectivity of ‘homeless’ has functioned as a social stigma alongside other forms of deviance. I build on analysis of racism and anti-Semitism by examining three linguistic mechanisms deployed by speakers to produce and contest homelessness as a deviant subjectivity: the use of metonyms in processes of synechdochization, the use of metaphors in describing groups and actions, and how processes of lexicalization attach meaning to places and social categories across three categories of deviance prevalent in descriptions of homelessness and urban camping: dirtiness, drugs, and danger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Exemplar Theory, the mental lexical representation of a word is a distribution over memories of past experiences with that word. These memories are rich with phonetic and indexical detail. At the very core of the theory, then, is the prediction that individual words should have a unique phonetic distribution shaped by the environments in which they were most encountered. We pursue this hypothesis directly by exploring the prediction that a word should be more easily processed when it contains characteristics that most resemble the listener's accumulated past experience with that word. Twenty-five participants took part in an auditory lexical decision task where they heard words that are usually said more by older speakers, words usually said more by younger speakers, and age-neutral words. These words were presented in both an older and a younger voice. Accuracy rates increased and response times decreased when voice age and word age matched. This provides robust evidence that words are more easily processed when they contain characteristics that most resemble the listener's accumulated past experience with that word, providing verification of a key prediction of exemplar models of the lexicon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Readers or speakers of a particular language break up sentences into lexical/syntactic entities while reading or speaking. Pausing, being one indispensible characteristic of this process, forms a basis for this study. President Obama's address at the G-20 summit was analyzed in terms of intrasentential pausing strategies with due focus on duration of pauses preceding and following the that complementizer in noun and adjective type that-clauses. Recordings of the speech were analyzed in two separate parts: (1) the first part - assumed as pre-prepared and thus considered as read speech, and the second - question/answer session -considered as spontaneous speech. Pauses were measured in milliseconds utilizing Goldwave™, the sound analyzing software, and later, a comparison was carried out between pauses in the two speech types to observe any potential differences and/or similarities. Overall findings obtained reveal that while preceding pauses in read speech were significantly longer than following ones, in spontaneous speech, however, the difference was statistically insignificant. One interesting outcome was found to be clause-type specific, in that while preceding pauses regarding adjective clauses were considerably longer than following pauses in read speech, with noun clauses, however, the difference was insignificant. And, in spontaneous speech, the situation was completely the opposite, such that while following pauses concerning noun-clauses were significantly longer, regarding adjectives, although preceding pauses were observed to be longer, the length did not display any statistically significant difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lexical access was examined in English-Spanish bilinguals by monitoring eye fixations on target and lexical competitors as participants followed spoken instructions in English to click on one of the objects presented on a computer (e.g., 'Click on the beans'). Within-language lexical competitors had a phoneme onset in English that was shared with the target (e.g., 'beetle'). Between-language lexical competitors had a phoneme onset in Spanish that was shared with the target (' bi gote', 'mustache' in English). Participant groups varied in their age-of-acquisition of English and Spanish, and were examined in one of three language modes (Grosjean, 1998, 2001). A strong within-language (English) lexical competition (or cohort effect) was modulated by language mode and age of second language acquisition. A weaker between-language (Spanish) cohort effect was influenced primarily by the age-of-acquisition of Spanish. These results highlight the role of age-of-acquisition and mode in language processing. They are discussed in comparison to previous studies addressing the role of these two variables and in terms of existing models of bilingual word recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the patterns of prosodically induced variation in the English stop contrast produced by Korean learners of English. The acoustic realization of the laryngeal contrast in English stops is observed in utterance-initial, -medial, and -final positions either with or without contrastive focal accent. The speech data in English collected from 4 adult male Korean speakers are compared with the result of a previous study by 6 adult male speakers native in American English (Choi, 2005). Overall, statistical results show that Korean adult speakers do not specify variation conditioned by focus and position. Focus-induced acoustic variation in the stops, observed in the speech by native speakers of English, is not significantly replicated in the speech of the Korean learners in the present study. Additional difference in using the acoustic correlates to mark the contrast is detected in the Korean adult speakers. It suggests the adult learners have problem in specifying the postlexical prosodic structure and segmental variations, and thus, rather active instruction of the phrasal prosody is also needed in educational settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four experiments employed a priming methodology to investigate different mechanisms of stress assignment and how they are modulated by lexical and sub-lexical mechanisms in reading aloud in Italian. Lexical stress is unpredictable in Italian, and requires lexical look-up. The most frequent stress pattern (Dominant) is on the penultimate syllable [laVOro (work)], while stress on the antepenultimate syllable [MAcchina (car)] is relatively less frequent (non-Dominant). Word and pseudoword naming responses primed by words with non-dominant stress - which require whole-word knowledge to be read correctly - were compared to those primed by nonwords. Percentage of errors to words and percentage of dominant stress responses to nonwords were measured. In Experiments 1 and 2 stress errors increased for non-dominant stress words primed by nonwords, as compared to when they were primed by words. The results could be attributed to greater activation of sub-lexical codes, and an associated tendency to assign the dominant stress pattern by default in the nonword prime condition. Alternatively, they may have been the consequence of prosodic priming, inducing more errors on trials in which the stress pattern of primes and targets was not congruent. The two interpretations were investigated in Experiments 3 and 4. The results overall suggested a limited role of the default metrical pattern in word pronunciation, and showed clear effect of prosodic priming, but only when the sub-lexical mechanism prevailed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the nature of the involvement load (Laufer & Hulstijn, 2001) in second language (L2) lexical input processing through reading by considering the effects of the reader-based factors of L2 reading proficiency and background knowledge. The lexical input processing aspects investigated were lexical inferencing (search), attentional allocation during target word (TW) verification (evaluation), TW episodic memory after verification, TW retention, and changes in lexical input processing. This study also addresses the relationships between inferencing and retention as well as the relationships among the various phases of lexical input processing. A questionnaire on self-reported strategy use during the TW verification task was designed to examine motivation and cognitive involvement. A repeated-measures design was used with a cross-sectional sample of 35 adult L2 learners of Spanish. Participants read narratives (one more and one less familiar) that contained nonsense words. They guessed the meanings of the TWs. After reading all of the stories, participants completed an online inference verification task whose goal was to confirm or to correct guesses and to encourage deeper processing of TWs. This was followed by a test of TW episodic memory (yes/no verification) and a strategy questionnaire. Afterward, participants?completed two tests that measured receptive retention of meaning. Analyses reveal differential effects of the reader-based variables across the different aspects of lexical input processing and negative changes in lexical input processing due to an interaction between reading proficiency and background knowledge. Results illustrate how reader-based factors also affect learner involvement and lexical input processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of neurolinguistic factors in stuttering was investigated by determining whether individuals who stutter display atypical neural functions for language processing, even with no speech production demands. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were obtained while 9 individuals who stutter (IWS) and 9 normally fluent speakers (NS) read sentences silently. The ERPs were elicited by: (a) closed-class words that provide structural or grammatical information, (b) open-class words that convey referential meaning, and (c) semantic anomalies (violations in semantic expectation). In standardized tests, adult IWS displayed similar grammatical and lexical abilities in both comprehension and production tasks compared to their matched, normally fluent peers. Yet the ERPs elicited in IWS for linguistic processing tasks revealed differences in functional brain organization. The ERPs elicited in IWS were characterized by reduced negative amplitudes for closed-class words (N280), open-class words (N350), and semantic anomalies (N400) in a temporal window of approximately 200-450 ms after word onsets. The overall pattern of results indicates that alterations in processing for IWS are related to neural functions that are common to word classes and perhaps involve shared, underlying processes for lexical access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the different names of tobaccos used by the Latino consumers in the U.S. It mentions that the National Adult Tobacco Survey is administered in Spanish to encompass the significant Latino population in the U.S. It notes the importance of lexical variations in spoken Spanish among Latino groups.

Entries in the burgeoning “text-as-data” movement are often accompanied by lists or visualizations of how word (or other lexical feature) usage differs across some pair or set of documents. These are intended either to establish some target semantic concept (like the content of partisan frames) to estimate word-specific measures that feed forward into another analysis (like locating parties in ideological space) or both. We discuss a variety of techniques for selecting words that capture partisan, or other, differences in political speech and for evaluating the relative importance of those words. We introduce and emphasize several new approaches based on Bayesian shrinkage and regularization. We illustrate the relative utility of these approaches with analyses of partisan, gender, and distributive speech in the U.S. Senate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]