Experience with a second language affects the use of fundamental frequency in speech segmentation

View/ Open
Issue Date
2017-07-24Author
Tremblay, Annie
Namjoshi, Jui
Spinelli, Elsa
Broersma, Mirjam
Cho, Taehong
Kim, Sahyang
Martínez-García, María Teresa
Connell, Katrina S.
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
Rights
© 2017 Tremblay et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
This study investigates whether listeners’ experience with a second language learned later in life affects their use of fundamental frequency (F0) as a cue to word boundaries in the segmentation of an artificial language (AL), particularly when the cues to word boundaries conflict between the first language (L1) and second language (L2). F0 signals phrase-final (and thus word-final) boundaries in French but word-initial boundaries in English. Participants were functionally monolingual French listeners, functionally monolingual English listeners, bilingual L1-English L2-French listeners, and bilingual L1-French L2-English listeners. They completed the AL-segmentation task with F0 signaling word-final boundaries or without prosodic cues to word boundaries (monolingual groups only). After listening to the AL, participants completed a forced-choice word-identification task in which the foils were either non-words or part-words. The results show that the monolingual French listeners, but not the monolingual English listeners, performed better in the presence of F0 cues than in the absence of such cues. Moreover, bilingual status modulated listeners’ use of F0 cues to word-final boundaries, with bilingual French listeners performing less accurately than monolingual French listeners on both word types but with bilingual English listeners performing more accurately than monolingual English listeners on non-words. These findings not only confirm that speech segmentation is modulated by the L1, but also newly demonstrate that listeners’ experience with the L2 (French or English) affects their use of F0 cues in speech segmentation. This suggests that listeners’ use of prosodic cues to word boundaries is adaptive and non-selective, and can change as a function of language experience.
Collections
Citation
Tremblay A, Namjoshi J, Spinelli E, Broersma M, Cho T, Kim S, et al. (2017) Experience with a second language affects the use of fundamental frequency in speech segmentation. PLoS ONE 12(7): e0181709. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0181709
Items in KU ScholarWorks are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.
We want to hear from you! Please share your stories about how Open Access to this item benefits YOU.
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as: © 2017 Tremblay et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.