Receptive Knowledge of Transitivity Alternation by Korean Heritage Speakers

Heritage speakers (HS) have historically been attributed with what they cannot do or what they have lost; however while heritage grammars are inevitably different from the monolingual variety, investigating HS knowledge and abilities can reveal much about their capacity for retention. This article investigates Korean HS living in the U.S. and their receptive knowledge of Korean transitivity alternation, specifically, whether they are able to retain a phonologically reduced transitivity marker that is not reinforced in the dominant language, a previous unstudied area of heritage grammar and a feature that does not exist in the speakers’ dominant language, English. Participants (N = 20) rated their acceptability judgment of four sentence conditions on a self-paced online assessment. In a second task, other participants (N = 14) translated the four sentence conditions into English. Results revealed a significant effect of sentence condition for the HS on their acceptability ratings, Wald χ2(3) = 61.133, p < .001, indicating that participants’ judgments of test sentences were significantly influenced by which category of sentence they were given. The HS also demonstrated keen distinctions between sentences with and without the transitivity marker in their translations. Overall, the study shows that Korean HS are able to retain this the transitivity marker.

Sentence Context Differentially Modulates Contributions of Fundamental Frequency Contours to Word Recognition in Chinese-Speaking Children With and Without Dyslexia

Previous work has shown that children with dyslexia are impaired in speech recognition in adverse listening conditions. Our study further examined how semantic context and fundamental frequency (F0) contours contribute to word recognition against interfering speech in dyslexic and non-dyslexic children. Thirty-two children with dyslexia and 35 chronological-age-matched control children were tested on the recognition of words in normal sentences versus wordlist sentences with natural versus flat F0 contours against single-talker interference. The dyslexic children had overall poorer recognition performance than non-dyslexic children. Furthermore, semantic context differentially modulated the effect of F0 contours on the recognition performances of the two groups. Specifically, compared with flat F0 contours, natural F0 contours increased the recognition accuracy of dyslexic children less than non-dyslexic children in the wordlist condition. By contrast, natural F0 contours increased the recognition accuracy of both groups to a similar extent in the sentence condition. These results indicate that access to semantic context improves the effect of natural F0 contours on word recognition in adverse listening conditions by dyslexic children who are more impaired in the use of natural F0 contours during isolated and unrelated word recognition. Our findings have practical implications for communication with dyslexic children when listening conditions are unfavorable.

The missing link? Testing a schema account of unitization

Unitization refers to the creation of a new unit from previously distinct items. The concept of unitization has been used to explain how novel pairings between items can be remembered without requiring recollection, by virtue of new, item-like representations that enable familiarity-based retrieval. We tested an alternative account of unitization – a schema account – which suggests that associations between items can be rapidly assimilated into a schema. We used a common operationalization of “unitization” as the difference between two unrelated words being linked by a definition, relative to two words being linked by a sentence, during an initial study phase. During the following relearning phase, a studied word was re-paired with a new word, either related or unrelated to the original associate from study. In a final test phase, memory for the Relearned associations was tested. We hypothesized that, if unitized representations act like schemas, then we would observe some generalization to related words, such that memory would be better in the definition than sentence condition for related words, but not for unrelated words. Contrary to the schema hypothesis, evidence favoured the null hypothesis of no difference between definition and sentence conditions for related words (Experiment 1), even when each cue was associated with multiple associates, indicating that the associations can be generalized (Experiment 2), or when the schematic information was explicitly re-activated during Relearning (Experiment 3). These results suggest that unitized associations do not generalize to accommodate new information, and therefore provide evidence against the schema account.

Talker Discrimination by Prelingually Deaf Children with Cochlear Implants: Preliminary Results

Forty-four school-age children who had used a multichannel cochlear implant (CI) for at least 4 years were tested to assess their ability to discriminate differences between recorded pairs of female voices uttering sentences. Children were asked to respond “same voice” or “different voice” on each trial. Two conditions were examined. In one condition, the linguistic content of the sentence was always held constant and only the talker's voice varied from trial to trial. In another condition, the linguistic content of the utterance also varied so that to correctly respond “same voice,” the child needed to recognize that Two different sentences were spoken by the same talker. Data from normal-hearing children were used to establish that these tasks were well within the capabilities of children without hearing impairment. For the children with CIs, in the “fixed sentence condition” the mean proportion correct was 68%, which, although significantly different from the 50% score expected by chance, suggests that the children with CIs found this discrimination task rather difficult. In the “varied sentence condition,” however, the mean proportion correct was only 57%, indicating that the children were essentially unable to recognize an unfamiliar talker's voice when the linguistic content of the paired sentences differed. Correlations with other speech and language outcome measures are also reported.

The Role of Phonology in Reading Comprehension: Implications of the Effects of Homophones on Processing Sentences with Referentially Dependent Categories

Two experiments investigated whether phonological representations are activated in the processing of anaphors in reading, and if they are, whether they play a role in the initial (first-pass) processing of the sentence or in review (second-pass) processes. Subjects made sentence acceptability judgements for sentences that contained either verb-gaps or indefinite and personal pronouns (overt anaphors). All sentences contained homophones. Half of the semantically unacceptable sentences were phonologically plausible if the homophones were inserted in the gap (e.g. The children sleighed in the winter, and the murderer in cold blood) or used as the referent of the pronoun (e.g. There is a sale on at the store and I have one at the boat). The other half of the semantically unacceptable sentences were phonologically implausible. In both experiments, half of the subjects saw the sentences under normal viewing conditions (whole sentence condition); for the other half of the subjects the words of each sentence were presented sequentially in the centre of the video screen at the rate of 250 msec/word (RSVP condition). A large proportion of the phonologically implausible sentences in the first experiment contained phrases in the second clause which resulted in semantic “oddities” (e.g. The children sleighed in the winter, and the murderer in the jar); the sentences in Experiment 2 did not contain such oddities. In Experiment 1 subjects made more errors on the phonologically plausible than implausible unacceptable sentences with both verb-gaps and pronouns in the whole sentence but not in the RSVP condition. There was no effect of phonological plausibility in Experiment 2. As the effect of phonological plausibility was only seen in the whole sentence condition, and only when the sentences contained semantic oddities, these data suggest that phonological information was not used in the first-pass analysis of the sentence, but rather when the subject re-read the sentence to find the referent.

The Intelligibility of Synthesized Speech

The intelligibility of two speech synthesizers [ECHO II (Street Electronics, 1982) and VOTRAX (VOTRAX Division, 1981)] was compared to the intelligibility of natural speech in each of three different contextual conditions: (a) single words, (b)"low-probability sentences" in which the last word could not be predicted from preceding context, and (c) "high-probability sentences" in which the last word could be predicted from preceding context. Additionally, the effect of practice on performance in each condition was examined. Natural speech was more intelligible than either type of synthesized speech regardless of word/sentence condition. In both sentence conditions, VOTRAX speech was significantly more intelligible than ECHO II speech. No practice effect was observed for VOTRAX, while an ascending linear trend occurred for ECHO II. Implications for the use of inexpensive speech synthesis units as components of augmentative communication aids for persons with severe speech and/or language impairments are discussed.

The Comparative Judgements of Generally and Specifically Gifted Children

Different groups of children were compared on sentence verification tasks. The children were either academically, musically or artistically gifted, and there were two forms of the task. In one, a picture was followed by a sentence, and in another, one sentence was followed by another. Subjects had to decide as quickly as possible whether or not the second proposition logically confirmed the first. In the picture-sentence condition results from all groups could be fitted to the constituent comparison model for sentence verification proposed by Carpenter and Just (1975). For the sentence-sentence condition, however, the observed results diverged from those predicted by the model. The results are explained in terms of different degrees of linguistic processing capacities of the subjects, and they demonstrate the importance which verbal-logical congruence has for children. Artistically able children had difficulties in processing subject/object incongruence in sentence pairs whereas musically able children had more problems in processing above/below incongruence.