Talker variability facilitates the statistical learning of speech sounds

Natural speech contains many sources of acoustic variability both within and between talkers, which challenges speech recognition in some contexts but may facilitate language understanding in novel listening situations. Despite this ubiquitous variability, most previous studies that have examined the ability to extract sound patterns in speech—known as statistical learning—have used highly controlled, artificial, monotonic streams of syllables. Thus, it is unknown whether variability in speech may help or hinder statistical learning – an important question to resolve if statistical learning does indeed play a role in the segmentation of naturally spoken language, as widely theorized. Here, we assessed whether the use of naturally produced, variable speech sounds produced by multiple talkers benefits or impairs statistical learning, including the ability to generalize patterns to a novel talker. During training, participants listened to approximately 12 minutes of continuous speech made up of repeating trisyllabic words, spoken either by a single talker (single-talker condition) or four talkers speaking for three minutes each (multiple-talker condition). Post-training, all participants completed three assessments of learning: (1) an explicit familiarity rating task, (2) an explicit forced-choice recognition task, and (3) an implicit syllable target detection task. Results indicated that participants in both training conditions showed evidence of statistical learning across all assessments, providing an important demonstration that statistical learning is robust to additional variability in the speech signal. Further, in both the forced-choice recognition task and target detection task, participants in the multiple-talker condition showed evidence of facilitated statistical learning, particularly when listening to a novel talker. In the familiarity rating task, performance was comparable between conditions; however, participants trained with multiple talkers were less likely to conflate word familiarity with talker voice familiarity. Overall, these results suggest that training with multiple talkers can improve aspects of statistical learning across multiple measures of learning.

Investigating Chinese EFL Learners’ Comprehension of English Idioms

This study investigates how Chinese EFL learners’ understanding of English idioms is associated with their judgments of idiom familiarity, transparency. Another factor, context is also explored for its role in idiom comprehension. Results show learners’ familiarity rating is positively correlated with their idiomatic knowledge, transparency rating does not indicate clear correlation; it is easier for learners to understand high-familiar and high-transparent idioms. Context exerts a facilitating role in learners’ interpretation of idioms, and there are significant interaction effects between familiarity and context. The findings provide pedagogical implications for teachers to use classroom activities or exercises to increase learners’ exposure to English idioms.

Word familiarity and lexical change: The case of Sarawak Malay Dialect

This preliminary study looks at the familiarity rating of words in Sarawak Malay Dialect (SMD). Although familiarity ratings of language items are usually utilised in psycholinguistic research, they can be very useful for studies in the area of language change. The aim of this study is twofold: (1) to compare the perceptive familiarity rating of Sarawak Malay words; and (2) to document Sarawak Malay words that are undergoing lexical change. Fifty SMD words were used in this study consisting of those with meanings that can be considered as medium to high in frequency for everyday speech. Questionnaires were designed using a 5-point Likert-type scale to rate word familiarity and distributed to 15 participants who were native SMD speakers between the ages of 20 and 25. Across word items, more than one third were found to be rated as less familiar and unknown and thus were not actively used in daily conversations. There were also a number of words perceived as familiar to highly familiar but were not widely used in everyday speech. Evidently, it is crucial to document and preserve these SMD words as they are fast becoming passive vocabulary for the young and may eventually be lost in their lexicon.