Abstract
The " I Congresso Internacional de Psicolinguística do Multilinguismo” will take place online and in-person in Dec 5 to Dec 8 2022.
Our own Marta Ortega-Llebaria is one of the invited speakers. Her contribution is entitled “Adult Prosody in a Second Language: Stress and Rhythm”. The events are both in Brazilian Portuguese and in English. Online attendance is free. To attend, subscribe here: https://forms.gle/uuQPtMS4BEegtpUM6
More event information can be found here: https://instagram.com/icpm2022/
Abstract for Marta's presentation:
Adult Prosody in a Second Language: Stress and Rhythm
Marta Ortega-Llebaria
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA
This talk focuses on the acquisition of two prosodic features, namely, stress and rhythm, in spoken language. After a brief introduction presenting terminology and concepts, the talk reviews the last 20 years of research in L2 stress first, and then in L2 rhythm. Starting with early theoretical frameworks which framed “stress deafness” in a second language as either a problem of cue-transfer (Cutler & Jessie 2021 and references therein) or a problem of representation (Dupoux and colleagues 2010), the contributions of recent research are presented. For example, recent research investigated other types of word-prominence besides stress such as pitch-accents and tones showing that on the one hand, any type of prominence in L1 aids the perception of word-prominence in an L2 (e.g., Kim & Tremblay 2021, Wiener & Goss 2018, 2019). On the other hand, “deafness” to any word-prominence type was more acute in speakers of languages with no word-prominence such as French. Together, these findings support the explanatory power of the cue transfer hypothesis. Yet, speakers of languages with word-prominences continued showing different degrees of stress deafness (Ortin & Simonet 2022, Ortega-Llebaria et al. 2013), and other factors such as pitch shape not only modulated L2 stress perception (Ortega-Llebaria and Wu, 2017, 2021) but also L1 perception of tone and pitch accents (e.g., Wu et al. 2017) indicating that cue-transferring is a necessary but not a sufficient explanation to the perception of word-prominence. With regard to L2 rhythm, I present work on duration-based measures of rhythm, aka micro-rhythm (e.g., Dellwo 2010), and on pitch-based measures of rhythm, aka macro-rhythm (Jun 2014). While there is abundant research on L2 micro-rhythm showing that L2 duration patterns related to rhythm are indeed learnable by adult speakers and that this learning is modulated by the L1-L2 rhythmic similarities (e.g., Li & Post 2014), research on macro-rhythm is just starting. To date, only a few works analyzed these new measures cross-linguistically. To my knowledge, not many studies on L2 macro-rhythm are yet published. I will present a recent case study (Nagao et al. 2022), where both measures, micro- and macro-rhythm, are used to describe the learning patterns of two Japanese leaners of English. The talk concludes with a summary of the progress made in L2 stress and rhythm in the last decade and some of the current challenges it encounters.
Works Cited
Cutler, A., & Jesse, A. (2021). Word stress in speech perception. In J. S. Pardo, L. C. Nygaard, R. E. Remez, & D. B. Pisoni (Eds.). The Handbook of Speech Perception, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 239-265.
Dellwo, V. (2010). Influences of speech rate on the acoustic correlates of speech rhythm: An experimental phonetic study based on acoustic and perceptual evidence. PhD dissertation, Universität Bonn.
Dupoux, E., Peperkamp, S., & Sebastián-Gallés, N. (2010). Limits on bilingualism revisited: Stress ‘deafness’ in simultaneous French–Spanish bilinguals. Cognition, 114(2), 266-275.
Jun, S. A. (2014). Prosodic typology: By prominence type, word prosody, and macro-rhythm. Prosodic typology II: The phonology of intonation and phrasing, 520, 539.
Kim, H., & Tremblay, A. (2021). Korean listeners’ processing of suprasegmental lexical contrasts in Korean and English: A cue-based transfer approach. Journal of Phonetics, 87, 101059.
Li, A., & Post, B. (2014). L2 acquisition of prosodic properties of speech rhythm: Evidence from L1 Mandarin and German learners of English. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 36(2), 223-255.
Nagao, J., & Ortega-Llebaria, M. (2022). Micro- and macro-rhythm measures in English and Japanese as first and second languages. 1st International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI). Sonderborg, Denmark.
Ortín, R., & Simonet, M. (2022). Phonological processing of stress by native English speakers learning Spanish as a second language. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 44(2), 460-482.
Ortega-Llebaria, M., Gu, H., & Fan, J. (2013). English speakers' perception of Spanish lexical stress: Context-driven L2 stress perception. Journal of Phonetics, 41(3-4), 186-197.
Ortega-Llebaria, M., Nemogá, M., & Presson, N. (2017). Long-term experience with a tonal language shapes the perception of intonation in English words: How Chinese–English bilinguals perceive “Rose?” vs. “Rose”. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20(2), 367-383.
Ortega-Llebaria, M., & Wu, Z. (2021). Chinese-English speakers’ perception of pitch in their non-tonal language: Reinterpreting English as a tonal-like language. Language and speech, 64(2), 467-487.
Wiener, S., & Goss, S. (2018). Perceptual assimilation of non-native prosodic cues: Cross-linguistic effects of lexical F0 learning. In Proc. 9th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2018, 947-951.
Wiener, S., & Goss, S. (2019). Second and third language learnres’ sensitivity to Japanese pitch accent is additive: an information-based model. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 41(4), 897-910.
Wu, Z., & Ortega-Llebaria, M. (2017). Pitch shape modulates the time course of tone vs pitch-accent identification in Mandarin Chinese. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 141(3), 2263-2276.