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Program |
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Program
Sunday, 25/11
17:00-18:30 -
Registration
19:00-20:00 - Plenary
session
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Dr. Lise Menn: Phones, phonemes, and phonotactics: Similarities and
differences between L1 and L2
13:00-14:00 -
Poster session
Keynote speakers and talks:
1. Ocke-Schwen Bohn (Aarhus University, Denmark) The dos and don’ts of assessing cross-language perceptual similarity of speech sounds Attempts to predict difficulty in second language speech learning and in cross-language speech perception (such as Flege’s Speech Learning Model or Best’s Perceptual Assimilation Model) depend critically upon valid similarity measures. This talk will review and evaluate methods used to assess cross-language perceptual similarity of speech sounds. It will be shown that indirect measures of perceptual similarity, such as those based on acoustic comparisons or on comparisons of phonetic symbols, are inadequate. These methods often fail to correctly predict cross-language speech perception and learning difficulty. Because of this, methods have been developed which are aimed at assessing cross-language perceptual similarity directly. In these tasks of perceptual assimilation or interlingual identification, listeners typically hear nonnative sounds, which they are asked to a) identify with native categories and b) rate for the goodness of fit with the native category. Despite the broad acceptance of direct methods in assessments of cross-language perceptual similarity, several questions regarding the design, the nature, and interpretation of perceptual assimilation tasks are still unresolved. This talk will suggest ways of addressing these questions to improve our understanding of what listeners actually do when they perceive the sounds of a foreign language.
2. Paul Iverson (University College London) The role of categorization in learning second-language phonemes Current work on
second-language phoneme learning and perception emphasizes the role
of phonetic or phonological categorization, by examining, for
example, how second-language phonemes assimilate to first-language
categories, how first- and second-language categories interact, and
what cues are used in the category representations. The aim of this
talk is to demonstrate some limitations of this approach. Learning
second-language phonemes almost certainly involves many levels and
types of processing, such as auditory tuning and focused attention,
that cannot be easily related to category structure, and we thus
need to broaden the scope of our investigation if we are to
understand difficulties in second-language phoneme learning.
Examples will be given from recent research on the perception and
training of English vowels by Spanish, French, German, and Norwegian
speakers; and English /r/-/l/ by Japanese speakers.
3. Leonor Scliar Cabral (Federal University of Santa Catarina) Decay of early phonetic discrimination Research carried out within the HAS (high-amplitude sucking) paradigm has shown early discrimination by newborns (beginning with 36 hours of life) of the differences among the sounds of any language. For instance, newborns are able to discriminate the opposition between [+/-voiced] in the minimal pair [ba]/[pa] (Eimas et al., 1971), regardless of the ambient language. Despite this ability, empirical data obtained from psycholinguistic experiments show the difference between phonetic discrimination and perceptual categorization (Mandler, 1999, p. 303) and the decay of the former during the first twelve months: Not only the ability to discriminate many language sound differences but also initial phonotactic preferences will be gradually lost in favor of the ones belonging to the language(s) which is/are being acquired. The child, innately guided, loses the sensitivity to some phonetic features, reorganizes categories, and narrows or enlarges their scope (Jusczyk, 1997, pp. 73-74): The cortex cells must become tuned to these categories (Aslin & Pisoni, 1980). This presentation will focus on the inability Spanish native speakers show to perceive the differences between the vowel pairs [-high, -low, -back] and [+low, -back] and between [-high, -low, +back] and [+low, +round, + back] in Brazilian Portuguese.
Program with abstracts - click here Oral presentations timetable - click here |