Session 2F

The acquisition of nonnative phoneme contrasts has been considered as one of the pronunciation difficulties by L2 adult learners. Previous studies have demonstrated positive effect of hand gestures mimicking phonological features on L2 pronunciation learning at suprasegmental level (e.g., Baills, Suárez-González, González-Fuente & Prieto, 2019), but the role of gestures mimicking articulatory feature at segmental level remains unclear (e.g., van Maastricht, Hoetjes, & van der Heijden, 2019). This study examined whether hand gesture mimicking articulatory features of nonnative segments can boost the learning by naïve learners and whether a mismatch between the hand gesture form and the target articulatory features influenced the learning effect. Specifically, we assessed the role of a hand gesture mimicking the burst of air on the perception and production of Mandarin Chinese aspirated and unaspirated consonants (i.e., plosives and affricates) by Catalan speakers. Crucially, while the hand burst gesture mimicking the aspiration feature is adequate to represent the phonetic distinction between aspirated and unaspirated plosives, this is not the case for the affricates. In a mixed-subject experiment with a pre- and posttest design, 50 Catalan native speakers undertook a short perceptual training session on two types of Mandarin consonants in one of the two training conditions: a) in the Gesture (G) condition, participants watched two instructors performed hand gestures when uttering the aspirated consonants embedded in disyllabic words; or b) in the No Gesture (NG) condition, they watched the instructors utter the same stimuli without any given gestures. Before and after the training, participants’ perception and production performance were tested through an identification task and an imitation task. Five Mandarin native speakers rated participants’ speech production on the consonantal features (aspiration for plosives and frication for affricates) and general pronunciation accuracy. The accuracy score from identification task and rating results from the imitation task were uploaded to three Generalized Linear Mixed Model (GLMM). For the identification task, the results revealed that training with hand gesture was not significantly better than without it. Moreover, whether gestures matched or mismatched the articulatory features of the target phonemes, they did not influence the training effect. For the imitation task, results showed that hand gestures improved learners’ production performance only when they adequately matched the articulatory features. To sum up, these results revealed that the efficiency of observing hand gestures on nonnative segment learning depends on the adequacy of those gestures. That is, the hand gesture was efficient only when its form adequately matched the articulatory properties of the novel segments. Baills, F., Suárez-González, N., González-Fuente, S., & Prieto, P. (2019). Observing and producing pitch gestures facilitates the learning of Mandarin Chinese tones and words. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 41(1), 33-58. Duanmu, S. (2007). The phonology of standard Chinese. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Li, S., & Gu, W. (2015). Acoustic Analysis of Mandarin Affricates. Paper presented in the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Dresden, Germany. Retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/934b/c1b1be7db63d97cac655ed2b2174f9c3bee1.pdf Van Maastricht, L., Hoetjes, M., & van der Heijen, L. (2019, accepted). Multimodal training facilitates l2 phoneme acquisition: an acoustic analysis of Dutch learners’ segment production in Spanish. Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences., Melbourne, Australia. Retrieved from https://icphs2019.org/icphs2019-fullpapers/pdf/full-paper_617.pdf

For some time now, the importance of suprasegmental instruction has been stressed for improving L2 learners’ fluency (e.g. Derwin et al., 1998), and comprehensibility (e.g. Gordon & Darcy, 2016). Moreover, the contribution of prosody to the perception of foreign accent is considerable (e.g. Anderson-Hsieh et al., 1992). Therefore, effective methods to teach L2 suprasegmental features need assessment. There is evidence that highlighting a target language’s speech rhythm improves L2 processing (e.g. Cason et al., 2015) and pronunciation (see Gluhareva & Prieto 2017, for beat gestures; Baills et al., 2018, for hand-clapping) and that highlighting intonation also improves pronunciation (see Yuan et al., 2018 for pitch gestures). To focus on suprasegmental features, segmental information can be controlled for by replacing words with logatomes, i.e. pseudo-words composed of a single simple syllable, such as /dadada/ (e.g. Billières, 2002). In this study, we assess the effect of training only prosodic features on the pronunciation of L2 French by Catalan learners. Moreover, we explore whether the embodiment of prosodic features further boosts the learning effect. In this between-subject training study with pre- and posttest, 80 Catalan learners of French with intermediate proficiency took part in three 30-minutes audiovisual sessions where they practiced individually reading aloud short dialogues in one of the 3 following conditions: a) Sentence Imitation, where participants repeated the sentence stimuli after the instructor; b) Logatomes Imitation, where participants listened to and repeated a logatome sequence followed by the corresponding sentence stimuli; c) Logatome and Gesture Imitation, where participants additionally mimicked the gesture produced by the instructor. Before and after training, participants recorded themselves reading 3 trained and 1 untrained dialogues aloud, answering a semi-spontaneous speech task, and doing a French-sentence imitation task. These recordings were rated on a scale from 1 to 9 in terms of fluency, comprehensibility, and accentedness, as well as accuracy in suprasegmental and segmental features by 5 French native speakers. Preliminary results indicate that Logatome Imitation and Logatome and Gesture Imitation help improve the pronunciation of the reading aloud task in terms of fluency and suprasegmental accuracy more than Sentence Imitation. The results are currently being analyzed and will be available for presentation at the Eurosla conference in July 2020. Anderson-Hsieh, J., Johnson, R., & Koehler, K. (1992). The relationship between native speaker judgments of nonnative pronunciation and deviance in segmentals, prosody, and syllable structure. Language Learning, 42, 529–555. Baills, F., Zhang, Y., & Prieto, P. (2018). Hand-clapping to the rhythm of newly learned words improves L2 pronunciation: Evidence from Catalan and Chinese learners of French. In 9th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2018 (Vol. 2018-June, pp. 853–857). Billières, M. (2002). Le corps en phonétique corrective. In R. Renard (Ed.), Apprentissage d'une langue étrangère/seconde 2. La phonétique verbo- tonale. Bruxelles : De Boeck Université. Cason, N., Astésano, C., & Schön, D. (2015). Bridging music and speech rhythm: Rhythmic priming and audio-motor training affect speech perception. Acta Psychologica, 155, 43–50. Derwing, T. M., Munro, M. J., & Wiebe, G. (1998). Evidence in favor of a broad framework for pronunciation instruction. Language Learning, 48(3), 393–410. Gluhareva, D., & Prieto, P. (2017). Training with rhythmic beat gestures benefits L2 pronunciation in discourse-demanding situations. Language Teaching Research, 21(5), 609–631. Gordon, J., & Darcy, I. (2016). The development of comprehensible speech in L2 learners. Journal of Second Language Pronunciation, 1, 56–92. Yuan, C., González-Fuente, S., Baills, F., & Prieto, P. (2019). Observing pitch gestures favors the learning of Spanish intonation by Mandarin speakers. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 41(1), 5–32.

Adults living in a country where their second language (L2) is spoken are surrounded by L2 input both in the spoken and written modalities. Interactions between the phonetic systems of a bilingual´s first language (L1) and L2 are well researched [1], but the influence of grapheme-phoneme mappings on bilinguals’ speech production across languages is not well studied, especially in the L2-to-L1 direction. Graphemes corresponding to different sounds in L2 and L1 may contribute to bidirectional cross-linguistic influence. L2 production can be affected by L1 orthography in late bilinguals, even in naturalistic learners [2]. Given that the phonetic system of the L2 can have an impact on L1 production in immersed bilinguals [3], L2 orthography could likewise modulate speech production in L1. In the current study L2-immersed bilinguals are tested on their production of words containing graphemes that correspond to different sounds in their two languages. In an ongoing study, 18 L1-French-L2-Spanish bilinguals (final N=24) living in Spain for several years were asked to produce French words and pseudowords written either with the grapheme , or with the grapheme corresponding to the sound /s/ in French, but to the sound /?/ in Spanish. The phonetic environment of stimuli written or was matched. Participants had to produce the /s/ sound in three conditions: picture-naming, word-reading and pseudoword-reading, in order to disentangle two effects: (a) the immediate online influence of orthography and (b) its impact on long-term representations through co-activation of orthographic representations during production. We expected participants to produce /s/ with a lower spectral center of gravity (CoG) when written than when written , indicating fronting toward the Spanish dental fricative /?/. Preliminary data analysis indicates that when reading pseudowords, participants produced French [s] with a lower CoG when it occurred in words spelled as opposed to words spelled (M=7502 Hz; M=7651 Hz, p=0.034). No significant differences in CoG between [s]- and [s]- were observed either in picture naming (M=7479 Hz; M=7483 Hz, p=0.714) or in word reading (M=7377 Hz; M=7428 Hz, p=0.387). Control data on the production of the /s/ and /?/ sounds in Spanish by the bilinguals is currently being analyzed to determine how Spanish performance can help explain variation in French production. To our knowledge, these results are the first to suggest that L2 orthography may contribute to L1 phonetic attrition in immersed bilinguals. We will discuss how these results can be used to extend current models of cross-language phonetic interactions that do not take orthographic effects into account. The long-term representation of words in the mental lexicon does not seem to be affected by L2 orthography, as the orthographic effect is only significant for pseudowords. Nevertheless, these results are important to understand the representation of grapheme-to-phoneme mappings across languages, as well as the role orthography can play during speech-elicitation tasks. References [1] Flege, J. E. (1995). Second language speech learning: Theory, findings, and problems. Speech perception and linguistic experience: Issues in cross-language research, 92, 233-277. [2] Young-Scholten, M., & Langer, M. (2015). The role of orthographic input in second language German: Evidence from naturalistic adult learners’ production. Applied Psycholinguistics, 36, 93-114. [3] Kartushina, N., & Martin, C. D. (2019). Third-language learning affects bilinguals’ production in both their native languages: A longitudinal study of dynamic changes in L1, L2 and L3 vowel production. Journal of Phonetics, 77, 100920.

Do orthographic forms ('spellings') lead L2 listeners to perceive contrasts that are unattested in the target language? Consonant spelling affects L2 speech production in ItalianL1 speakers of EnglishL2, who produce the same English consonant as longer if spelled with double letters than if spelled with a single letter, following Italian grapheme-phoneme conversion rules (Bassetti, 2017; Bassetti, Mairano, Masterson, & Cerni, under review). This is because ItalianL1-EnglishL2 speakers make a phonological contrast between singleton and geminate consonants in English, as shown by the production of homophones such as finish-Finnish as minimal pairs (Bassetti, Sokolovi?-Perovi?, Mairano, & Cerni, 2018) and by performance on metalinguistic awareness tasks (Bassetti et al., under review; Cerni, Bassetti, & Masterson, 2019). We then tested whether ItalianL1 listeners perceive short and long consonants in English homophonic word pairs that are spelled with a single letter or double letters. In Experiment 1, 50 ItalianL1-EnglishL2 bilinguals and 50 English controls performed a Consonant Perception Task. They heard 18 English homophonic word pairs containing a target consonant spelled with single or double letters, 18 control pairs (homonyms) and 15 fillers, and reported whether the two audio recordings contained the same or different sounds. There were two groups: The Acoustic Input group listened to recordings of the word pairs (e.g. [?f?n?? - ?f?n??]); for the Acoustic and Visual Input group, pictures appeared simultaneously with the audio recordings in order to activate the two target words (e.g., a finish line flag and a Finnish flag). The ItalianL1-EnglishL2 listeners in the Visual Input group reported perceiving different sounds in homophonic pairs. There were no orthographic effects in either L2 listeners in the Audio Input group or English native speakers in either group. Experiment 2 then tested whether naturalistic exposure reduces orthographic effects on speech perception by comparing instructed learners (high-school students), sequential bilinguals with lengthy residence in the UK, and EnglishL1 controls (all n = 30). Task and materials were the same as in Experiment 1, but all participants received both acoustic and visual Input. Orthographic form affected consonant perception in both learners and sequential bilinguals, but contrary to predictions the latter were more affected. Our results indicate that Italian speakers of English make a long-short contrast for consonants – which is unattested in English – and illusorily perceive it in spoken English homophonous words. The effect may be stronger in those who learned English mostly from written input, and it does not seem to be reduced by lengthy naturalistic exposure. References Bassetti, B. (2017). Orthography affects second language speech: Double letters and geminate production in English. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 43(11), 1835-1842. doi:10.1037/xlm0000417 Bassetti, B., Mairano, P., Masterson, J., & Cerni, T. (under review). Orthographic forms affect both speech production and phonological awareness in a second language. Bassetti, B., Sokolovi?-Perovi?, M., Mairano, P., & Cerni, T. (2018). Orthography-induced length contrasts in the second language phonological systems of L2 speakers of English: Evidence from minimal pairs. Language and Speech, 61, 577-597. doi:10.1177/0023830918780141 Cerni, T., Bassetti, B., & Masterson, J. (2019). Effects of orthographic forms on the acquisition of novel spoken words in a second language. Frontiers in Communication, 4(31). doi:10.3389/fcomm.2019.00031