Synchronised movement and individual rhythmic skill influence the perception of temporal structure in spoken language

Tamara Rathcke, Eline Smit, Rachel Yue & Massimiliano Canzi (2024)
Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 1-17 | doi: 10.3758/s13414-024-02893-8

The subjective experience of time flow in speech deviates from the sound acoustics in substantial ways. The present study focuses on the perceptual tendency to regularize time intervals found in speech but not in other types of sounds with a similar temporal structure. We investigate to what extent individual beat perception ability is responsible for perceptual regularization and if the effect can be eliminated through the involvement of body movement during listening. Participants performed a musical beat perception task and compared spoken sentences to their drumbeat-based versions either after passive listening or after listening and moving along with the beat of the sentences. The results show that the interval regularization prevails in listeners with a low beat perception ability performing a passive listening task and is eliminated in an active listening task involving body movement. Body movement also helped to promote a veridical percept of temporal structure in speech at the group level. We suggest that body movement engages an internal timekeeping mechanism, promoting the fidelity of auditory encoding even in sounds of high temporal complexity and irregularity such as natural speech.

How bilingual experience shapes accents in German - Italian primary school children

Tanja Kupisch, Massimiliano Canzi, Maria Ferin, Miriam Geiss, Marie Reiber & Paulina Speck (2024)
Heritage Language Journal | …

This study investigates the accents of German-Italian school children (6–10 years old) in their two languages. We ask to what extent accents in the bilingual children’s two languages are related and how foreign accentedness relates to proficiency in other areas of language (speech rate, vocabulary size) and extralinguistic factors (formal and information exposure and AoO in the majority language). Data from 87 early bilingual German-Italian children is rated by adult raters in Italy and Germany. Bilinguals are perceived as being more accented than monolinguals, mostly in Italian, the HL of the bilingual children. Moreover, children with a more monolingual-like accent in Italian tend to sound foreign in German, and vice versa, but some children have no perceivable accent in any language. Accentedness is especially affected by amount of language use, which underlines the importance of exposure to the minority language at this age, regardless of the setting, formal or informal.

Understanding the role of broadcast media in sound change

Tamara Rathcke, Chiara Castellano & Massimiliano Canzi (2024)
In F. Kleber & T. Rathcke (eds.), Speech Dynamics: Synchronic Variation and Diachronic change. Mouton De Gruyter

The idea that broadcast media can be a factor in sound change has been widely and controversially debated. This chapter outlines the main posits, issues and evidence surrounding the ongoing debates and offers a new empirical perspective on the subject matter. It hypothesizes that mass media may be the primary factor initiating and promoting sound change if there are limited opportunities for face-to-face contact, with media being the only or main source of exposure to sound innovation and dialectal variability. Such situations occur frequently during second language acquisition, which is the focus of the study discussed in the chapter. Eighteen German teenage learners of English were divided into two groups and asked to watch either a British or an American television series daily for the duration of two consecutive weeks. Comparisons of sound productions recorded before and after the two-week exposure period revealed significant changes in the participants’ frequency of /t/-flapping and rhoticity, in the direction predicted by the media accommodation account. In line with previous discussions, the observed influence of the media was partly moderated by the participants’ emotional involvement with the series they watched. A change toward the televised variety was observed primarily in high-engagement (but not in low-engagement) speakers. The chapter concludes with a discussion that aims to inspire innovative directions in future research of this much-debated topic that currently lacks pertinent empirical study.

Unmasking the truth: Impact of community masks on the perception of voiceless fricatives in English

Massimiliano Canzi & Tamara Rathcke (2023)
Proc. ICPhS 2023 | Download PDF

Abstract The current study aims at quantifying the effects of wearing a face mask on speech perception, by investigating performance of native English listen- ers in a phoneme monitoring task with monosyl- labic words containing voiceless fricatives. Previ- ous experimental work on the topic has mainly fo- cussed on the effects of acoustic filtering caused by the use of face coverings with mixed results and weak effects of mask wearing on speech percep- tion. In this experiment, we explore the interplay of acoustic filtering with other potentially relevant factors such as the presence of visual cues, lexical frequency and listener-specific background. We pro- vide evidence that suggests the impact of face cover- ings (esp. FFP-2 face mask) on speech perception is not directly moderated by the acoustic properties of masked speech. Rather, it is inked to an interplay of audio-visual integration, the absence of visual cues for (some) target fricatives, and the listener-specific sociolinguistic background.

Related: (2023) A. Tsaroucha, T. Rathcke, & Canzi, M. Effects of a face mask on the perception of English fricatives by native speakers of Greek. Proc. ICGL15

Same or different? Subject realization in the majority and heritage language of Polish-German bilingual children

Bernhard Brehmer, Aldona Sapata & Massimiliano Canzi (2023)
Linguistics Vanguard | doi 10.1515/lingvan-2022-0061

Abstract: The paper examines the extent to which bilingual children select lexical noun phrases and null and overt pronouns as referring expressions in their majority language German and their heritage language Polish. Both languages are similar regarding the availability of lexical noun phrases but differ in terms of the distribution of null and overt pronominal forms. Our focus lies on discourse contexts with a subject antecedent in the preceding clause, which require only light processing for both speaker and hearer due to the high accessibility of the intended subject referent. Drawing on experimental data from a picture story retelling task (MAIN) to investigate the distribution of referring expressions in the two languages compared to age-matched monolingual control groups, our results reveal that bilingual children are sensitive to crosslinguistic differences in the syntactic and discourse-pragmatic constraints that regulate the distribution of null and overt subjects in Polish and German, depending on the mode of speech (narrative or dialogic). Furthermore, there are no significant differences between the bilingual and monolingual children, irrespective of language and age group. Thus, our study cannot confirm findings of previous studies concerning the tendency of bilingual children to be either overspecific or underspecific in subject reference production.

Intonational alignment in second language acquisition

Christiane Ulbrich & Massimiliano Canzi (2023)
Speech Communication, 146, 70-81 | doi: 10.1016/j.specom.2022.11.007

Abstract This study examines whether proficient second language speakers of Belfast English and Northern Standard German accommodate on cross-linguistically different intonational phonological categories and their gradient phonetic implementation in a collaborative map task. Belfast English and Northern Standard German select two different intonation patterns for nuclear pitch accents in declarative utterances. Northern Standard German features a falling pitch accent pattern. In Belfast English, a rising intonation contour is realised. The experiment investigates the production of phonologically different pitch accents in declarative utterances, gradient acoustic characteristics of pitch range in utterance-final position and peak alignment in nuclear pitch accents. Evidence was found for accommodation for all three prosodic phenomena. However, the accommodation patterns were asymmetric in the Belfast English and the Northern Standard German groups of speakers. Furthermore, both phonologically contrastive characteristics and gradient phonetic acoustic detail appeared to be influenced by factors of linguistic function, perceptual salience and familiarity.

Prosody of case markers in Urdu

Benazir Mumtaz, Massimiliano Canzi & Miriam Butt
Proceedings of Interspeech 2021 | doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2021-1776

This paper studies the prosody of case clitics in Urdu, for which various different claims exist in the literature. We conducted a production experiment and controlled for effects potentially arising from the phonetics of the case clitics, the syntactic function they express and clausal position. We find that case clitics are incorporated into the prosodic phrase of the noun and that they become part of the overall LH contour found on accentual phrases in Urdu/Hindi. We also find some differences across case type and position which we tie to information structural effects.