Laura Spinu

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Kingsborough Community College

Individuals can make judgments on a person’s personality and socioeconomic status in as little as 30 s after hearing their voice. This study investigates the perceptions of Cuban and Peninsular Spanish varieties by native Cuban and Peninsular Spanish speakers, second language (L2) Spanish learners, and monolingual English speakers. Specifically, it...

This paper considers the differences between the acoustic correlates of the phonemic alveolar tap /ɾ/, phonemic canonical trill /r/, and alveolar approximant /ɹ/ in two groups of Spanish-English bilinguals: early (heritage Spanish) and late (native Spanish) bilingual speakers. In particular, the study explores cross-linguistic influence (CLI) and t...

The production of fricatives involves the complex interaction of articulatory constraints resulting from the formation of the appropriate oral constriction, the control of airflow through the constriction so as to achieve frication and, in the case of voiced fricatives, the maintenance of glottal oscillation by attending to transglottal pressure. T...

Early language exposure is crucial for acquiring native mastery of phonology, and multilingual exposure results in enhanced phonetic/phonological learning ability in adulthood. It remains unclear, however, whether early language exposure has lasting benefits when the quantity and quality of speaking drop dramatically after childhood. We investigate...

This study explores the third language imitation of the Spanish rhotic-lateral contrast by Akan-English bilingual children and adults. Specifically, it examines this phenomenon, with respect to (i) first language transfer in the imitation of the Spanish rhotic-lateral contrast, (ii) the effect of orthographic input on the imitation of the rhotic-la...

Bilingualism has been linked with improved function regarding certain aspects of linguistic processing, e.g., novel word acquisition and learning unfamiliar sound patterns. Two non mutually-exclusive approaches might explain these results. One is related to executive function, speculating that more effective learning is achieved through actively ch...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Recent work has shown that exposure to orthographic effects can promote first-language (L1) phonological transfer. However, it is relatively unknown whether orthographic effects persist in highly proficient bilinguals. Here, we examined how L1 orthographic depth (regularity in grapheme-phoneme correspondences) modulated Ko...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Phonetic and phonological learning was reported to be enhanced in bilinguals; however, the underlying mechanisms remain understudied. Prior work suggests a bilingual advantage in articulatory skill and auditory sensory memory, raising the question of the involvement of sensorimotor functions in phonetic and phonological le...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Research has revealed positive consequences of bilingualism on cognition, some of which have been collectively referred to as the ‘bilingual advantage’, although the term remains controversial. The lack of replicability of such studies is often ascribed to methodological issues, such as the difficulty of quantifying the bi...

Aims and objectives Recent findings suggest enhanced phonetic and phonological learning ability in bilinguals compared with monolinguals. While other cognitive differences between these two groups have been identified in the past, the most frequently investigated mechanism potentially underlying them has been executive function. When considering ph...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Despite considerable controversy surrounding the “bilingual advantage” phenomenon, recent meta-analyses reveal a majority of studies on the topic have reported that bilinguals outperform monolinguals on tasks related to executive functioning, such as mental flexibility and inhibitory mechanisms. A more recent line of inves...

No PDF available ABSTRACT We compared monolinguals' and bilinguals' ability to learn an artificial accent of English upon brief initial exposure in an online experiment (n = 40) using the pavlovia.org platform. Our findings replicated those of an earlier experiment conducted in the lab (n = 60), leading us to conclude that remote testing can offer...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Findings in bilingual cognition have long been undermined by conflicting results attributed, among others, to our inability to adequately describe and quantify bilingual knowledge in the context of experimental work. In this presentation, I will discuss the necessity of standardizing experimental paradigms involving biling...

No PDF available ABSTRACT A major issue in bilingualism research is how the bilingual mind processes and reconciles two languages without apparent difficulty when trying to use only one. Research has revealed that when bilinguals produce speech, cross-linguistic competition induced by simultaneous activation of both languages is circumvented by inh...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Recent work shows bilingual speakers exhibit an advantage in phonetic and phonological learning (PPL) compared to monolinguals. Specifically, bilinguals displayed stronger subcortical encoding of sound when processing speech stimuli (Krizman et al., 2012), and outperformed monolinguals in speech perception tasks (Tremblay...

No PDF available ABSTRACT The main goal of this study is to determine whether articulatory differences exist between monolinguals (n = 19) and bilinguals (n = 21) through the analysis of tongue-twister production, following Goldrick & Blumstein (2006). The latter were divided into early bilinguals (consistent exposure to both of their languages bef...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Bilinguals outperformed monolinguals in phonetic and phonological learning tasks (Tremblay and Sabourin, 2012; Antoniou et al., 2015; Spinu et al., 2018). Spinu et al. (2020) presented monolingual and bilingual participants (n = 36) with an artificial accent of English differing in four distinct ways from Standard American...

In the current study, we explore the factors underlying the well-known difficulty in acoustic classification of front nonsibilant fricatives (Maniwa, Jongman & Wade 2009, McMurray & Jongman 2011) by applying a novel classification method to the production of Greek speakers. The Greek fricative inventory [f v θ ð s z ç ʝ x ɣ] includes voiced and voi...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Bilingualism has been linked with improved function regarding certain aspects of linguistic processing, e.g., manipulating language in terms of discrete units, novel word acquisition, and learning unfamiliar sound patterns in novel accents. Recent experimental work with non-native contrasts suggests that bilinguals have en...

No PDF available ABSTRACT While not uncontroversial, the claim that bilingual experience underlies certain cognitive advantages has been at the forefront of recent work. Thus, enhanced skills were associated with bilingualism in terms of multitasking, auditory encoding of sound, and resistance to dementia. Among the mechanisms potentially supportin...

This study explores the phenomenon of language attrition. Specifically, we investigate the phonetic properties of consonant gemination across three groups of speakers of Palestinian Arabic: monolinguals (i.e., native speakers born in Palestine who have lived there their entire life, n = 5), late bilinguals (i.e., speakers born in Palestine who emig...

Research shows that bilinguals tend to outperform monolinguals on certain cognitive and linguistic tasks. While the mechanism underlying these advantages remains unclear, it has been suggested that bilinguals have enhanced working memory, which may be responsible for some of the cognitive advantages observed in these populations. To examine the mec...

We collected production data from monolingual English speakers who were trained to produce a foreign accent of English, specifically Russian English (RE). First, the subjects read a paragraph in their own accent (baseline). Second, they listened to recordings of English sentences produced by a native speaker of Russian; next, the sentences were rep...

In the current study, we explore the factors underlying the well-known difficulty in acoustic classification of front fricatives (McMurray & Jongman, 2011; Maniwa et al., 2009) by taking a closer look at the production of 29 native Greek speakers. Our corpus consists of Greek fricatives from five places of articulation and two voicing values [f, v,...

This study compares two methods for classifying voiceless sibilant fricatives forming a 4-way phonemic contrast found in Russian, but otherwise cross-linguistically rare. One method uses spectral measures, i.e. vowel formants, COG, duration and intensity of frication. The second method uses cepstral coefficients extracted from different regions ins...

This study examines a rare cross-linguistic contrast, that between plain and secondarily palatalized postalveolar fricatives, through (i) an acoustic analysis of the production of 31 Romanian speakers, and (ii) a perception experiment with a different group of 31 native speakers. Evidence of acoustic separation between plain and palatalized forms w...

Research shows that bilinguals tend to outperform monolinguals on certain cognitive tasks. While these advantages are typically attributed to differences in executive function, serial memory and syntactic processing may also help account for the differences observed between these populations. Bilinguals have been shown to outperform monolinguals on...

Research question We address the question of whether the cognitive advantage of the bilingual mind, already demonstrated in the case of auditory processing or novel word acquisition, also applies to other linguistic domains, specifically to phonetic and phonological learning. Design We compare the performance of 17 monolinguals and 25 bilinguals f...

In this paper we explore two methods for the classification of fricatives. First, for the coding of the speech, we compared two sets of acoustic measures obtained from a corpus of Romanian fricatives: (a) spectral moments and (b) cepstral coefficients. Second, we compared two methods of determining the regions of the segments from which the measure...

We use a classification tool previously tested on Romanian fricatives to categorize the front (non-sibilant) fricatives of English by place of articulation. Labiodental and interdental fricatives are difficult to distinguish acoustically, posing problems even for human perception. Prior classification work with English front fricatives has not been...

As part of a larger study investigating the acoustic correlates of accentedness in the reproduction of various accents of English by English monolinguals and French-English bilinguals, we explored speakers' ability to imitate and spontaneously reproduce patterns of realization of word-final coronal stops in three different accents: SE England...

This paper presents the results of an acoustic study of fricatives from four places of articulation produced by 31 native speakers of Romanian, as well as those of a perceptual study using the stimuli from the acoustic experiment, allowing for a direct comparison between acoustic properties and perception. It was found that there are greater acoust...

A recent gender identification study using Cepstral coefficients extracted from voiced and voiceless fricatives from four different places of articulation yielded 78% correct classification in a linear discriminant analysis (LDA) [Spinu and Lilley (2010)]. This high accuracy was somewhat unexpected, as previous cross‐linguistic studies of fricative...

The relationship between vowel length and a following NC cluster in Luganda and other Bantu languages has received attention from both phonetic and phonological perspectives, however, the data are typically drawn from relatively small corpora. This study provides the results of the first relatively large-scale acoustic investigation of Luganda, usi...

Several gender classification methods based on acoustic information were compared. The data came from 31 native speakers of Romanian (10 males, 21 females). A subset of fricatives and vowels (7348 tokens) was divided by hidden Markov model training into three acoustically uniform regions. For each region, (a) a set of cepstral coefficients, specifi...

Within the larger context of the Romance languages, Romanian stands alone in exhibiting a surface contrast between plain and palatalized consonants (that is, consonants with a secondary palatal articulation). While the properties of secondary palatalization are well known for language families in which the set of palatalized consonants is considere...

Hidden Markovmodels (HMMs) with two types of acoustic features were used to classify fricatives by place of articulation and palatalization status. The data were recordings of 31 native speakers of Romanian who produced a total of 3674 fricatives. Segments from four places (labial, alveolar, postalveolar, and dorsal) were examined, each of which ap...

The ability of listeners to distinguish between compound and phrasal stress in English was examined on the basis of a picture selection task. The responses to naturally and synthetically produced stimuli were compared. While greater overall accuracy was observed with the natural stimuli, the same pattern of greater accuracy with compound stress tha...

The present volume includes a selection of twenty-one peer-reviewed and revised papers from the 37th annual Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL) held at the University of Pittsburgh in 2007. The papers cover a range of topics in morphology, syntax, phonology and language acquisition. A number of languages and varieties are also analyzed...

The present volume includes a selection of twenty-one peer-reviewed and revised papers from the 37th annual Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL) held at the University of Pittsburgh in 2007. The papers cover a range of topics in morphology, syntax, phonology and language acquisition. A number of languages and varieties are also analyzed...

Investigation of the acoustic properties of secondary palatalization in Romanian.

Departing from the crosslinguistic generalization whereby the contrast between the plain and palatalized consonants is favored at the coronal, as compared to the labial, place of articulation, recent perceptual studies show native speakers of Romanian displaying higher sensitivity to this contrast in labials. To investigate this unexpected behavior...

This volume presents selected papers from the 36th LSRL conference held at Rutgers University in 2006. It contains twenty-two articles of current approaches to the study of Romance linguistics. Well-known researchers present their findings in areas such as of syntax and semantics, phonology, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics. The volume contains...