Paola Escudero

Western Sydney University · MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development

This study investigates the predictions of second language (L2) speech acquisition models — SLM(-r), PAM(-L2), and L2LP — on how native (L1) Japanese speakers implement the spectral and temporal aspects of L2 American English vowel categories. Data were obtained from 102 L1 Japanese speakers in the J-AESOP corpus, which also includes nativelikeness...

Research has shown that novel words can be learned through the mechanism of statistical or cross‐situational word learning (CSWL). So far, CSWL studies using adult populations have focused on the presentation of spoken words. However, words can also be learned through their written form. This study compared auditory and orthographic presentations o...

Australia lags behind other linguistic and culturally diverse countries in policy direction and approaches to early multilingual education, despite well-established research documenting the intellectual, linguistic, sociocultural, familial and economic benefits of multilingualism in the early years. This is evidenced by the absence of a national po...

Adults commonly struggle with perceiving and recognizing the sounds and words of a second language (L2), especially when the L2 sounds do not have a counterpart in the learner’s first language (L1). We examined how L1 Mandarin L2 English speakers learned pseudo English words within a cross-situational word learning (CSWL) task previously presented...

In many communities around the world, speech to infants (IDS) and small children (CDS) has increased mean pitch, increased pitch range, increased vowel duration, and vowel hyper-articulation when compared to speech directed to adults (ADS). Some of these IDS and CDS features are also attested in foreigner-directed speech (FDS), which has been studi...

Cross-situational statistical word learning (CSWL) refers to the process whereby participants learn new words by tracking ambiguous word-object co-occurrences across time. This study used event-related potentials to explore the acquisition of novel word meanings via CSWL in healthy adults. After learning to associate novel auditory words (e.g., ‘ke...

As many distributional learning (DL) studies have shown, adult listeners can achieve discrimination of a difficult non-native contrast after a short repetitive exposure to tokens falling at the extremes of that contrast. Such studies have shown using behavioural methods that a short distributional training can induce perceptual learning of vowel an...

Listeners are sensitive to speech sounds’ probability distributions. Distributional training (DT) studies with adults typically involve conscious activation of phoneme labels. We show that distributional exposure can shift existing phoneme boundaries (Spanish /e/–/i/) pre-attentively. Using a DT paradigm involving two bimodal distributions we asses...

Perception of music and speech is based on similar auditory skills, and it is often suggested that those with enhanced music perception skills may perceive and learn novel words more easily. The current study tested whether music perception abilities are associated with novel word learning in an ambiguous learning scenario. Using a cross-situationa...

Adapting laboratory psycholinguistic methods to fieldwork contexts can be fraught with difficulties. However, successful implementation of such methods in the field enhances our ability to learn the true extent and limitations of human behavior. This paper reports two attempts to run word learning experiments with the small community of Nungon spea...

In spite of the considerable body of pedagogical and experimental research providing clear insights into best practices for pronunciation instruction, there exists relatively little implementation of such practices in pedagogical materials including textbooks. This is particularly true for target languages other than English. With the goal of assis...

Developmental research typically relies on face-to-face testing at laboratories, childcare centers, museums or playgroups. Current social distancing measures have led to a halt in research. Although face-to-face interaction is considered essential for research involving young children, current technology provides viable alternatives. This paper int...

This study tests whether Australian English (AusE) and European Spanish (ES) listeners differ in their categorisation and discrimination of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) vowels. In particular, we investigate two theoretically relevant measures of vowel category overlap (acoustic vs. perceptual categorisation) as predictors of non-native discrimination...

In recent years, cross-situational word learning (CSWL) paradigms have shown that novel words can be learned through implicit statistical learning. So far, CSWL studies using adult populations have focused on the presentation of spoken words (auditory information), however, words can also be learned through their written form (orthographic informat...

Cross-situational word learning (CSWL) paradigms have gained traction in recent years as a way to examine word learning in ambiguous scenarios in infancy, childhood, and adulthood. However, no study thus far has examined how CSWL paradigms may provide viable learning pathways for second language (L2) word learning. Here, we used a CSWL paradigm to...

This study examines relative weighting of two acoustic cues, vowel duration and spectra, in the perception of high front vowels by Japanese learners of English. Studies found that Japanese speakers rely heavily on duration to distinguish /iː/ and /ɪ/ in American English (AmE) as influenced by phonemic length in Japanese /ii/ and /i/, while spectral...

Despite well-established research that documents the intellectual, linguistic, sociocultural and familiar benefits of early childhood bilingualism, Australia's provision of heritage language (HL) support in early childhood (EC) settings is fairly minimal, resulting in little to no access to the HL outside of the home. We report on language data fro...

In contrast to the anecdotal claim that “male infants like cars and female infants like dolls,” previous studies have reported mixed findings for gender‐related toy preferences in infancy. In Experiment 1, we explored the emergence of gender‐related preferences using face–car pairs (Experiment 1a, n = 51, 6–20 months) or face–stove pairs (Experimen...

This chapter investigates three important skills that facilitate L2 communication: (1) perception (listening), (2) spoken word recognition (understanding) and (3) production (speaking) and their interrelation. In Part One, we present a review of the literature pertaining to L2 acquisition in Portuguese, with a particular focus on phonological acqui...

This study is a comprehensive acoustic description and analysis of the six vowels /i e a u o ɔ/ in the Towet dialect of the Papuan language Nungon ⟨yuw⟩ of northeastern Papua New Guinea. Vowel tokens were extracted from a corpus of audio speech recordings created for general language documentation and grammatical description. To assess the phonetic...

Purpose: The aim of this study was to develop a checklist to assess vocabulary development in Indigenous Australian children, with a local focus on Indigenous Australian children growing up in the towns and communities of the Katherine Region in the Northern Territory of Australia. In this region, many families are multilingual and/or multidialecta...

Infants successfully discriminate speech sound contrasts that belong to their native language's phonemic inventory in auditory-only paradigms, but they encounter difficulties in distinguishing the same contrasts in the context of word learning. These difficulties are usually attributed to the fact that infants' attention to the phonetic detail in n...

Vowels in child-directed speech (CDS) can differ from those in adult-directed speech (ADS) in the same language. Some speech communities, including in Papua New Guinea (PNG), are said to lack special CDS styles. The present study compares vowel acoustics and duration in CDS and ADS for the Papuan language Nungon of PNG. Vowels in conversations betw...

First acoustic analysis of vowels in Nungon, a Papuan language of Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea

The effects of acoustic versus phonetic similarity in non-native vowel perception have been the focus of many second language (L2) speech perception models, examining how non-native sounds are perceived and assimilated by listeners. These models use perceptual discrimination tasks (e.g., AX, AXB) that may elicit different modes of perception depend...

This study presents an experiment that investigates the perception of Japanese vowel length by Australian English (AusE) listeners. Previous studies found that AusE listeners utilize duration, spectra, and vowel inherent spectral change (VISC) to categorize native vowels. However, while Japanese vowels have phonemic vowel length distinctions, they...

Cross-linguistic influence (CLI) is a commonly observed phenomenon that influences an individual’s ability to perceive, comprehend and speak in a second language (L2). As phonemic inventories differ across languages and dialects, cross-linguistic difficulty is not uniform. According to the Second Language Linguistic Perception model (L2LP), learner...

Cross‐situational word learning (XSWL) tasks present multiple words and candidate referents within a learning trial such that word–referent pairings can be inferred only across trials. Adults encode fine phonological detail when two words and candidate referents are presented in each learning trial (2 × 2 scenario; Escudero, Mulak, & Vlach, 2016a)....

Spoken word recognition is a hard task. As an aid, native listeners develop segmentation strategies efficiently attuned to phonological properties of their language, like the rhythmic unit (foot, syllable, or mora). If second-language (L2) learners persist in using their own unit, they may experience longer processing times and even miss word bound...

Learning to listen to and produce the sounds of a new language is a difficult task for many second-language learners. While there is a large corpus of literature that investigates Spanish and Portuguese learners’ perception and production of an L;2, particularly English, there is relatively little research available for the opposite scenario, namel...

Studies show that second language (L2) learners’ perceptual patterns differ depending on their native dialect (e.g., Chládková and Podlipský 2011; Escudero and Williams 2012). Likewise, speakers from the same native language background show different perceptual patterns depending on the dialect to which they are exposed (e.g., Escudero and Boersma...

Australian English /iː/, /ɪ/, and /ɪə/ exhibit almost identical average first (F1) and second (F2) formant frequencies and differ in duration and vowel inherent spectral change (VISC). The cues of duration, F1 × F2 trajectory direction (TD) and trajectory length (TL) were assessed in listeners' categorization of /iː/ and /ɪə/ compared to /ɪ/. Durat...

The mutual exclusivity (ME) assumption is proposed to facilitate early word learning by guiding infants to map novel words to novel referents. This study assessed the emergence and use of ME to both disambiguate and retain the meanings of novel words across development in 18‐month‐old monolingual and bilingual children (Experiment 1; N = 58), and i...

Research investigating listeners’ neural sensitivity to speech sounds has largely focused on segmental features. We examined Australian English listeners’ perception and learning of a supra-segmental feature, pitch direction in a non-native tonal contrast, using a passive oddball paradigm and electroencephalography. The stimuli were two contours ge...

The role of early bilingual experience in the development of skills in the general cognitive and linguistic domains remains poorly understood. This study investigated the link between these two domains by assessing inhibitory control processes in school-aged monolingual and bilingual children with similar English receptive vocabulary size. The part...

Speech perception proceeds by extracting acoustic cues and mapping them onto linguistic information. Early speech perception studies sought to determine which speech sound contrasts infants could detect. Over the past few decades, research has shown that young infants can discriminate a wide range of speech sounds, and by 12 months, infants categor...

Fifteen-month-olds have difficulty detecting differences between novel words differing in a single vowel. Previous work showed that Australian English (AusE) infants habituated to the word-object pair DEET detected an auditory switch to DIT and DOOT in Canadian English (CanE) but not in their native AusE (Escudero et al., 2014). The authors specula...

Purpose: Evidence suggests that extensive experience with lexical tones or musical training provides an advantage in perceiving nonnative lexical tones. This investigation concerns whether such an advantage is evident in learning nonnative lexical tones based on the distributional structure of the input. Method: Using an established protocol, di...

This study concerns Japanese speakers' perception of American English (AE) high front vowels: /iː/-/ɪ/. Although vowel spectra are the primary perceptual cue for this contrast for native speakers, Japanese learners of English perceive /iː/ as 'long' and /ɪ/ as 'short,' being influenced by contrastive vowel length in Japanese. However, little attent...

Infants preferentially discriminate between speech tokens that cross native category boundaries prior to acquiring a large receptive vocabulary, implying a major role for unsupervised distributional learning strategies in phoneme acquisition in the first year of life. Multiple sources of between-speaker variability contribute to children's language...

Purpose: This study tested an assumption of the Natural Referent Vowel (Polka & Bohn, 2011) framework, namely, that directional asymmetries in adult vowel perception can be influenced by language experience. Method: Data from participants reported in Escudero and Williams (2014) were analyzed. Spanish participants categorized the Dutch vowels /a...

Research suggests that the size of the second language (L2) vowel inventory relative to the native (L1) inventory may affect the discrimination and acquisition of L2 vowels. Models of non-native and L2 vowel perception stipulate that naïve listeners' non-native and L2 perceptual patterns may be predicted by the relationship in vowel inventory size...

This study investigates the relationship between non-native perception and production of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) vowels by eight European Spanish monolinguals. Participants’ accuracy on a non-native discrimination task was used to predict performance in non-native production. We also investigated the acoustic similarity between participants’ non-...

Inconsistent findings have been reported for distributional learning of vowels, possibly due to interference from learners' native phonological (L1) categories. Native Australian-English (AusE) listeners were exposed to unimodal and bimodal distributions of a continuum spanning Dutch /ɑ/-/aː/, which is perceived moderately well by AusE listeners. D...

Learning to associate words to their meaning is a difficult task. Early word learning may be aided by the way in which adults talk to infants. Infants prefer infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS) [1]–[3], and evidence suggests the positive affect inherent to IDS drives this preference [4]. Infants can form word-object associ...

This study assessed the influence of language background in speech normalization by examining non-native vowel categorization across speaker, sex and accent variation. Mandarin-English bilinguals, Australian English bilinguals and monolinguals categorized /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ produced by a female Dutch speaker, and were then tested with the same vowels prod...

http://researchdirect.uws.edu.au/islandora/object/uws%3A39898

In this talk, I will present five studies aimed at demonstrating that individual native production and perception abilities predict and explain success in L2 sound perception and word recognition. These studies tested and extended the theoretical and computational framework of the Second Language Linguistic Perception (L2LP) model was tested and ex...

Infants often hear new words in the context of more than one candidate referent. In cross-situational word learning (XSWL), word-object mappings are determined by tracking co-occurrences of words and candidate referents across multiple learning events. Research demonstrates that infants can learn words in XSWL paradigms, suggesting that it is a via...

To succeed at cross-situational word learning, learners must infer word-object mappings by attending to the statistical co-occurrences of novel objects and labels across multiple encounters. While past studies have investigated this as a learning mechanism for infants and monolingual adults, bilinguals’ cross-situational word learning abilities hav...

Experienced listeners of a particular acoustic cue in either speech or music appear to have an advantage when perceiving a similar cue in the other domain (i.e., they exhibit cross-domain transfer). One explanation for cross-domain transfer relates to the acquisition of the foundations of speech and music: if acquiring pitch-based elements in speec...

This study provides a thorough acoustic analysis of the 18 Australian English monophthongs and diphthongs produced in a variety of phonetic contexts by young adult speakers from Western Sydney. The 18 vowels are well separated by duration and dynamic formant trajectory information. Vowel durations and formant trajectories were affected by the conso...

Listeners are able to cope with between-speaker variability in speech that stems from anatomical sources (i.e. individual and sex differences in vocal tract size) and sociolinguistic sources (i.e. accents). We hypothesized that listeners adapt to these two types of variation differently because prior work indicates that adapting to speaker/sex vari...

Table of formant frequencies of vowel stimuli used in Experiments 1 and 2. (DOCX)

Listener behavior to NEW and FAM tokens of Experiment 1 and 2 (separated in different sheets). Each listener is uniquely coded in the “Participant ID” column. Numbers in columns labeled FAM Go, FAM No-go, NEW Go, and NEW No-go indicate the number of Go responses listeners made (i.e. how many times they pressed “p”). In total, listeners could have m...

This study presents the first acoustic description of the vowel space of a Papuan language—Nambo, spoken in southern Papua New Guinea—based on duration and first and second formant measurements from 19 adult male and female speakers across three age groups (young, middle-aged, senior). Phonemically, Nambo has six full vowels /i, e, æ, ɑ, o, u/ and...

Ebook: https://books.google.com.au/books?id=7hB4CgAAQBAJ&dq=info:wE9-bIVAKcwJ:scholar.google.com&lr= Second language acquisition has rapidly grown as a field over the past decade, as our knowledge of the ways in which children and adults learn and use a second language has become crucial for effective language teaching. In addition to this importa...

Different speakers produce the same speech sound differently, yet listeners are still able to reliably identify the speech sound. How listeners can adjust their perception to compensate for speaker differences in speech, and whether these compensatory processes are unique only to humans, is still not fully understood. In this study we compare the a...

The human ability to comprehend speech regardless of variation across speakers and accents has long puzzled researchers. Human listeners appear to employ separate mechanisms to cope with speaker versus accent variation. The present study uses event-related potentials (ERP) to test whether such different mechanisms exist at a pre-attentive level of...

Infants preferentially discriminate native speech-sound categories prior to acquiring a large receptive vocabulary, implying a major role for distributional learning strategies in phoneme learning. However, it is unknown how infants extract the vowel phonemes of their language from distributional information in the presence of between-speaker varia...