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Introduction
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February 2017 - February 2017
Publications
Publications (34)
This study investigates the role of the listener in the perception of non-native speakers and their speech. Our goal is to examine the impact of listener characteristics on their attitudes towards non-native speakers and their speech. In addition, we aim to explore the relationship between listeners’ attitudes and the intelligibility, comprehensibi...
This study examines the Dutch intelligibility of a group of monolingual Dutch and bilingual Turkish-Dutch preschool children in Flanders, as rated by native Dutch listeners and measured by a Dutch intelligibility test. The intelligibility of the bilingual children is compared to that of the monolingual Dutch children, in order to examine whether ag...
Aims and objectives
The study investigates the effects of family background and language exposure on the language abilities of Turkish-Dutch bilingual children in their heritage language, Turkish, as well as in the majority language, Dutch.
Methodology
Thirty-five children (3;01-6;11) participated in the study. All children took two standardized p...
In this paper we review the phonological component of Dutch in Taalportaal, a website discussing the language systems of Dutch, Frisian and Afrikaans (www.taalportaal.org). We examine the website from the perspective of language variation, with special attention to (varieties of) Belgian Dutch. The discussion on Dutch phonology is comprehensive, in...
The current study explores the feasibility of an extensive reading programme in the context of a low-income country (Mozambique), as well as the influence of extensive reading on academic reading. The programme took over 4 months and was conducted among 30 students majoring in Journalism at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique in 2013. The...
This study aims to map native Dutch and non-native English vowels of Belgian children who have not been immersed and have not received instruction in English, but who are exposed to it through the media. It investigates to what extent this type of exposure is sufficient to develop new phonetic vowel categories. Twenty-four children aged 9–12 years...
• Aims and Objectives: The aim was to identify which criteria children used to decide on the category membership of native and non-native vowels, and to get insight into the organization of phonological representations in the bilingual mind.
• Methodology: The study consisted of two cross-language mispronunciation detection tasks, in which L2 vowe...
This study reports on the perception and production of Standard Dutch and Standard British English vowels by speakers of two regional varieties of Belgian Dutch (East Flemish and Brabantine) which differ in their vowel realizations. Twenty-four native speakers of Dutch performed two picture-naming tasks and two vowel categorization tasks, in which...
![Figure 1. Example stimulus: line drawing of the pseudoword [pyx].](profile/Karen-Mulak/publication/264777685/figure/fig1/AS:403510186266624@1473215733299/Example-stimulus-line-drawing-of-the-pseudoword-pyx_Q320.jpg)
Previous studies have shown that orthography is activated during speech processing and that it may have positive and negative effects for non-native listeners. The present study examines whether the effect of orthography on non-native word learning depends on the relationship between the grapheme–phoneme correspondences across the native and non-na...
This study investigated the phonological representations of vowels in children's native and non-native lexicons. Two experiments were mispronunciation tasks (i.e., a vowel in words was substituted by another vowel from the same language). These were carried out by Dutch-speaking 9–12-year-old children and Dutch-speaking adults, in their native (Exp...
This study examines to what extent native speakers of Dutch, who are beginning learners of Italian, have acquired the perception and production of the Italian contrast between singleton and geminate consonants. In Italian, but not in Dutch, consonants can be phonemically long and minimal pairs like dita ('fingers') – ditta ('company') differ only i...
This article reports on an acoustic study of voicing in obstruents followed by a sonorant across a word boundary in two dialects of Dutch: East- and West-Flemish. In both varieties only gradient phonetic voicing was typically found in word-final stops when a sonorant followed in the next word. In addition, West-Flemish showed optional categorical v...
This study examines the effect of second language experience on the acquisition of the English vowel contrast /ε/–/æ/ by native speakers of Dutch. It reports on the results of production and perception tasks performed by three groups of native Dutch learners of English in Belgium, differing in experience with English, as measured through study choi...
a b s t r a c t We investigated whether regional differences in the native language (L1) influence the perception of second language (L2) sounds. Many cross-language and L2 perception studies have assumed that the degree of acoustic similarity between L1 and L2 sounds predicts cross-linguistic and L2 performance. The present study tests this assump...
This study examines the effect of L2 and L3 proficiency on L3 word learning. Native speakers of Spanish with different proficiencies in L2 English and L3 Dutch and a control group of Dutch native speakers participated in a Dutch word-learning task involving minimal and nonminimal word pairs. The minimal word pairs were divided into “minimal-easy” a...
This paper reports on the results of a study exploring learners' beliefs on the learning and teaching of English grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary at tertiary level. While the importance of learners' beliefs on the acquisition process is generally recognized, few studies have focused on and compared learners' views on different components of t...
This article examines the linguistic forces at work in present-day second language and bilingual acquisition of laryngeal contrasts, and to what extent these can give us insight into the origin of laryngeal systems of Germanic voicing languages like Dutch, with its contrast between prevoiced and unaspirated stops. The results of present-day child a...
Although Dutch, English, and German all have a phonological contrast between voiced and voiceless plosives, they differ in the way these stops are realized. While English and German contrast voiceless aspirated with phonetically voiceless stops, Dutch has a contrast between voiceless unaspirated and prevoiced stops. This study compares these three...
PhilpJenefer, OliverRhonda & MackeyAlison (eds), Second language acquisition and the younger learner. Child's play?Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins, 2008, Pp. 334. ISBN 978 90 272 1984 8 (Hb), 978 90 272 1985 5 (Pb). - Volume 37 Issue 4 - Ellen Simon
Between phonological forms and their orthographic representations a close connection can be established. Previous psycholinguistic research has amply illustrated that word recognition can be influenced by orthography (Perre & Ziegler, 2008; Taft, 2001) and that orthography plays a role in phonemic awareness (Cheung, Chen, Lai, Wong, & Hills, 2001;...
This paper examines the role of orthographic information used during training on the ability to learn a non-native vowel contrast. We investigate whether exposure to novel grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences can help learners in the acquisition of a new phonological contrast. Three related experiments were carried out on the acquisition of the Fren...
This paper examines the productivity of voicing and devoicing rules in Dutch–English interlanguage. In Dutch, but not in English, coda obstruents can be subject to final devoicing and various voice assimilation processes, depending on the context. The analysis of a corpus of casual Dutch and English conversational speech of native Dutch speakers re...
![Figure 4. [spread glottis] in a consonant cluster (Iverson & Salmons,...](publication/311581614/figure/fig4/AS:11431281119436318@1676084495368/spread-glottis-in-a-consonant-cluster-Iverson-Salmons-1995-372_Q320.jpg)
This study examines the effect of proficiency in the L2 (English) and L3 (Dutch) on word learning in the L3. Learners were 92 L1 Spanish speakers with differing proficiencies in L2 and L3, and 20 native speakers of Dutch. The learners were divided into basic and advanced English and Dutch proficiency groups according to their scores on general list...
This study examines the acquisition of the English laryngeal system by native speakers of (Belgian) Dutch. Both languages have a two-way laryngeal system, but while Dutch contrasts prevoiced with short-lag stops, English has a contrast between short-lag and long-lag stops. The primary aim of the article is to test two hypotheses on the acquisition...
This paper reports the results of a longitudinal case study examining the acquisition of the English voice system by a three-year-old native speaker of Dutch. The study aims to examine whether the child develops two different phonetic systems or uses just one system for both languages, and compares the early L2 acquisition process with L1, simultan...
This paper reports the results of a categorization task of the English vowels "epsilon" and "ash" by native speakers of Dutch. Dutch has only one member of the contrast ("epsilon"), the acoustic realization of which is subject to considerable regional variation (Adank et al., 2007). Previous research has shown that that there is asymmetrical lexica...
This paper presents a cross‐sectional and longitudinal investigation into the development of a contrast in voicing production in simple and complex consonant clusters for 21 children. The results showed that, although the group results indicated a progression that may have been caused either by development in articulatory proficiency or by an growi...
This paper presents a cross‐sectional and longitudinal investigation into the development of a contrast in voicing production in simple and complex consonant clusters for 21 children. The results showed that, although the group results indicated a progression that may have been caused either by development in articulatory proficiency or by an growi...
The present paper deals with the question of how sonorant consonants are able to trigger regressive voice assimilation (henceforth RVA) in a number of language varieties. In contrast to obstruents, sonorants are spontaneously voiced sounds (cf. e.g. Chomsky & Halle, 1968: 302) and have been assumed to be unspecified for [voice] in the phonology (cf...
Projects
Projects (2)
The project will provide insight into the factors that have an impact on the intelligibility of native spoken Dutch for L2 learners and on the intelligibility of L2 Dutch for native listeners. Production and perception experiments will be set up which throw light on the role of phonological representations in L2 acquisition. L2 phonological acquisition is crucial for intelligibility, and in addition influences attitudes, since L2 pronunciation is often associated with general competence. The perception and production of both adult and child L2 learners will be examined, with a focus on L2 learners of French and Dutch-Turkish bilingual children in Belgium. The results will find an application in the development of teaching materials (e.g. training software) and a pedagogical approach to teaching Dutch as a foreign/non-native language.
