Tuning in to the prosody of a novel language is easier without orthography

Abstract

Mastering prosody is a different task for adults learning a second language and infants acquiring their first. While prosody crucially aids the process of L1 acquisition, for adult L2 learners it is often considerably challenging. Is it because of an age-related decline of the language-learning ability or because of unfavourable learning conditions? We investigated whether adults can auditorily sensitise to the prosody of a novel language, and whether such sensitisation is affected by orthographic input. After 5 minutes of exposure to Māori, Czech listeners could reliably recognize this language in a post-test using low-pass filtered clips of Māori and Malay. Recognition accuracy was lower for participants exposed to the novel-language speech along with deep-orthography transcriptions or orthography with unfamiliar characters. Adults can thus attune to novel-language prosody, but orthography hampers this ability. Language-learning theories and applications may need to reconsider the consequences of providing orthographic input to beginning second-language learners.

Full text

1
This is a preprint version of manuscript that has been accepted (on Nov 18, 2024) for
publication in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.
Tuning in to the prosody of a novel language is easier without orthography
Kateřina Chládková1,2, Václav Jonáš Podlipský3, Lucie Jarůšková1, Šárka Šimáčková3
1Institute of Czech Language and Theory of Communication, Faculty of Arts, Charles University
2Institute of Psychology, Czech Academy of Sciences
3Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Palacký University
katerina.chladkova@ff.cuni.cz
Highlights
- After 5 minutes of exposure to a new language adults sensitise to the novel prosody.
- They recognize this language, beside a similar one, in low-pass filtered recordings.
- Exposure to written forms of the novel speech can impair attunement to its prosody.
Abstract
Mastering prosody is a different task for adults learning a second language and infants acquiring
their first. While prosody crucially aids the process of L1 acquisition, for adult L2 learners it is
often considerably challenging. Is it because of an age-related decline of the language-learning
ability or because of unfavourable learning conditions? We investigated whether adults can
auditorily sensitise to the prosody of a novel language, and whether such sensitisation is
affected by orthographic input. After 5 minutes of exposure to Māori, Czech listeners could
reliably recognize this language in a post-test using low-pass filtered clips of Māori and Malay.
Recognition accuracy was lower for participants exposed to the novel-language speech along
with deep-orthography transcriptions or orthography with unfamiliar characters. Adults can
thus attune to novel-language prosody, but orthography hampers this ability. Language-learning
theories and applications may need to reconsider the consequences of providing orthographic
input to beginning second-language learners.
1 Introduction
At the start of the language learning journey, human fetuses and infants attune to the rhythm
and melody of the ambient language without any apparent effort, very likely subconsciously,
and with an outcome that seems perfect. After they begin tuning in to the global characteristics
of the native language, infants come to learn the properties of the native-language segments (i.e.
vowels and consonants), word forms and meanings, and relations between words. Eventually,
children become acquainted with how those segments and words are written. The journey is
commonly travelled backwards when learning subsequent languages later in life: learners read
words and learn their meanings, they learn how the words and sounds that constitute them are

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pronounced, but hardly ever do they fluently attune to the global rhythm and intonation of the
language. Mastering the rhythm and melody of a second (or third or fourth) language is what
older children and especially adults struggle with considerably. Why? Is it because they are past
a sensitive window for learning prosody or is it because they never had a chance to experience
the prosody the way first-language learners do? In the present study, we investigate whether
adults display sensitivity to prosodic patterns of an unknown language and whether their
prosodic sensitivity is modulated by the type of input they receive.
In the developmental literature, prosody is regarded as a window into the first language
(Gleitman & Wanner 1982, Gervain et al. 2020). Before they are even born, humans have weeks
to months of exposure to the primarily prosodic features of the ambient language. As shown by
studies with fetuses and newborns, in this early period of development humans sensitise to the
prosodic features in language-specific ways (DeCasper et al. 1994, Mampe et al. 2009, Granier-
Deferre et al. 2011). The early attunement to native prosody then arguably helps children to
recognize the language that they are learning, identify prominent chunks of speech, parse the
continuous speech signal into words and syllables, or learn morphosyntactic relations in
utterances (Johnson & Jusczyk 2001, Mandel et al. 1996, Gerken 1994, Gordon et al. 2015,
Suppanen et al. 2019). Prosody opens the language window not only in the domain of
perception. Language-specific prosodic patterns are manifested also in infant's own vocal
productions: from the way in which newborn babies cry to how older infants babble and
toddlers speak their first words (Mampe et al. 2009, Wermke et al. 2016, Levitt & Wang 1991,
Hallé et al. 1991). Such prosodic bootstrapping seems to be characteristic of L1 acquisition (e.g.
Gervain et al. 2020).
Contrary to its prime role in first language acquisition, prosody hardly serves as a gateway to
the acquisition of a second language in adults. Naturally, adults never encounter the speech of a
new language with primarily, or only, the prosodic cues available, as fetuses do when
experiencing their native language(s) in the womb. This means that adults lack the opportunity
to perceive L2 speech without the full segmental characteristics, so that they could use prosody
to bootstrap other linguistic knowledge the way infants acquiring their native language(s) do.
What is more, prosody is what adults keep struggling with even at later stages of their second-
language development, after they have learnt a great part of the L2 grammar and vocabulary,
possibly even more than with L2 segments, as reflected in comprehensibility, intelligibility, or
accentedness ratings of adults' L2 speech (Anderson-Hsieh et al. 1992, Warren et al. 2009, Saito
et al. 2016, see review in Choi & Kang 2023). Some authors even claim that L2 prosody is
unlearnable without explicit awareness and instruction (Chun & Levis 2020).
It might thus seem that beyond infancy or early childhood humans can no longer access the
mechanisms that enable them to acquire successfully the prosody of a new language. Previous
research on L2 prosody acquisition suggests that while L2 prosody is learnable (Mennen 2004),
the earlier L2 exposure begins and/or the more L2 exposure there is, the better can they
establish a new L2-like prosody differing sufficiently from their L1 prosody (Trofimovich &
Baker 2006, 2007). Why is that? It could be due to the end of a sensitive period for efficient
acquisition of the sound patterns of a second language, including its suprasegmental features
(Long 1990). However, we are proposing an alternative explanation, one which considers the
importance of the initial prosodic attunement in adult language learning. In the present
experiment, we thus aim to test whether even adults can sensitise to the prosody of a new

3
language through exposure and whether non-prosodic aspects of the input interfere with this
sensitisation.
One suspected hindering factor – orthography – is the focus of this study. Curiously, it is at
about the age of 6 years – i.e. the supposed end of the putative sensitive period for phonetic and
phonological acquisition (Long 1990) – that language learners usually start gaining the
knowledge of orthography. The literature suggests that once children learn to read and write,
they perform differently at novel word and grammar learning tasks. For instance, preliterate
children better learn article-noun gender agreement, i.e. multi-word chunks, than nouns,
probably because unlike literate children, they are not biased by the visual salience of words in
writing (Havron et al. 2018). A parallel orthography bias can be witnessed at the level of speech
sound patterns: children who learn to read and write using an alphabetic system start to
perceive – or at least think of – speech as a series of segments (Morais et al. 1979, Dehaene et al.
2010, Goetry et al. 2005). Getting acquainted with the orthographic representation of language
will then very likely shift the metalinguistic attention to the segmental level of vowels and
consonants and hence possibly hinder the perceptual sensitivity to the global (suprasegmental)
prosodic patterns. Compared to small children, adults not only have a developed L1 system
including its prosody, but they are also often literate; having access to orthographic segment-
based input may thus be detrimental to adults' ability to attune to suprasegmental-prosodic
patterns of a language. Possibly, the lack of such initial prosodic attunement may hinder further
acquisition of the target language sound patterns as well as other, e.g. morphosyntactic,
patterns.
The second-language speech learning literature has mostly researched the effects of
orthography in the domain of segmental contrasts and focused on the congruence between
sound-to-grapheme mapping in the first compared to the second language (Escudero et al. 2014,
Bassetti 2017), including orthography effects on the acquisition of lexical tones (Mok et al.
2018) as well as position-dependent effects of orthography (Zhou & Hamann 2020). Studies
have demonstrated that learning an L2 where the mapping between sounds and graphemes
differs from L1 may hinder the acquisition of the L2 speech sound contrasts at hand. A
notorious example is the English ship-sheep contrast where – for instance to an L1 Spanish
learner – the orthography provides conflicting cues about the realisation of the vowel sound
(Escudero & Boersma, 2004). From the perspective of comprehending unfamiliar L2 speech,
advanced L2 learners seem to benefit from encountering new L2 accents with L2 orthographic
transcription, namely subtitles in the L2, but are hindered by encountering the new L2 accents
with subtitles in the L1 (Mitterer & McQueen, 2009). It thus appears that in the case of advanced
L2 users who are well familiar with the L2 orthography, the L2 spelling serves as a cue to
phoneme and word identity and thus facilitates the understanding of L2 speech produced with
accents unfamiliar to the learner. The facilitating effect of L2 subtitles is likely highly relevant at
the segmental level where the familiar L2 spelling helps the learners decipher what the novel-
accent vowel and consonant realisations stand for. Whether and how exposing novice learners
to L2 orthography affects their ability to attune to the L2 prosody in particular, has not been
addressed yet.
As illustrated by studies referenced above, there is prior work on L2 prosody but this work has
not focused on the initial prosodic attunement (and the factors affecting it). When asking
whether adults can at all attune to novel-language prosody, one has to consider two aspects of
second- or foreign-language learning. Firstly, adult second-language learners completely lack

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the initial prosody-only phase of the new language exposure (since they do not listen from the
womb which would mask the frequencies above ~700–1000 Hz and thus also most segmental
identities, making prosodic patterns stand out). Secondly, their chance of sensitising to the
prosodic features in the input they receive, and learning them along their mental
representations of L1 prosody, may be hindered also by premature exposure to the orthography
of the target language. Considering how one can make the conditions of second language
acquisition more similar to those of the first, it is more feasible and ecologically realistic to
manipulate the latter aspect of L2 input (i.e. to remove orthography) rather than the former (i.e.
to try to block access to frequencies above approximately 1000 Hz in the speech input). In this
experiment we thus test whether adults can sensitise to an unfamiliar language through passive
listening, and whether their perceptual sensitisation to the novel-language prosody is affected
by orthographic input.
There are several ways in which orthography could interfere with auditory sensitisation to
prosody. Based on the proposal that learning to read and write using an alphabetic system
promotes perceiving speech as a sequence of segments and/or paying greater attention to the
segmental than the suprasegmental level, we hypothesize that (1) including alphabetic
orthographic representation of the audio speech signal will attenuate perceptual sensitisation to
prosody. In line with previous findings showing that particularly non-transparent and L1-
mismatching orthography hinders segmental learning (Escudero et al. 2014), and that
adaptation to novel accents is hindered by language mismatch in audio and subtitles (Mitterer &
McQueen, 2009) we hypothesize that (2) deep orthography with less reliable mappings
between sounds and letters will be more detrimental to prosodic sensitisation than shallow
orthography with better correspondence between sounds and letters. Lastly, (3) we
hypothesize the smallest or no interference of orthography on prosodic sensitisation when
participants are exposed to an unfamiliar script, as they will be least likely to map the heard
speech sounds to the unfamiliar letter shapes, potentially giving up trying to read along with
listening, making this condition similar to the audio-only exposure.
To test the above hypotheses we exposed L1-Czech adults to 5 minutes of Māori speech (an
audiobook) in one of four between-subject conditions: (a) audio only without any visual
representation, (b) audio with transcription using shallow orthography, i.e. the original Māori
Latin-alphabet-based text, (c) audio with transcription using deep orthography, and (d) audio
with an unfamiliar script, namely Hebrew characters which, we reasoned, would not be
recognized by most of our participants. After exposure, participants heard low-pass filtered
excerpts spoken by different speakers either in the same language or in a different but related
language, namely Malay, and had to indicate whether the excerpts were from the exposed
language or not. Low-pass filtering with a 800-Hz cutoff and 100-Hz smoothing (i.e., gradual
attenuation starting at 700 Hz, and not passing through frequencies of 900 Hz and higher)
effectively removes most segmental information preserving the intonational and rhythmic
dynamics (it also appears to be the point after which speech frequencies get attenuated as they
pass into the womb, Granier-Deferre et al. 2011, Richards et al. 1992). If orthography hinders
prosodic sensitisation, we predict better outcomes in condition (a) than in conditions (b) and
(c). If deep orthography is particularly detrimental for sensitisation to prosody we predict a
smaller difference between (a) and (b) than between (a) and (c). If an unfamiliar script does not
make participants hone in on segments at the cost of prosody, we predict the smallest or no
difference between (a) and (d).

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2 Method
2.1 Participants
A total of 221 students from Charles University, Prague, Czechia, and Palacký University in
Olomouc, Czechia, participated for course credit, being assigned randomly to one of the four
conditions. They were native speakers of Czech (all were monolingually-raised in Czech) with
self-reported normal hearing and normal or corrected-to-normal vision. Forty-seven
participants were excluded because at the end of the experiment, they indicated they could
identify or probably identify the exposure language (in some cases motivated by the audio or
Maori script, in some cases by the Hebrew script). We excluded all participants who indicated
that they thought they had possibly identified the language, even those whose guess was
actually incorrect, as their belief might still have influenced their choices on the post-test. The
remaining 174 participants were distributed across the 4 conditions as follows: 43 in condition
a (audio only), 44 in condition b (shallow orthography), 47 in condition c (deep orthography),
and 40 in condition d (unfamiliar script). The participants' mean age was 22.29 (sd = 3.96); 145
identified as women, 28 as men, and 1 as non-binary. The experiment was approved by the
Ethics committee of the Institute of Psychology, Czech Academy of Sciences.
2.2 Materials: Target language
Our participants' L1 was Czech, all spoke English as an L2, and many knew or learnt other Indo-
European languages. As the target language of exposure for the present experiment we chose
Māori, a Malayo-Polynesian language from the Austronesian family, because it fulfilled the
following conditions: (1) it is an unfamiliar and very likely an unencountered language for the
population represented by our participant sample, (2) it is phonotactically relatively simple and
segmentally rather similar to or simpler than the L1 of our participants, (3) there are high-
quality audio materials available, (4) there is a closely related language for which comparable
high-quality audio materials are available as well. As the competitor language for the test phase,
we selected Malay, also a Malayo-Polynesian language from the Austronesian family. The audio
materials from which we extracted our stimuli were Harry Potter audiobooks (Rowling 2022).
As for the auditory features that could be preserved in the low-pass filtered signal, Māori has 5
vowel qualities /i e a o u/, and a two-way contrast in vowel length which seems to be preserved
only in the low-vowel /a/-/aː/ pair. Malay has 6 vowels /i e a o u ə/ and does not contrast vowel
length. Phonotactically, Māori contains open syllables, permitting onsetless syllable structure.
While Malay permits coda consonants, neither of the two languages permits consonant clusters.
Rhythmically, both Māori and Malay seem to be in-between on the scale of stress-timed vs.
syllable-timed languages, patterning with the former on some rhythm metrics and with the
latter on other metrics (Clynes & Deterding 2011, Wan 2012, Harlow et al. 2009, Maclagan et al.
2009). For the rhythm-metrics values published for Māori and Malay, see the ranges in brackets
in Table 1.
2.3 Stimuli
The exposure materials were excerpts from the Māori audiobook that were recorded by a
female speaker. We selected three parts from different chapters of the audiobook that
conformed to the following criteria: they were continuous speech streams of mainly descriptive
style with a relatively stable, natural prosody, not containing direct speech (dialogues between

6
characters), and they did not contain internationally known English names or expressions. The
three parts from the different chapters were concatenated, and the total duration of the
exposure material was 5 minutes and 17 seconds altogether.
For the test phase, we selected 3 excerpts from the Māori audiobook (different from those in the
exposure stimuli) that were recorded by a male speaker, and 3 excerpts from the online Malay
audiobook recorded by a female speaker. We ensured there were no identifiable character
names in the post-test materials, such as Hare (“Harry”) that occurred several times in the
exposure materials. The six clips lasted between 4 and 6 seconds each. Whereas the exposure
material was naturally-produced, each of the post-test stimuli was low-pass filtered using Praat
(Boersma & Weenink 1992–2023) with the cut-off frequency of 800 Hz and the smoothing
setting of 100 Hz, which means that frequencies below 700 Hz were preserved, those above 900
Hz completely filtered out, and those in-between were gradually more and more reduced in
intensity. This filtering procedure effectively reduced the cues to spectral information above
700 Hz and removed them completely at 901 Hz and above: while some vowels' first formants
could be discernible in such signal, it is unlikely that the heavily impoverished vowel quality
cues would drive the discriminability of Malay and Māori whose vowel inventories are quite
similar.
We used different speakers for the exposure and test phase, and intentionally selected a male
speaker (i.e. different sex than exposure materials) for the same-language test trials and a
female speaker (i.e. same sex as exposure materials) for the different-language test trials. As
seen in Table 1, the voice quality (as measured by F0) of the exposure materials was more
similar to the different-language test trials than to the same-language test trials. Therefore, if
participants would rate the stimuli based on acoustic voice properties, they would be below
chance with their classification of language similarity. On the other hand, Table 1 also shows
that the prosodic rhythm properties of the exposure stimuli are more similar to the same-
language than to the different-language test trials. If the listeners’ decisions were cued by these
linguistic rhythm properties, they would be more likely to correctly identify the exposure
language at test.
Table 1 shows information about the melodic and rhythmic properties of the exposure and test
stimuli. F0 was measured in Praat (using Praat’s Filtered autocorrelation method with standard
settings and manually correcting octave jumps due to non-modal phonation). The rhythm
measurements were based on manual labelling of the vocalic and consonantal intervals. For the
exposure recording, the first 30s and the last 30s were used; for the test stimuli the entire
original unfiltered recordings were used. Durations of the labelled intervals were measured by a
Praat script and submitted to the calculations of the rhythm metrics (according to Grabe & Low
2002 and Dellwo 2006).
The auditory stimuli in the exposure phase were presented in four conditions. Condition (a)
contained only audio; condition (b) paired the audio stimuli with the actual Māori Latin-
alphabet-based orthography, which is a shallow orthography with a transparent and
straightforward mapping between phonemes and graphemes; condition (c) paired the audio
stimuli with an artificially modified, deep, orthography, where each phoneme was, each time it
occurred and each time differently, represented by one randomly selected letter out of 2 or 3
Latin alphabet letters preselected as possible spellings of the sound (one of them being the
original Māori spelling but removing any diacritics); condition (d) presented the audio stimuli

7
with transcriptions using an unfamiliar script (Hebrew) with unfamiliar placement of
characters (right-to-left within words which were placed left-to-right). Conditions (b) through
(d) thus represented three levels of orthographic complexity, ranging from the simplest, most
transparent phoneme-to-grapheme mapping in condition (b) to a highly complex, unfamiliar,
and not trivially retrievable phoneme-to-grapheme mapping in condition (d). Examples of what
participants saw on the screen in the three orthography conditions are shown in Figure 1.
Exposure Māori
Test Māori (all 3
stimuli together)
Test Malay (all 3
stimuli together)
Duration (s)
317
15
15
F0 (Mel)
0.1 quantile
129
114
147
median
168
142
168
0.9 quantile
216
183
220
mean
171
147
177
St. deviation
33
29
32
range
193
133
180
Rhythm metrics
%V
53
54
54 (46–54)
varcoC
43
45
47
nPVI (V intervals)
56 (39–57)
48 (39–57)
45 (35–55)
rPVI (C intervals)
49 (37–47)
47 (37–47)
42 (20–47)
Table 1. Selected acoustic properties of the exposure and test stimuli. The ranges in brackets are
values published for different datasets in prior studies for Māori (Maclagan et al. 2009) and Malay
(Wan 2012). The values for the various rhythm metrics provided here should be taken only as
indications of some of the rhythm properties of the two languages. It is seen that our Malay
samples have lower nPVI and rPVI but higher varcoC than our Maori test and exposure materials.
However, if listeners discriminate between the languages, we do not conclude that they do so on
the basis of rhythm alone (as intonation patterns were also present) or on the basis of these
particular rhythm metrics: a separate rhythm-cue-weighting experiment would need to address
that. Explanation of abbreviations: %V is the percentage of vocalic intervals; varcoC is the
percentage that the standard variation of the consonantal interval duration takes up of the mean
duration of the consonantal intervals (Dellwo 2006), rPVI and nPIV are the raw and rate-
normalized, respectively, Pairwise Variability Indices, i.e. the average differences between
consecutive consonantal and vocalic intervals (Grabe & Low 2002).

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Figure 1: Example subtitling of a segment of the exposure audio
[ˈpakʉˈpaijanakʰijˈawaˈhaŋaˈhea hea ] in the different orthography conditions. The first panel
shows condition (b) which used subtitles in the original Māori shallow orthography, the middle
panel shows condition (c) which used deep-orthography subtitles, and the last panel shows
condition (d) using a script unfamiliar to the participants. The audio-only condition (a)
displayed a plain grey screen throughout the experiment.
2.4 Procedure
The participants were tested individually or in small groups in a quiet room using a desktop
computer and circumaural headphones; the experiment was implemented in Praat, using a
Demo window script (Boersma & Weenink 1992–2023). Prior to the experiment, the
participants were told that they would hear a new language for 5 minutes and were asked to do
so attentively. They were told they might also see the language in writing on the screen, in
which case they were asked to pay attention to the screen as well. They were told that after the
exposure they would be asked a few simple questions about this language. An experimenter
made sure participants were paying attention to the auditory and visual stimulation throughout
the session. Prior to exposure, the volume was adjusted to a comfortable level for each
participant individually.
Immediately after the exposure ended, a screen with information about the post-test appeared
and the participants commenced by a click. Each of the six trials presented one of the test
stimuli, audio only for all participants, in random order with the question whether the audio clip
came from the language the participant had heard and then a forced choice between ‘yes’ and
‘no’.
3 Results
To provide a glimpse of the data before statistical modeling, Figure 2 plots per-participant
overall accuracy at post-test in recognizing the exposed and rejecting the competitor language.
The figure suggests that the accuracy was higher in the audio-only condition than in the deep
and the unfamiliar orthography condition. The accuracy seems in-between for the shallow
orthography condition.
To test this statistically, the raw binomial scores from the post-test were analyzed with a
generalised linear-mixed effects model, using the function glmer() of the lmer package in R
(Bates et al. 2015, R Core Team 2021). The modelled variable was response accuracy (i.e.
correct identification of the exposed and correct rejection of the competitor language). The fixed
factors were Condition (4 levels, treatment contrasts with audio-only as the reference level) and

9
Trial number (numeric, mean-centred). The modelled random effects were intercepts per
participant and per item (six test trial identities). Means and confidence intervals were
estimated using the function ggemmeans(), in the R package ggeffects (Lüdecke et al. 2020).
Table 2 shows the fixed-effects model output; Table 3 and Figure 3 show the estimated marginal
means per condition. First, the analysis showed that the intercept was reliably higher than zero,
indicating that in the audio condition, participants were above chance in accurately identifying
the exposed language and rejecting the competitor. Next, the slope for condition was significant
for two of the three contrasts: for audio-only versus deep orthography and for audio-only
versus unfamiliar script. Comparisons of the estimated means reveal that the audio-only
condition yielded significantly higher post-test scores than the deep-orthography condition by
11%, and than the unfamiliar-script condition by 9%. The numerical difference between the
audio-only and the shallow-orthography condition trended in the same direction (by 3%) but
was non-significant. Despite the lower scores in some of the orthography conditions,
performance was still above chance (i.e. above 0.5 probability), as shown by the lower bounds
of the confidence intervals given in Table 3.
As for the size of the effects across the three contrasts of condition, pairwise comparisons of
mean effects sizes and their confidence intervals in Table 2 show that while deep orthography
and unfamiliar script yielded effects of comparable size, the effect of shallow orthography seems
numerically smaller than the effect of deep orthography, but this apparent difference is not
statistically significant (as the 95% c.i.s overlap with the means of the contrasting level).
Figure 2. Stacked dot plots and overlaid violin plots of the proportions of correctly recognising
the exposed and rejecting the competitor language in each exposure condition. Coloured dots
show per-participant proportions correct (recognitions and rejections together), black asterisks
show group means. Numbers of participants per condition are given in parentheses.

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Estimate
SE
95% CI lower
95% CI upper
z value
p
Intercept
1.115
0.241
0.605
1.642
4.623
<0.001
Cond. (shallow ortho)
-0.172
0.211
-0.592
0.245
-0.815
0.415
Cond. (deep ortho)
-0.545
0.203
-0.954
-0.146
-2.677
0.007
Cond. (unfam. script)
-0.458
0.212
-0.882
-0.041
-2.161
0.031
Trial number
0.068
0.040
-0.011
0.147
1.683
0.092
Table 2. Fixed-effects model summary with 95% confidence intervals of the estimated effects.
Figure 3. Estimated marginal means and 95% confidence intervals of accuracy in recognising
the exposed and rejecting the competitor language at post-test.
condition
mean
95% CI lower
95% CI upper
audio
0.75
0.66
0.83
shallow ortho
0.72
0.62
0.80
deep ortho
0.64
0.53
0.73
unfamiliar script
0.66
0.55
0.75
Table 3. Estimated accuracies of recognizing the exposed and rejecting the competitor language
at post-test, means and 95% confidence intervals.

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4 Discussion
We investigated whether adults are able to sensitise to the prosody of a new unfamiliar
language during a 5-minute first encounter and whether this ability is modulated by
orthographic input. Adult native speakers of Czech listened to an audiobook in Māori, either
without any visual input, or along with a transcription using shallow and familiar (Latin-
alphabet-based Māori) orthography, or using deep and familiar (Latin-alphabet-based)
orthography, or using unfamiliar (Hebrew-character-based) orthography. Attunement to the
novel-language prosody was tested immediately after exposure by a language recognition task
with low-pass filtered utterances in Māori and Malay (recorded by different speakers than the
exposure materials). The low-pass filtering approximated the quality of speech input that
fetuses receive in the womb. We hypothesised that orthographic input in the familiar Latin-
alphabet-based script would draw the participants' attention to segments, at the cost of
suprasegmental (i.e. prosodic) information, and thus impede subsequent prosody-based
language recognition with the low-pass filtered stimuli. We predicted larger detrimental effects
of deep (i.e. less transparent) orthography compared to shallow orthography, and negligible or
no effects of transcriptions using an unfamiliar alphabet.
An analysis of the post-test language recognition scores revealed that after 5 minutes of
exposure to the novel language auditorily, the adult participants’ accuracy in recognising the
exposed language in the competition of another very similar language in low-pass filtered
stimuli was above chance, but it was also affected by orthography. The correct recognition of the
exposed language and rejection of the competitor language in the post-test was significantly
attenuated by exposure to deep orthography as well by exposure to the unfamiliar segmental
orthography.
Our prediction that orthography would hamper the ability to perceptually attune to novel
language prosody was borne out. There was a detrimental effect of deep orthography, as
presenting listeners with non-transparent transcriptions of the exposure speech in the novel
language attenuated their ability to recognize the novel-language prosody at post-test. Our data
do not permit us to determine with confidence whether presenting listeners with shallow-
orthography transcription during exposure led to attenuated recognition as well. Numerically,
the performance was intermediate and it was not reliably worse than performance in the audio-
only condition (given the non-significance of the auditory-only vs. shallow orthography
contrast); at the same time though, it was not better than performance in the deep orthography
condition (given the overlap of the confidence intervals for the shallow and deep orthography
effects). Thus, our second prediction that shallow orthography would be less detrimental than
deep orthography was not confidently confirmed, and neither was our third prediction that
transcriptions using an unfamiliar script would be the least, or not at all, harmful to prosodic
sensitisation, making the performance in this condition similar to that of the audio-only
condition. Instead, there was a clear reduction in the unfamiliar-orthography condition, just like
in the deep-orthography condition, indicating that even attempting to read an unfamiliar
alphabetic script while listening to the exposure speech (which had a natural tempo) had a
distracting effect on the implicit learning of prosody.

12
4.1 Tuning in to a novel prosody in adulthood
Our findings demonstrate that after exposure to 5 minutes of natural speech in an unfamiliar
language, adult listeners are able to recognize this language when hearing low-pass filtered
utterances spoken by a new speaker. The ability to identify the exposed language, and to reject
another unfamiliar but closely related language, was likely driven by the listeners’ sensitivity to
the prosodic cues available (i.e. intonation and rhythm) which were well preserved in the low-
pass filtered signal, unlike segmental cues which were mostly removed (possibly with some
exceptions such as cues to vowel height). Previous studies have shown that in low-pass filtered
speech stimuli, adults can recognize their native language variety and distinguish it from a non-
native language or variety (Vicenik & Sundara, 2013), as well as recognise foreign accents in
their native language (Kolly et al. 2014), or that both child and adult listeners can discriminate
speaker gender and accent (Weatherhead et al. 2019, Bozkurt & Soley 2022, Jacewicz et al.
2023). The present findings show that adults are able to achieve prosody-based language
recognition with non-native and unfamiliar languages, after only very brief exposure to one of
them. It thus appears that the tracking of and sensitising to the prosody of a novel language –
which is one of the first mechanisms which humans use to tune in to their native language very
early in life – is available also in adulthood.
Correctly recognizing that a short low-pass filtered utterance comes from a just-encountered
language (language A), and that a short low-pass filtered utterance from a similar language (B)
is not from language A is, in fact, a rather striking ability, perhaps even surpassing infants'
prosody-based language discrimination abilities that have been reported so far (especially if one
assumes that adults would be less adept at perceptual sensitisation to a new language, Long
1990, Munro & Mann 2005). Developmental literature shows that newborns and 2-month-old
infants can discriminate low-pass filtered languages only when they are very different
rhythmically (e.g. English versus Italian) and/or when one of the languages is the infants' native
language (Mehler et al. 1988, Nazzi et al. 1998). Low-pass filtered speech from languages that
are rhythmically rather close such as English and Dutch seems to be indiscriminable across the
lifespan, namely, by newborns (Nazzi et al. 1998), older infants (Johnson et al. 2003, holds also
for Basque vs. Spanish, Molnar et al. 2014), as well as by adults (Ramus et al., 2003).
4.2 Tuning in to novel prosody can be hampered by orthographic input
Adult's tracking of novel prosody, however, is undermined if listeners are concurrently
presented with a complex orthographic form of the novel language. This supports the idea that
learning to read an alphabetic system steers speech perception not only towards the segmental
content of speech but also away from the suprasegmental features, i.e. prosody. The reason why
learners attune less to prosody is probably because the segmentally-based visual cues promote
segmentally-based listening. Or one could also argue that the limited tracking of prosody was
observed here because the listeners' attention was split into two modalities. Although our
experimental design does not allow us to eliminate this possibility, we do not consider it a likely
explanation, given that we found reduced accuracy not for all but only some of the orthography
conditions: only for the deep-orthography and unfamiliar-script conditions did we observe
reduced accuracy as compared with the no-orthography condition, not for the shallow-
orthography condition. What the present results clearly show is that the availability of
orthographic input does not improve sensitisation to novel language prosody. This contrasts
with the literature on other domains of L2 suggesting that, if accompanying audio with

13
orthography (such as captioning and textual enhancement) has any effect at all, it boosts word-
form recognition and vocabulary and grammar learning in a second language (Markham 1999,
Winke et al. 2010, Montero Perez et al. 2013). The literature has proposed that textual input
helps learners become fluent listeners because it involves top-down conceptual and lexical
knowledge as well as helps learners parse and decode the auditory stream (Montero Perez
2020). Thus, although little to no data is available for visual spelling effects on the learning of
prosody, evidence from word learning and speech parsing studies speaks in favour of visual
cues rather than otherwise.
To what extent and under which conditions alphabetic visual input hampers prosodic
attunement needs to be researched further across various language populations and learning
scenarios. On the basis of the present findings, however, we conclude that captioning may not
always serve as an aiding input modality, because especially in the beginning stages of language
learning, the segmental basis of the orthographic input guides the learner away from auditorily
sensitising to the global suprasegmental patterns. And such orthography-induced segment-
based listening that literate learners may experience from the earliest stages of L2 learning,
demotes their auditory tracking of the suprasegmental features, consciously or subconsciously.
This might be precisely the reason why mastering prosody in an L2 is a challenge even in
advanced L2 users.
As regards the degree of transparency in sound-to-grapheme mapping, our results do not allow
us to determine with confidence whether and how it modulated the orthographic interference
with prosody tracking. While performance in the deep-orthography condition was reliably
worse than in the audio-only condition, performance in the shallow-orthography condition was
in-between the audio-only and deep-orthography conditions and not reliably different from
either. Therefore, further research is needed in this direction. A possible avenue would embrace
the developmental perspective and would measure prosody sensitisation – with and without
orthography – in preliterate and literate children. The prediction here is that prosody
sensitisation would be least affected by any type of orthography in preliterate children, and the
hampering effects of orthography would become stronger with the children's growing
knowledge of spelling. This would be an effect parallel to the finding that knowledge of
orthography affects parsing and learning words, or more specifically, that compared to their
literate peers matched on IQ, preliterate children are more adept at learning determiner+noun
combinations than isolated nouns (Havron et al. 2018).
The reduction of prosody tracking was found, contrary to our predictions, also after exposure to
captions written in an unfamiliar script. Despite being unfamiliar to the participants, they had
had ample experience with the alphabetic orthographies of their L1 Czech and L2 English,
possibly creating the expectation that the novel language we exposed them to also used an
alphabetic, segmental, orthography even if the characters were strange. What is more, the
transcriptions using Hebrew characters were strictly segment-based: the number of speech
sounds per word corresponded to the number of characters displayed. Therefore, one possible
explanation of our findings is that the unfamiliar segment-based orthography drove similar
segment-focused listening just like the Latin-alphabet-based script. If that is the case, a number
of predictions ensue: first, even the unfamiliar orthography could promote segment-based
parsing and thus also facilitate segmental acquisition of the novel language at the cost of
prosody; second, the harmful effects of orthography on prosody tracking could diminish with
exposure to a non-segmental script, such as logographic or syllabic writing if the learners are

14
aware of its non-segmental basis; and third, the effects of segmentally-based orthography may
perhaps be smaller in learners whose L1 writing system is not alphabetic, i.e. segment-based.
Alternatively, our finding of reduced prosody recognition after exposure to the unfamiliar script
transcriptions may also be explained as due to increased cognitive demands of trying to read
the unknown symbols, which resulted in an overall reduced attention to the auditory signal as
such. That would predict not only reduced tracking of prosody but also reduced learning of the
segmental details. A future study could help decide between the alternative explanations if it
compares the effects of shallow orthography using familiar versus unfamiliar characters on the
tracking both of the prosodic properties (reduced learning predicted by both possible
explanations) and of segmental properties of speech in a novel language (reduced learning
predicted by only the latter explanation).
At the level of the neural processing of speech, the brain’s ability to track words and syllables
(i.e. chunks of speech larger than segments), indexed by the strength and phase coherence of the
neural oscillatory activity in the delta and theta bands, has been shown to correlate with the
listeners' familiarity with and proficiency in the target language (being most precise for those
who had the target language as their L1, Ding et al. 2016, Lizarazu 2021), and hampered neural
speech tracking particularly in the delta band has been reported as a marker of dyslexia
(Hämäläinen et al. 2012). Experiments following up on the present finding that orthography
limits the ability to attune to and recognize novel language prosody should investigate how
orthographic input affects neural speech tracking: for instance, whether orthography interferes
with neural tracking of words or syllables in a novel language, or, how the interactions between
orthographic input and neural speech tracking of the different-sized chunks develops with
proficiency in a second language.
4.3 Implications for second language acquisition theory and teaching practice
The present finding that adults can sensitise to the prosody of a novel language suggests that the
typical struggle with prosody in second-language learning might be due to exogenous,
experiential factors rather than by endogenous factors such as a closed sensitive period. In our
view, our results therefore align with theories of L2 acquisition which propose that the effects of
the learner’s age on L2 acquisition success are not due to maturation per se but rather the
external learning conditions (Bialystok 1997, Moyer 2004, Baumert et al. 2020, Singleton &
Lesniewska 2021, and Flege & Bohn 2021). Prior research suggests that promoting the salience
of prosody by manual gestures or by providing L2 learners with prosodically enhanced input
can lead to prosodic bootstrapping in the L2, i.e. facilitate the learning of the L2 even beyond the
prosodic patterns themselves (Baills et al. 2019, Yuan et al. 2019, Campfield & Murphy 2014).
Such prosodic bootstrapping of other linguistic knowledge is hypothesized to be an important
characteristic of first-language development (e.g. Gervain et al. 2020)..
Arguably, one of the experiential factors that block the access to the prosody of the target
language is premature exposure to its orthography. Orthographic representations of L2 words
are typically omnipresent in the input from the earliest stages of second-language development
in literate learners (and often even in illiterate ones, Sbertoli & Arnesen 2014). It has been
proposed that the involvement of reading and writing in the early stages of L2 development
supports the explicitness of learning and analytical thinking about language (see Discussion in
Miterrer & Reinisch 2015). Unlike segments, prosody is generally not marked (in an alphabetic
writing system) and needs to be acquired implicitly. Premature exposure to alphabetic spelling

15
in the learning of a new language may therefore pose a problem for the acquisition of L2
prosody, since the learners’ explicit attention is drawn to the segments, at the cost of prosody.
Our finding of implicit auditory attunement to a novel language after even a brief exposure
period is in line with recent research showing that adults are well able to learn by implicit
exposure to a second or foreign language (Alexander et al. 2022).
It is possible that if learners miss the chance to sensitise to L2 prosody early in L2 development,
due to high exposure to orthography in the input, they may be prevented from sensitising to the
L2 prosody in a similar fashion as they did in their L1. We do not mean to suggest that the
acquisition of L2 segments or lexical items, for which segment-based orthography may be
helpful, is not important in L2 acquisition. It is possible though that prosody is even more
important than segments at the initial stages of the acquisition of any language (native or
second): in the same way it bootstraps the development of L1, prosody might serve as a
stepping stone into a successful acquisition of the second language. As outlined in the
introduction, it is possible that the apparent age-related detriment in L2 acquisition is due to
the lack of initial sensitization to L2 prosody, which reduces the potential bootstrapping or
facilitation effects that prosody may have on the learning of other language levels and further
language competences in the L2 such as word segmentation or morphosyntactic relations. This
means that the lack of early prosody attunement may be much more hindering to L2
development than just making the learner sound non-native. This is why it is worth
investigating the factors that may facilitate prosody sensitisation at the initial stages of L2
learning, such as postponed exposure to L2 orthography. To what extent does presenting
orthography adversely affect the learning of the L2 sound patterns overall or the learning of
prosody in particular? This remains to be resolved in future research. In any case, presenting
(unfamiliar or deep) orthography distracts the learner away from the sound of the L2 speech.
This should be considered in foreign language classrooms where learners are routinely exposed
to even deep and unfamiliar orthographies right from the first moment without the necessary
awareness of any adverse effects on sound-pattern learning this may have.
One implication of our findings is thus that using orthographic representations in second- or
foreign-language classrooms almost all of the time should be discouraged if the acquisition of
prosody is to be promoted. The idea that early exposure to L2 orthography interferes with the
attunement to L2 prosody needs to be tested further. If confirmed, this will lend support to
teaching approaches which see L2 and L1 learning as parallel processes (Morgan-Short et al.
2012) and encourage listening before speaking and definitely before writing. Until then, we
cannot eliminate the risk that early exposure to orthography and insistence on correct spelling
(often common even with child L2 learner in schools) has harmful effects on the acquisition of
L2 prosody which is essential for the successful acquisition of the sound patterns, and possibly
helpful for the acquisition of patterning on other levels, of the target language (Anderson-Hsieh
et al. 1992, Warren et al. 2009). Unlike in L1 acquisition and in immersive non-formal L2
acquisition, formalized instructional L2 learning routinely uses immediate exposure to L2
orthography. Understanding potential unintended effects of early exposure to orthography on
the acquisition of L2 sound patterns is essential both from the perspective of SLA theory and
practice. Our study provides an indication of the potential disadvantages of early L2
orthography use and warrants further investigation.

16
5 Conclusion
After passively listening to 5 minutes of speech from a previously encountered natural language,
adults recognize this language above chance in low-pass filtered recordings of new persons
speaking the exposed or a different related language. The accuracy in recognizing the exposed
language is lower if the exposure includes orthographic, alphabetic, representation – especially
if the writing does not transparently reflect the auditory realisation of speech sounds (i.e. deep
orthography) or if it is in an unfamiliar script. These findings demonstrate that adults are able to
attune to the prosodic patterns of a novel language during a brief passive exposure and that
presenting novice learners with the written form of the language may interfere with the
prosody tracking ability. That has implications for linguistic theories of sensitive periods, as well
as for applied language teaching research. In follow-up research we aim to investigate the
developmental trajectory and neural underpinnings of the interactions between prosodic
sensitisation and orthography. Future studies should also test how orthography may affect
novel language prosody tracking for different combinations between the listeners’ L1 and the
particular new language.
Data availability statement
The stimuli, materials, data, and analysis scripts are available at https://osf.io/p4b5m/.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Norbert Vanek for helping us purchase the Māori audiobook and shipping it
to us from Auckland, New Zealand, and to Barbora Dvořáková for assistance in data collection.
The research was funded by Czech Science Foundation, grant no. 21-09797S and by the
European Regional Development Fund, project “Beyond Security: Role of Conflict in Resilience-
Building”, reg. no.: CZ.02.01.01/00/22_008/0004595.
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