Stefano Coretta’s research while affiliated with University of Edinburgh and other places

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Publications (20)


Figure 1. Scatter plot of proficiency and learning scores illustrating a U-shaped learning curve
A tutorial on generalised additive mixed effects models for bilingualism research
  • Article
  • Full-text available

November 2024

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88 Reads

Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism

Stefano Coretta

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While recent years have seen a shift towards random effects modelling, particularly in areas of linguistics in which nested structure is the norm (e.g., trial repetitions nested within participants), an over-reliance on standard linear modelling prevails, particularly in the cases of dynamic phenomena that may not constitute a linear relationship, e.g., vowel trajectories, pitch contours, acquisition processes, etc. Generalised Additive (Mixed) Models (GAMMs) are now commonly employed in phonetic research (given the naturally dynamic nature of speech data) and this is reflected by the availability of several tutorials which focus on phonetic data. This tutorial aims at making GAMMs accessible to researchers from other fields within linguistics. In particular, this tutorial is written for researchers in bilingualism and multilingualism who wish to be able to start using GAMMs for non-linear data, which is very common in developmental and learning phenomena. While only the basics will be covered here, we hope that researchers will get the necessary foundations to be able to learn GAMMs from existing resources.

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Language practices of Emilian and Esperanto communities: spaces of use, explicit language attitudes and self-reported competence

October 2024

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11 Reads


Intrinsic vowel duration in Northwestern Italian: Bio-mechanical or more?

December 2023

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2 Reads

A well-known property of vowel duration is that it tends to be modulated by vowel height: higher vowels are usually shorter than lower vowels (aka ``intrinsic vowel duration'').Results from previous work on a limited number of languages suggest two possible scenarios: (A) vowel duration is entirely driven by the duration of the gesture necessary to reach the tongue height target of the specific vowel, (B) vowel duration targets are part of the cognitive representation of the vowel.However, a third scenario has been put forward theoretically: (C) the duration of the vocalic gesture partially determines vowel duration but a vowel duration target for each vowel category is also necessary.This study set out to investigate vowel duration data from Northern Italian to assess which of the three scenarios finds support.The first formant frequency (F1) of vowels was used as a proxy for tongue height position and Directed Acyclic Graph theory was employed to determine the causal relationship between vowel duration, vowel category and F1.Bayesian modelling results suggest a robust non-linear effect of F1 on vowel duration, together with a direct effect of vowel category, which matches scenario (C).


A tutorial on Generalised Additive Mixed Effects Models for bilingualism research

December 2023

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79 Reads

In recent years quantitative analysis of linguistic data has benefited greatly from the now commonplace use of so-called random effects (also known as hierarchical, mixed-effects, multi-level or nested models, Winter (2013); Winter (2020)). While this shift represents a clear improvement in statistical analyses, particularly in areas of linguistics in which nested structure is the norm (e.g., trial repetitions nested within participants), an over-reliance on standard linear modelling prevails, particularly in the cases of dynamic phenomena that may not constitute a linear relationship, e.g., vowel trajectories, pitch contours, acquisition processes, etc.Generalised Additive (Mixed) Models (GAMMs) are now commonly employed in phonetic research (given the naturally dynamic nature of speech data) and this is reflected by the availability of several tutorials which focus on phonetic data (Sóskuthy, 2017, 2021; Tamminga et al., 2016; Wieling, 2018). This is why we hope that this tutorial will make GAMMs accessible to researchers from other fields within linguistics. In particular, this tutorial is thought for researchers in bilingualism and multilingualism who wish to be able to start using GAMMs for non-linear data, which is very common in developmental and learning phenomena.


Measuring spaces and observing attitudes: a comparative analysis on the language practices of Emilian and Esperanto speakers

December 2023

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6 Reads

This paper provides a comparative analysis of the language practices maintained by speakers of two minoritised languages: Emilian and Esperanto. Emilian is a Gallo-Italic language group historically spoken in the Emilia Romagna region of Italy for which very little is currently known. Esperanto is seemingly maintaining itself more successfully than Emilian and can therefore serve as an insightful member of comparison. We administered a sociolinguistic questionnaire designed to quantify spaces of language use and attitudes towards each language to investigate the following: (i) spaces of language use and (ii) language attitudes in the two communities, and (iii) the relationship between spaces, language attitudes and competence. The results suggest that the relationship between language attitudes and competence is modulated by spaces of use: at lower proportions of spaces of use, language attitudes are more positively correlated with language competence, while at higher proportions of spaces of use, the relationship between attitude and competence is reduced. Although Emilian is maintained in less spaces than Esperanto is, we observe that it is still used in local spaces. We propose that creating spaces for users of minoritised language like Emilian could engender higher levels of language competence and hence language maintenance.


Multidimensional Signals and Analytic Flexibility: Estimating Degrees of Freedom in Human-Speech Analyses

July 2023

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261 Reads

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4 Citations

Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science

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Stefano Coretta

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[...]

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Recent empirical studies have highlighted the large degree of analytic flexibility in data analysis that can lead to substantially different conclusions based on the same data set. Thus, researchers have expressed their concerns that these researcher degrees of freedom might facilitate bias and can lead to claims that do not stand the test of time. Even greater flexibility is to be expected in fields in which the primary data lend themselves to a variety of possible operationalizations. The multidimensional, temporally extended nature of speech constitutes an ideal testing ground for assessing the variability in analytic approaches, which derives not only from aspects of statistical modeling but also from decisions regarding the quantification of the measured behavior. In this study, we gave the same speech-production data set to 46 teams of researchers and asked them to answer the same research question, resulting in substantial variability in reported effect sizes and their interpretation. Using Bayesian meta-analytic tools, we further found little to no evidence that the observed variability can be explained by analysts’ prior beliefs, expertise, or the perceived quality of their analyses. In light of this idiosyncratic variability, we recommend that researchers more transparently share details of their analysis, strengthen the link between theoretical construct and quantitative system, and calibrate their (un)certainty in their conclusions.



The decline of local anchoring: a quantitative investigation

April 2023

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95 Reads

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1 Citation

English Language and Linguistics

This article presents a quantitative study of the referential status of PPs in clause-initial position in the history of English. Earlier work (Los 2009; Dreschler 2015) proposed that main-clause-initial PPs in Old English primarily function as 'local anchors', linking a new clause to the immediately preceding discourse. As this function was an integral part of the verb-second (V2) constraint, the decline of local anchors was attributed to the loss of V2 in the fifteenth century, so that only the contrasting and frame-setting functions of these PPs remain in PDE. This article tests these hypotheses in the syntactically parsed corpora of OE, ME, EModE and LModE texts, using the Pentaset-categories (New, Inert, Assumed, Inferred or Identity; Komen 2011), based on Prince's categories (Prince 1981). The finding is that Identity clause-initial PPs decline steeply from early ME onwards, which means the decline pre-dates the loss of V2. A likely trigger is the loss of the OE paradigm of demonstrative, which functioned as standalone demonstrative pronouns as well as demonstrative determiners, and the loss of gender marking more generally. From EModE onwards, main-clause-initial PPs that still link to the preceding discourse do so much more indirectly, by an Inferred link. Keywords: English historical syntax, verb-second, demonstrative pronouns, information structure, local anchors 1 We would like to thank Laurel Brinton and Kristin Bech, as well as an anonymous reviewer, for valuable feedback on an earlier version of this article. We also would like to acknowledge the support of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), grant 360-70-370. English Language and Linguistics, page 1 of 28.


Multidimensional Signals and Analytic Flexibility: Estimating Degrees of Freedom in Human-Speech Analyses

March 2023

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394 Reads

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16 Citations

Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science

Recent empirical studies have highlighted the large degree of analytic flexibility in data analysis which can lead to substantially different conclusions based on the same data set. Thus, researchers have expressed their concerns that these researcher degrees of freedom might facilitate bias and can lead to claims that do not stand the test of time. Even greater flexibility is to be expected in fields in which the primary data lend themselves to a variety of possible operationalizations. The multidimensional, temporally extended nature of speech constitutes an ideal testing ground for assessing the variability in analytic approaches, which derives not only from aspects of statistical modeling, but also from decisions regarding the quantification of the measured behavior. In the present study, we gave the same speech production data set to 46 teams of researchers and asked them to answer the same research question, resulting in substantial variability in reported effect sizes and their interpretation. Using Bayesian meta-analytic tools, we further find little to no evidence that the observed variability can be explained by analysts’ prior beliefs, expertise or the perceived quality of their analyses. In light of this idiosyncratic variability, we recommend that researchers more transparently share details of their analysis, strengthen the link between theoretical construct and quantitative system and calibrate their (un)certainty in their conclusions.



Citations (8)


... Although our statistical methods differ-using more conservative approaches (e.g., generalized linear mixed-effects models and LASSO regression) instead of ANOVA-this reduces the likelihood of false positives, as fewer statistical tests are conducted, making any replicated findings more robust and unified while maintaining the same intent of the original analyses. Because we were provided the original audio stimuli from Sulpizio and McQueen (2012), our replication also serves as an opportunity to reanalyze the acoustics and confirm their results, i.e., increase researcher degrees of freedom (Coretta et al., 2023). We make materials, data, and code available as part of our replication in the interest of promoting open and transparent science. ...

Reference:

Individual differences modulate prediction of Italian words based on lexical stress: a close replication and LASSO extension of Sulpizio and McQueen (2012)
Multidimensional Signals and Analytic Flexibility: Estimating Degrees of Freedom in Human-Speech Analyses

Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science

... Additionally, the intricate multidimensional nature of the speech signal, the underlying mechanisms governing its production, and the subtleties of psychoacoustic sound perception by humans must be considered. This approach allows for the identification of latent patterns within the data, even in the presence of uncertainty from the researcher's perspective [15]. ...

Multidimensional signals and analytic flexibility: Estimating degrees of freedom in human speech analyses

... Nowadays, in spite of some attempts to reintroduce classic direct palatography into active use (most notably Ladefoged, 2003) as the most convenient means of collecting data on place of articulation, the technique seems to receive limited attention from both phoneticians (as an old-time, unsophisticated research method) and field linguists (not having enough motivation to apply the technique). While there are a few recent studies using data from direct palatography (e.g., Chen & Guo, 2022;Chirkova et al., 2015;Coretta et al., 2023), there is no impression that palatographic evidence has become an essential part of every language description (cf. its absence in plenty of JIPA's illustrations). ...

Northern Tosk Albanian

Journal of the International Phonetic Association

... These were randomly selected. 10 recordings of the authors, using the Micro system with 64-element, 20 mm radius convex probe, and with different field of view and contrast settings • A total of 2 recordings by Strycharczuk et al. [34] using an EchoB system with a 128-element, 20 mm radius convex probe. These data are from an ultrasound machine not represented in the test set and included to generalize the model. ...

Distance vs time. Acoustic and articulatory consequences of reduced vowel duration in Polish

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

... Traditionally, sound change has been studied using symbolic (i.e., alphabetic) representation of the normative way these sounds were pronounced in lists of cognate words (e.g., Jäger, 2019). A notable development has been the interpretation of sound changes in terms of vocal tract gestures (Browman and Goldstein, 1991;Carignan et al., 2021), using the models discussed in Section 4.3. However, such approaches have not yet been applied systematically to larger speech corpora. ...

Planting the seed for sound change: Evidence from real-time MRI of velum kinematics in German
  • Citing Article
  • June 2021

Language

... These findings suggest that when comparing children from different WEIRD (White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) regions, there are stronger links between expressive language and social competence in children from North America compared to Europe. To our knowledge, developmental research has often focused on disentangling differences between western and eastern regions (e.g., Cameron-Faulkner et al. 2021;Farver et al. 2000). In turn, this study offers unique insights into specific variations between European and North American regions with respect to expressive language and social competence and highlights the need for future research to consider these differences among more diverse regions. ...

A Cross‐Cultural Analysis of Early Prelinguistic Gesture Development and Its Relationship to Language Development

Child Development

... Az egyik ilyen artikulációs manőver a nyelvgyök előre mozdítása a zöngés szegmentumok ejtésekor a garatüregi régió megnagyobbítása érdekében (Narayanan et al. 1995). Egyes tanulmányok szerint a zöngés obstruensekben (különösen a réshangokban) előrébb tolódott a nyelvgyök e mássalhangzók zöngétlen párjához képest (Ahn -Davidson 2016), míg más tanulmányok nem számoltak be releváns eltérésről ebben a tekintetben (Coretta 2020). A magyarra vonatkozóan eddig a /z/ és az /s/ ejtésének összehasonlítása történt meg, azt a kérdést vetve fel, hogy van-e összefüggés a nyelvgyökhelyzet variabilitása és i) a fonációs arány, illetve ii) a nyelvhegy mozgása között , Gráczi et al. 2020b, 2021b. ...

Longer vowel duration correlates with greater tongue root advancement at vowel offset: Acoustic and articulatory data from Italian and Polish
  • Citing Article
  • January 2020

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

... This particular phenomenon has sparked long-lasting methodological and theoretical debates about the very nature of linguistic representations (Port & Leary, 2005) and has been replicated several times in both production and perception. Vowel duration differences within this range have also been reported across phenomena associated with segmental contrasts (Coretta, 2019), reduction phenomena (Nowak, 2006), and biomechanical reflexes of prominence (Mücke & Grice, 2014). Thus, variation between different analyst teams of 7.2 to 14.1 ms in one or the other direction can be theoretically relevant and might lead to opposing theoretical conclusions. ...

An exploratory study of voicing-related differences in vowel duration as compensatory temporal adjustment in Italian and Polish

Glossa a journal of general linguistics