Duane G. Watson - US grants

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This proposal investigates the role acoustic prominence, which is one aspect of prosody, plays in language production and comprehension. Traditionally, researchers have characterized acoustic prominence as a means by which a speaker signals the givenness of information: new information is accented and given information is not. In this proposal it is proposed that acoustic prominence is a function of 1) the importance of a word to a conversation and 2) the predictability of the word. Results from preliminary experiments suggest that speakers produce important, less predictable words with more prominence, and that informativeness and predictability play a role in the type of prominence that is chosen by speakers. However, important questions remain. Experiments 1-6 investigate whether the degree of acoustic prominence produced by a speaker is proportional to its importance in a referential communication task and whether listeners are sensitive to fine- grained differences in acoustic prominence using an eye-tracking visual world paradigm. Experiments 7-8 explore whether effects of predictability on acoustic prominence are driven by processes in planning or by processes that facilitate listener comprehension. Experiments 9 and 10 investigate how predictability and informativeness interact to influence pitch accent choice. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE An important part of successful communication is producing and understanding language with appropriate prosody (e.g. stress, pitch, rhythm, and pausing). Individuals with language deficits that affect the production and comprehension of prosody are likely to have difficulty communicating, and little is known about how prosody facilitates communication in on-line language processing. This proposal investigates the role acoustic prominence, which is one aspect of prosody, plays in language production and comprehension.

Successful communication requires not just choosing the correct words and grammar, but also emphasizing the right words, pausing in appropriate locations, and using appropriate intonation and rhythm. This aspect of language is called prosody and it can convey important information about the syntactic structure of a sentence, which words in the conversation are given and new, and which aspects of the sentence are important. Understanding the rules for how prosody is used is important for building artificial speech systems that produce and understand natural language, designing interventions for individuals with speech disorders, and creating curriculum for language learners. A challenge for the field is the fact that the acoustic cues that signal which words are emphasized and where prosodic boundaries occur are highly variable, changing across both speakers and contexts. This variability is pervasive, yet researchers know very little about how the brain accommodates it.

The special theme of this conference is understanding how speakers navigate pervasive variability in how prosody is realized in natural speech. Prosodic information varies significantly due to physiological and language-internal factors, dialect, idiosyncratic speaker preferences, and speech context. As a result, prosodic features lack acoustic cues that are constant across contexts. Nonetheless, human language users can readily use prosodic information in conversation. This puzzle constitutes one of the fundamental issues in prosody research. New approaches to these problems have recently emerged both in linguistic research on prosody and neighboring fields such as speech perception and recognition. The goal of this conference is to bring prosody researchers together with researchers in neighboring fields to discuss problems in prosodic variability. With invited speakers and participants from theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, phonetics, phonology, language acquisition and computer science, this meeting attempts to provide a holistic picture of prosodic variability and a venue for discussions that may lead to solving this core question in prosody research.

This dissertation project aims to examine native English speakers' acquisition of a second language with noun classes defined in terms of grammatical gender. Fluent multilingualism has become an increasingly important skill; and whereas children seem to attain fluency with relative ease, adults experience persistent difficulty becoming proficient in a second language. Though instruction helps, its effectiveness is ultimately limited by our understanding of why learning a second language is so difficult for adults. Mastering grammatical gender, in particular, has proven a great challenge. Unlike English, some language cannot use determiners like "the" with any noun. Spanish, for example, uses the definite determiner "el" for "sun" but "la" for "moon"; using the wrong determiner with a noun is considered a grammatical error. For second language speakers, learning to use words like "el" and "la" with the right nouns when speaking and comprehending poses a great challenge. This can lead to misunderstandings, sometimes embarrassing ones, like telling someone that you met "la papa" (the potato) when you really meant to say that you met "el Papa" (the Pope). Research also shows that native speakers use grammatical gender information to help make comprehension easier. Second language learners, on the other hand, have difficulty using grammatical gender in this manner. In order to identify ways to make learning a second language more successful in general, we must first determine what makes learning specific features like grammatical gender so challenging.

This project aims to understand why adult second language learners suffer persistent difficulty with grammatical gender. It has two primary goals: 1) to determine how different ways of learning a second language can make adults more or less successful at using grammatical gender, and 2) to understand if and when adults can use grammatical gender information to ease comprehension in a second language. Two experiments will be conducted to address these goals. The first will examine the brainwaves of native and second language speakers of German while they read sentences. The second experiment will teach native speakers of English and German an artificial language that uses grammatical gender. Nouns and their gender words (like "el" and "la") will be learned in two different ways. After learning, the researchers will record participants' eye movements while they comprehend sentences. Together, these experiments will allow the researchers to determine if and when adult language learners use gender information to ease comprehension; the research will also identify whether particular ways of learning lead to better and more effective use of grammatical gender information, like native speakers. The outcomes of this research will therefore not only help identify the source of second language learners' problems, but will also provide clear and direct practical evidence for language teaching, with the ultimate goal of providing sustained societal gains in multilingualism and its associated social and economic benefits.

Despite having mastered basic word reading skills, large numbers of readers struggle to understand what they read. More worrisome still is the over-representation of minority and low-income populations in the ranks of struggling readers, which is linked to poor health outcomes. At the same time, there is very little agreement among psycholinguists and education researchers as to what factors drive variability in language understanding. This research program tests two factors that have been argued to explain variability in grammatical processing and language comprehension abilities. The first are differences in cognitive abilities (i.e. working memory, processing speed, and phonological ability). The second are differences in experience with language. We test these two possibilities in a series of experiments examining individual differences in language comprehension in young readers and adults. We have 2 specific aims: 1) To determine whether syntactic processing is guided by cognitive constraints or language experience; 2) to determine whether correlations between language experience and comprehension skills that were discovered in pilot work are the result of previous experience with diverse grammatical structures or the result of improved parsing efficiency derived from practice. The outcomes of the proposed experiments have implications for core questions in language research. Evidence that working memory or other cognitive factors predict language skill is most consistent with theories that domain general aspects of cognition are engaged in understanding language. Evidence that language experience predicts variability in reading skill is more consistent with theories that posit that statistical representations drive language processing.