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PubMed2004

Using the Speech Transmission Index for predicting non-native speech intelligibility.

While the Speech Transmission Index (STI) is widely applied for prediction of speech intelligibility in room acoustics and telecommunication engineering, it is unclear how to interpret STI values when non-native talkers or listeners are involved. Based on subjectively measured psychometric functions for sentence intelligibility in noise, for populations of native and non-native communicators, a correction function for the interpretation of the STI is derived. This function is applied to determine the appropriate STI ranges with qualification labels ("bad"-"excellent"), for specific populations of non-natives. The correction function is derived by relating the non-native psychometric function to the native psychometric function by a single parameter (nu). For listeners, the nu parameter is found to be highly correlated with linguistic entropy. It is shown that the proposed correction function is also valid for conditions featuring bandwidth limiting and reverberation.

Humans↗
PubMed2004

Patterns of English phoneme confusions by native and non-native listeners.

Native American English and non-native (Dutch) listeners identified either the consonant or the vowel in all possible American English CV and VC syllables. The syllables were embedded in multispeaker babble at three signal-to-noise ratios (0, 8, and 16 dB). The phoneme identification performance of the non-native listeners was less accurate than that of the native listeners. All listeners were adversely affected by noise. With these isolated syllables, initial segments were harder to identify than final segments. Crucially, the effects of language background and noise did not interact; the performance asymmetry between the native and non-native groups was not significantly different across signal-to-noise ratios. It is concluded that the frequently reported disproportionate difficulty of non-native listening under disadvantageous conditions is not due to a disproportionate increase in phoneme misidentifications.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

Lexical frequency and neighborhood density effects on the recognition of native and Spanish-accented words by native English and Spanish listeners.

This study examined the effect of presumed mismatches between speech input and the phonological representations of English words by native speakers of English (NE) and Spanish (NS). The English test words, which were produced by a NE speaker and a NS speaker, varied orthogonally in lexical frequency and neighborhood density and were presented to NE listeners and to NS listeners who differed in English pronunciation proficiency. It was hypothesized that mismatches between phonological representations and speech input would impair word recognition, especially for items from dense lexical neighborhoods which are phonologically similar to many other words and require finer sound discrimination. Further, it was assumed that L2 phonological representations would change with L2 proficiency. The results showed the expected mismatch effect only for words from dense neighborhoods. For Spanish-accented stimuli, the NS groups recognized more words from dense neighborhoods than the NE group did. For native-produced stimuli, the low-proficiency NS group recognized fewer words than the other two groups. The-high proficiency NS participants' performance was as good as the NE group's for words from sparse neighborhoods, but not for words from dense neighborhoods. These results are discussed in relation to the development of phonological representations of L2 words. (200 words).

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Perception of familiar contrasts in unfamiliar positions.

This paper investigates the perception of non-native phoneme contrasts which exist in the native language, but not in the position tested. Like English, Dutch contrasts voiced and voiceless obstruents. Unlike English, Dutch allows only voiceless obstruents in word-final position. Dutch and English listeners' accuracy on English final voicing contrasts and their use of preceding vowel duration as a voicing cue were tested. The phonetic structure of Dutch should provide the necessary experience for a native-like use of this cue. Experiment 1 showed that Dutch listeners categorized English final /z/-/s/, /v/-/f/, /b/-/p/, and /d/-/t/ contrasts in nonwords as accurately as initial contrasts, and as accurately as English listeners did, even when release bursts were removed. In experiment 2, English listeners used vowel duration as a cue for one final contrast, although it was uninformative and sometimes mismatched other voicing characteristics, whereas Dutch listeners did not. Although it should be relatively easy for them, Dutch listeners did not use vowel duration. Nevertheless, they attained native-like accuracy, and sometimes even outperformed the native listeners who were liable to be misled by uninformative vowel duration information. Thus, native-like use of cues for non-native but familiar contrasts in unfamiliar positions may hardly ever be attained.

Humans↗
PubMed2006

Training the perception of Hindi dental and retroflex stops by native speakers of American English and Japanese.

Perception of second language speech sounds is influenced by one's first language. For example, speakers of American English have difficulty perceiving dental versus retroflex stop consonants in Hindi although English has both dental and retroflex allophones of alveolar stops. Japanese, unlike English, has a contrast similar to Hindi, specifically, the Japanese /d/ versus the flapped /r/ which is sometimes produced as a retroflex. This study compared American and Japanese speakers' identification of the Hindi contrast in CV syllable contexts where C varied in voicing and aspiration. The study then evaluated the participants' increase in identifying the distinction after training with a computer-interactive program. Training sessions progressively increased in difficulty by decreasing the extent of vowel truncation in stimuli and by adding new speakers. Although all participants improved significantly, Japanese participants were more accurate than Americans in distinguishing the contrast on pretest, during training, and on posttest. Transfer was observed to three new consonantal contexts, a new vowel context, and a new speaker's productions. Some abstract aspect of the contrast was apparently learned during training. It is suggested that allophonic experience with dental and retroflex stops may be detrimental to perception of the new contrast.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Phonological systems in bilinguals: age of learning effects on the stop consonant systems of Korean-English bilinguals.

Interaction of Korean and English stop systems in Korean-English bilinguals as a function of age of acquisition (AOA) of English was investigated. It was hypothesized that early bilinguals (mean AOA=3.8 years) would more likely be native-like in production of English and Korean stops and maintain greater independence between Korean and English stop systems than late bilinguals (mean AOA=21.4 years). Production of Korean and English stops was analyzed in terms of three acoustic-phonetic properties: voice-onset time, amplitude difference between the first two harmonics, and fundamental frequency. Late bilinguals were different from English monolinguals for English voiceless and voiced stops in all three properties. As for Korean stops, late bilinguals were different from Korean monolinguals for fortis stops in voice-onset time. Early bilinguals were not different from the monolinguals of either language. Considering the independence of the two stop systems, late bilinguals seem to have merged English voiceless and Korean aspirated stops and produced English voiced stops with similarities to both Korean fortis and lenis stops, whereas early bilinguals produced five distinct stop types. Thus, the early bilinguals seem to have two independent stop systems, whereas the late bilinguals likely have a merged Korean-English system.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2006

The use of visual cues in the perception of non-native consonant contrasts.

This study assessed the extent to which second-language learners are sensitive to phonetic information contained in visual cues when identifying a non-native phonemic contrast. In experiment 1, Spanish and Japanese learners of English were tested on their perception of a labial/ labiodental consonant contrast in audio (A), visual (V), and audio-visual (AV) modalities. Spanish students showed better performance overall, and much greater sensitivity to visual cues than Japanese students. Both learner groups achieved higher scores in the AV than in the A test condition, thus showing evidence of audio-visual benefit. Experiment 2 examined the perception of the less visually-salient /1/-/r/ contrast in Japanese and Korean learners of English. Korean learners obtained much higher scores in auditory and audio-visual conditions than in the visual condition, while Japanese learners generally performed poorly in both modalities. Neither group showed evidence of audio-visual benefit. These results show the impact of the language background of the learner and visual salience of the contrast on the use of visual cues for a non-native contrast. Significant correlations between scores in the auditory and visual conditions suggest that increasing auditory proficiency in identifying a non-native contrast is linked with an increasing proficiency in using visual cues to the contrast.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2006

Early learners' discrimination of second-language vowels.

It is uncertain from previous research to what extent the perceptual system retains plasticity after attunement to the native language (L1) sound system. This study evaluated second-language (L2) vowel discrimination by individuals who began learning the L2 as children ("early learners"). Experiment 1 identified procedures that lowered discrimination scores for foreign vowel contrasts in an AXB test (with three physically different stimuli per trial, where "X" was drawn from the same vowel category as "A" or "B"). Experiment 2 examined the AXB discrimination of English vowels by native Spanish early learners and monolingual speakers of Spanish and English (20 per group) at interstimulus intervals (ISIs) of 1000 and 0 ms. The Spanish monolinguals obtained near-chance scores for three difficult vowel contrasts, presumably because they did not perceive the vowels as distinct phonemes and because the experimental design hindered low-level encoding strategies. Like the English monolinguals, the early learners obtained high scores, indicating they had shown considerable perceptual learning. However, statistically significant differences between early learners and English monolinguals for two of three difficult contrasts at the 0-ms ISI suggested that their underlying perceptual systems were not identical. Implications for claims regarding perceptual plasticity following L1 attunement are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Cue weighting in auditory categorization: implications for first and second language acquisition.

The ability to integrate and weight information across dimensions is central to perception and is particularly important for speech categorization. The present experiments investigate cue weighting by training participants to categorize sounds drawn from a two-dimensional acoustic space defined by the center frequency (CF) and modulation frequency (MF) of frequency-modulated sine waves. These dimensions were psychophysically matched to be equally discriminable and, in the first experiment, were equally informative for accurate categorization. Nevertheless, listeners' category responses reflected a bias for use of CF. This bias remained even when the informativeness of CF was decreased by shifting distributions to create more overlap in CF. A reversal of weighting (MF over CF) was obtained when distribution variance was increased for CF. These results demonstrate that even when equally informative and discriminable, acoustic cues are not necessarily equally weighted in categorization; listeners exhibit biases when integrating multiple acoustic dimensions. Moreover, changes in weighting strategies can be affected by changes in input distribution parameters. This methodology provides potential insights into acquisition of speech sound categories, particularly second language categories. One implication is that ineffective cue weighting strategies for phonetic categories may be alleviated by manipulating variance of uninformative dimensions in training stimuli.

Cues↗
PubMed2006

Language control in the bilingual brain.

How does the bilingual brain distinguish and control which language is in use? Previous functional imaging experiments have not been able to answer this question because proficient bilinguals activate the same brain regions irrespective of the language being tested. Here, we reveal that neuronal responses within the left caudate are sensitive to changes in the language or the meaning of words. By demonstrating this effect in populations of German-English and Japanese-English bilinguals, we suggest that the left caudate plays a universal role in monitoring and controlling the language in use.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

The use of a newspaper insertion to promote DIY testing of vision in India.

BACKGROUND: The mass media have the potential to motivate people to participate in self appraisal of their own health status. An innovative communication package was designed to help people to examine vision at home. The impact of publishing the "do it yourself" (DIY) kit in Indian newspapers was evaluated. METHODS: A pretested bilingual vision testing kit was published in three newspapers. The kit comprised four tumbling Es corresponding to 6/12 line of Snellen's optotypes. Directions on using the kit were enclosed. 3 -7 days after publication of the kit, a telephone survey of newspaper readers was undertaken to evaluate the impact and cost effectiveness. RESULTS: 603 people were contacted over the telephone. 125 (20.73%) subscribed to the newspaper carrying the DIY insertion. 43.2% (54) noticed the insertion of which 88.89% (48) read the enclosed instructions carefully. 58.33% respondents felt sufficiently motivated to contact an ophthalmologist. Graduates had a 3.83 times higher probability of reading the communication insertion compared with others. Differences in relation to other demographic variables were not statistically significant. CONCLUSIONS: Newspapers are an excellent medium for communicating self appraisal kits for vision testing. The medium is cost effective and has significant reach in the urban agglomerates of India.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

Sharing stories: complex intervention for diabetes education in minority ethnic groups who do not speak English.

OBJECTIVE: To develop and refine a complex intervention for diabetes support and education in minority ethnic groups, delivered through bilingual health advocates. DESIGN: Action research framework-a variety of methods used in an emergent and developmental manner, in partnership with clinicians, managers, and service users, drawing especially but not exclusively on narrative methods. SETTING: Deprived inner London district. INTERVENTIONS: Development and evaluation of three components of the complex intervention: a group based learning set for bilingual health advocates, in which stories about clients with diabetes formed the basis for action learning; advocate led support and education groups for people with diabetes, which used personal stories as the raw material for learning and action; organisational support to help to develop these new models and embed them within existing services. RESULTS: Both advocate groups and user groups were popular and well evaluated. Through storytelling, advocates identified and met their own educational needs in relation to diabetes and the unmet needs of service users. In the advocate led user groups, story fragments were exchanged in a seemingly chaotic way that the research team initially found difficult to facilitate or follow. Stories were not so much told as enacted and were often centred on discussion of "what to do." Whereas some organisations welcomed, successfully implemented, and sustained the advocate led groups, others failed to do so. A key component of the complex intervention was organisational support. CONCLUSIONS: An action research approach allowed engagement with an underserved group of health service staff and with hard to reach service users. The study produced subjective benefits to these groups locally as well as a worked-up complex intervention that will now be formally tested in a randomised controlled trial.

Attitude to Health↗
PubMed1999

Questionnaire survey of interpreter use in accident and emergency departments in the UK.

OBJECTIVE: To determine the support for a national telephone interpreter service from accident and emergency (A&E) departments across the UK, and the factors that may influence that support. To determine the nature of interpreter needs for these departments. METHODS: Postal questionnaire survey of 255 A&E departments in the UK. RESULTS: A total of 197 replies were received, a response rate of 77.3%. Altogether 186 respondents answered the question on support for a national telephone interpreter service and 124 (66.7%) would support one. Those departments in favour were no more likely to have required an interpreter in the last seven days (chi 2 = 0.16, df = 1, p = 0.69), be in the inner city (Fisher's exact test, two sided probability, p = 1), have predominantly local population needs compared with tourist needs (chi 2 = 0.65, df = 1, p = 0.42), or be current users of a telephone interpreter service (chi 2 = 0.01, df = 1, p = 0.93). Seventy-nine of 180 (42.9%) departments had used some form of interpreter in the seven days preceding completion of the survey. Seventy-six of 86 (88.4%) of those departments using face to face interpreters had experienced difficulty obtaining an interpreter out of hours. Nationally, the following proportion of all A&E departments listed the named language as occurring among the three most common languages requiring interpretation: French 0.46 (95% confidence interval 0.42 to 0.50), Urdu 0.30 (0.26 to 0.34), and German 0.24 (0.21 to 0.27). CONCLUSIONS: There is widespread need and support for a national telephone interpreter service that would match the requirements of 24 hour emergency health care provision.

Communication Barriers↗
PubMed2007

Paradoxical recovery in a bilingual patient with aphasia after right capsuloputaminal infarction.

We report the case of a bilingual dextral patient, who presented with an uncommon pattern of aphasic deficit following a right capsulo-putaminal infarction. In this patient, the linguistic deficit concerned the use of her mother tongue (Galician, L1) much more than the lesser practised second language (Spanish, L2). Our patient presented spontaneous fluent speech in L2 but not in L1, automatic translation into L2, and impaired repetition in L1, whereas comprehension was spared in both L1 and L2. Reading and writing were less valuable due to educational interference (reduced schooling). Spontaneous speech 16 months after the stroke showed the stability of the impairment. This is the first reporting of a crossed subcortical aphasia in a bilingual patient.

Aged↗
PubMed1999

Unidirectional dyslexia in a polyglot.

Alexia is usually seen after ischaemic insults to the dominant parietal lobe. A patient is described with a particular alexia to reading Hebrew (right to left), whereas no alexia was noted when reading in English. This deficit evolved after a hypertensive right occipitoparietal intracerebral haemorrhage, and resolved gradually over the ensuing year as the haematoma was resorbed. The deficit suggests the existence of a separate, language associated, neuronal network within the right hemisphere important to different language reading modes.

Aged↗