We are happy to announce that the Language & Brain Lab has been awarded a SSHRC Insight Grant from 2012-2017 to continue our research in the areas of multi-lingual and multi-modal speech perception, processing, and learning. See our Funding and Current Projects pages for details.
Cooper, A. and Wang, Y. (in press). The influence of linguistic and musical experience on Cantonese word learning. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
While at the LABlab, Angela Cooper was a PI on two projects: Factors Influencing Cantonese Lexical Tone and Tone Word Acquisition and Effects of Linguistic and Musical Experience on Non-native Perception of Thai Vowel Duration. She is now a PhD student at Northwestern University. http://akcooper.wordpress.com/
A cross-language investigation of phonetic and phonological processing of lexical tone
Date: Thursday May 24, 2012
Time: 10:30am
Location: Bennett Library Room 2020
Please join us for LABlab member Xianghua Wu's PhD Thesis Defense on May 24th, 2012!
In an investigation of how lexical tone is perceived and processed at the phonetic and phonological levels, listeners from diverse language backgrounds participated in three perceptual studies. In the first, native Mandarin and Thai listeners assimilated non-native tones to their native tone categories. Results indicated that occurrence of a lower-level phonetic and a higher-level phonological assimilation process was related to listeners' tone experience, as inexperienced listeners recognized only the phonetic distinctions, whereas experienced listeners were sensitive to both phonetic and phonological distinctions between native and non-native tone categories.
In the second study, native Mandarin, Thai and English listeners participated in a forced-choice tone perception test in which they identified the four Mandarin tone categories. Identification accuracy and confusion patterns revealed that previous tone experience predicted tone perception at the phonetic and phonological levels. Better performance was demonstrated for native than non-native, and experienced than inexperienced listeners. Experienced Thai listeners also showed more native-like performance than experienced English listeners. Lexical information from the carrier words was also found to help Mandarin and English listeners recognize difficult tones.
In the third study, participants from the second one completed a dichotic listening test assessing tone lateralization in the brain. The results demonstrated a strong influence of acoustic properties, as tones with dynamic F0 contours were lateralized to the left hemisphere while those with flatter F0 contours were lateralized to the right hemisphere. Meanwhile, native and non-native tone experience was associated with a larger degree of left hemisphere activation for Mandarin and experienced Thai listeners relative to those in the remaining groups.
In summary, these three studies indicate tone perception and processing at both phonetic and phonological levels. In relation to tone experience, inexperienced listeners may attach more importance to phonetic variation while experienced listeners are sensitive to both phonetic and phonological differences. In terms of theoretical contributions, tone perception results extend the current models of speech perception to the suprasegmental level while tone lateralization results provide evidence supporting the acoustic and functional hypotheses.
Members of Examining Committee:
Chair, Dr. Chung-hye Han
Sr. Supervisor, Dr. Murray Munro
Co-Supervisor, Dr. Yue Wang
Internal Examiner, Dr. Christian Guilbault
External Examiner, Dr. Valter Ciocco
We are happy to announce that one of our research assistants, Beverly Wu, has received a full-time Vice President Research Undergraduate Student Research Award (VPR USRA) to conduct research under the supervision of Dr. Yue Wang in the Language and Brain Lab for the duration of the Summer 2012 semester.
Congratulations, Beverly!
The Language and Brain Lab is now on Facebook and Twitter!
Visit us at facebook.com/SFULABlab and at twitter.com/SFULABlab
We are happy to announce that one of our research assistants, Alison Kumpula, has received a full-time Vice President Research Undergraduate Student Research Award (VPR USRA) to conduct research under the supervision of Dr. Yue Wang in the Language and Brain Lab for the duration of the Spring 2012 semester.
Congratulations, Alison!
This semester, we are continuing to do work on a number of projects, including the EEG-Musician study (EEG-M), the Cross Language Tone Perception (XLTP) study, the Pitch Accent Learning (PAL) study, and the Audio-Visual Accent (AVA) study.
If you would like to participate in any of these studies as a subject, visit the Participants Needed section of the LABlab site to see if you qualify. We need lots of participants, so don't be shy - email us today for more information.
Participants receive $10/hour, with our gratitude for your participation in furthering language research!
Dr. Jennifer A. Alexander, our National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the LABlab, was interviewed on Vancouver's Chinese Fairchild Radio for a segment about Linguistics and the research being conducted at the Language and Brain Lab. The first segment was broadcast on November 18th, 2011, and the second segment will be broadcast on AM 1470 on Friday November 25th, 2011 from 10:30-11:30am.
Click here to listen to a clip from the November 18th broadcast (14 minutes, Cantonese and English).
This semester, we are continuing to do work on a number of projects, including the EEG-Musician study (EEG-M), the Cross Language Tone Perception (XLTP) study, the Pitch Accent Learning (PAL) study, and the Audio-Visual Accent (AVA) study.
If you would like to participate in any of these studies as a subject, visit the Participants Needed section of the LABlab site to see if you qualify. We need lots of participants, so don't be shy - email us today for more information.
Participants receive $10/hour, with our gratitude for your participation in furthering language research!
August 8th, 2011 - New Journal Article Published in Applied Psycholinguistics
Congratulations to past and present LABlab members Xianghua Wu, Jung-Yueh Tu, and Lab Director Yue Wang on the publication of a new paper in Applied Psycholinguistics, entitled "Native and Nonnative Processing of Japanese Pitch Accent". Download PDF
ABSTRACT - The theoretical framework of this study is based on the prevalent debate of whether prosodic processing is influenced by higher level linguistic-specific circuits or reflects lower level encoding of physical properties. Using the dichotic listening technique, the study investigates the hemispheric processing of Japanese pitch accent by native Japanese listeners and two groups of nonnative listeners with no prior pitch accent experience but differing in their native language experience with linguistic pitch: native listeners of Mandarin (a tone language with higher linguistic functional use of pitch) and native listeners of English (a stress language with lower functional use of pitch). The overall results reveal that, for both native and nonnative listeners, the processing of Japanese pitch accent is less lateralized (compared to lexical tone processing, which has been found to be a left hemisphere property). However, detailed analysis with individual pitch accents across groups shows a right hemisphere preference for processing the high–accent–low (H∗L) pattern, a left hemisphere preference for LH∗, and no hemisphere dominance for LH, indicating a significant reliance on the acoustic cues. These patterns are particularly prominent with the English listeners who are least experienced with linguistic pitch. Together, the findings suggest an interplay of linguistic and acoustic aspects in the processing of Japanese pitch accent by native and nonnative listeners.
This study examines the role of linguistic experience in the perception and hemispheric processing of Japanese pitch accent by native Japanese listeners and two groups of nonnative listeners differing in their native language (L1) backgrounds with linguistic pitch: Mandarin Chinese and English.
July 28, 2011 - ICPhS-PLRT Conference Practice Session
The Language and Brain Lab would like to invite you to attend a practice session for the talks and posters to be presented at the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences and its satellite meeting, the Psycholinguistic Representation of Tone. This practice session will be held in AQ 6106 on July 28th from 10 AM to 1:30 PM. Light snacks and refreshments will be provided throughout the session. We hope you can join us!
Click here to download a PDF of the schedule for the session along with the abstracts for each of the presentations.
Dr. Jen Alexander and Xianghua Wu were invited to present their latest research findings during the poster sessions at the 161st Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Seattle, Washington, which took place May 23-27, 2011. Dr. Yue Wang and Saya Kawase also travelled with the group to participate in the conference.
The Language and Brain Lab has a number of projects launching this summer, including a new branch of the The Processing and Learning of Pitch in Speech project, studying the differences in tone perception between musicians and non-musicians using EEG, as well as the Audio-Visual Accent project, led by Saya Kawase (MA student).
If you would like to participate in either of these studies as a subject, visit the Participants Needed section of the LABlab site to see if you qualify. We need lots of participants, so don't be shy - email us today for more information.
Participants receive $10/hour, with our gratitude for your participation in furthering language research!