Language Acquisition, Processing, and Pedagogy Lab

These student-led projects have come from the "Language in the time of COVID-19" interdisciplinary course, as well as guided sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics independent studies. This research tries to understand how the pandemic has affected various aspects of language use.

How do face masks affect the recognition of minimal pairs (words that only differ by one speech sound) that involve lip rounding (e.g., 'ship' has lip-rounding, but 'sip' does not)? The study found that face masks do not make it harder to discriminate between minimal pairs like ship/sip. This was the case for first and second language English listeners. This study was published in an undergraduate research journal at Johns Hopkins University. Read more about the students and their project here.
• Zhang, L., Vasudev, A., Hill, S., & Stempien-Smith, A. (2021). The Role of Face Masks in Native and Non-Native Speech Perception. Richard Macksey Journal, 2(1), 27862.

Do listeners have race-based expectations of talkers when talking about COVID-19? The study found that speaker judgments varied in response to the type of language the speaker used. For example, saying 'COVID-19 impacts people' versus 'COVID-19 harms people' resulted in differ judgments about the speaker. No overall difference was found for speakers of different races, but an exploratory analysis found interesting follow-up questions to explore. This work was presented at the 2022 Linguistics Society of America annual conference. Read more about the students and their project here.
• Cole, K., Chan, B., & Wiener, S. Black Aggression in the Wake of Pandemic Panic: Effects of Word Choice and Race on Speaker Judgments. 96th Linguistics Society of America Meeting, Washington DC, January 7, 2022.

This research involves acoustic-phonetic studies of speech perception and production. These primarily lab-based studies are rooted in phonetic theory and, we hope, have some potential application to teaching and learning.

What acoustic dimensions or cues are talkers and listeners weighting and does this cue-weighting change with different communicative demands? This study looks at phonated and whispered Mandarin speech and how amplitude and duration cues are adjusted by the talker and the listener.
•Zhang, H., Wiener, S., & Holt, L. L. (2022). Adjustment of cue weighting in speech by speakers and listeners: Evidence from amplitude and duration modifications of Mandarin Chinese tone. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 151 (2), 992-1005.

What makes acquiring fricatives like /v/ and /θ/ so difficult? This study looked at the acquisition of English /v, θ, ð/ by adult L2 learners.
•Wiener, S., Gao, Z., Li, X., & Wu, Z. (Accepted). Acquisition of non-sibilant anterior English fricatives by adult second language learners. Journal of Second Language Pronunciation.

This research examines how words in a first and second language are stored, activated, processed, and retrieved, and how lexical knowledge interacts with other cognitive processes.

How does knowing a word like 'made,' affect learning and accessing new L2 words that sound identical but have different meanings and orthography, like 'maid'? Using Mandarin Chinese as the test language--a language with a relatively high degree of homophony--the study found a homophone advantage. Homophones were learned more accurately and identified faster than non-homophones.
• Liu, J. & Wiener, S. (2020). Homophones facilitate lexical development in a second language. System, 91, xx-xx.

How do heritage language bilinguals access words in their mental lexicon? Theoretically, a bilingual must store information in memory about how words sound (phonology), how they are written (orthography), and what they mean (semantics). Heritage speakers are unique in that they are often exposed to speech as children but do not necessarily reach an adult-like level of proficiency. The study found that exposure to a heritage language as a child affects how bilingual lexical information is stored and accessed.
• Wiener, S. & Tokowicz, N. (2021). Language proficiency is only part of the story: Lexical access in heritage and non-heritage bilinguals. Second Language Research, 37(4), 681-695.

How does lexical knowledge--like knowing that 'kiss' is a word and 'giss' is not a word--affect categorization of phonetic categories (like /k/ and /g/)? The study found that L2 Mandarin listeners are biased by their L2 lexical knowledge (knowing that 'hei' with a high-level tone is a word resulted in more high-level tones reported for 'hei' stimuli). Interestingly, this effect was constrained by a listener's perceptual abilities. Even knowing that 'hei1' is a word may not matter if the listener cannot hear the pitch difference involved in Mandarin tones.
•Wiener, S. & Liu, J. (2021). Effects of perceptual abilities and lexical knowledge on the phonetic categorization of second language speech. JASA Express Letters 1, 045202.

This research is aimed at understanding how phonetic, phonological, morphological, and syntactic information is processed and understood in real time. This research uses eye-tracking technology to examine language users' online processing.

What is the time course of knowledge-based (e.g., closets contain clothes) and morphosyntactic-based (e.g., singular/plural, gender, classifier) cue integration in native and non-native listeners? This study found that listeners immediately integrate their knowledge of real world context with language specific semantics.
•Wiener, S. & Rohde, H. (2021). What did you expect? Linguistic prediction occurs in both a first and second language but there are differences. Poster at the 3rd International Symposium on Bilingual and L2 Processing in Adults and Children (ISBPAC).

How does speech from multiple talkers (relative to a single talker) and explicit instruction (relative to no instruction) affect L2 spoken word recognition? This study found that while instruction type did not affect listeners, multiple talkers (i.e., high variability speech) resulted in more uncertainty by the listener and a greater reliance on likely sound patterns.
•Wiener, S., Ito, K., & Speer, S. R. (2021). Effects of multi-talker input and instructional method on the dimension-based statistical learning of syllable-tone combinations: An eye-tracking study. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 43 (1), 155-180.

This research is aimed at developing novel methods of instruction and learning rooted in experimental design. These studies are highly interdisciplinary and aimed at promoting a wide range of linguistic skills.

Can L2 word learning be improved by creating short phrases about the word's meaning? This study, by Zhe Gao (ABD; Carnegie Mellon Univeristy) examined whether Mandarin disyllabic compound words like 'salary' (xin1shui3), which consist of the morpheme for firewood (xin1) and the morpheme for water (shui3), can be better learned if the phrase 'a salary helps pay for firewood and water' is presented to the learner. The study found that this elaborative encoding method improved learning and retention of new L2 Mandarin words.
•Gao, Z. (2020). L2 learning of opaque Chinese compounds through elaborative encoding. Chinese as a Second Language, 55 (1), 1-23.

Can a videogame teach a second language better than a classroom? This work explores an alternative to traditional classroom-based explicit learning: incidental task-based learning. In our approach, a learner’s attention is directed away from the to-be-learned foreign-language speech categories by an engaging videogame task that does not involve overt category decisions or language learning per se. Our preliminary findings suggest that incidental task-based learning of non-native speech categories supports a wide range of perception and production outcomes. This work is funded by the NIH and Language Learning.
• Wiener, S., Murphy, T. K., Goel, A., Christel, M. G., & Holt, L. L. (2019). Incidental learning of non-speech auditory analogs scaffolds second language learners’ perception and production of Mandarin lexical tones. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, and P. Warren (Eds.), Proc. 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019 (pp. 1699-1703). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

Can structured short-term musical training be used to improve linguistic abilities for second language learners of Mandarin Chinese? The study found that a focused, 8-week musical training program can be effective in improving L2 perception of tone, especially when the music training was combined with structured classroom learning.
•Wiener, S. & Bradley, E. D. (In press). Harnessing the musician advantage: Short-term musical training affects non-native cue weighting of linguistic pitch. Language Teaching Research, xx-xx.