Language Technologies Institute Colloquium
Speaker
MARTA ORTEGA LLEBARIA
Associate Professor
Department of Linguistics
University of Pittsburgh
When
-
Where
In Person and Virtual - ET
Description
The acquisition of the suprasegmental features of pitch, duration, and intensity in a second language by adult speakers has been investigated from many different fields, theoretical approaches, and methodologies. I will address three areas, stress, rhythm, and sentence intonation from both a traditional SLA approach and less traditional perspectives illustrating the trends and evolution of the field in the last two decades as well as present day challenges.
The acquisition of L2 stress has been investigated mainly from perception. The factors that cause “stress deafness” in L2 learners have been examined from two approaches. The phonetic approach uses cue-weights and L1-to-L2 transfer to explain perceptual difficulties (e.g., Cooper et al. 2002, Kim & Tremblay, 2021, Ortega-Llebaria et al. 2013), while the phonological approach attributes perceptual difficulties to the presence versus absence of phonological representations of stress in the speakers’ L1 (e.g., Dupoux et al. 2010; Ortin & Simonet, 2021). These apparently contradictory approaches are reconciled once we consider the different linguistic meanings conveyed by stress, tone, and pitch accents highlighting the importance of defining meaning in relation to prosodic units (Ortega-Llebaria and Wu, 2021).
Research on speech rhythm measures (Arvaniti 2009, 2012; Pellegrino et al. 2021) and on the acquisition of L2 rhythm (e.g., Li and Post, 2014; Polyanskaya et al. 2020) have evolved in parallel, being the progress of the second contingent on the progress of the first. I will summarize the evolution of rhythm measurements in the last two decades. Applying these measures to L2 acquisition showed that L2 rhythm was learnable unraveling the factors that modulated this learning. This literature underscores the need to find automatic and efficient ways of measuring prosodic units in big data to advance our understanding of L2 rhythm.
Finally, the acquisition of sentence intonation in the last two decades generated a vast cross-linguistic documentation of intonation grammars (e.g., the intonation system of American English, the intonation system of Mandarin Chinese, the intonation system of the Mandarin Chinese spoken in Taiwan, etc), and in doing so, researchers had to confront the challenge of understanding sources of variation and representing them within intonation systems. I will address two sources of variation, the geographical/dialectal variation (e.g., Prieto and Roseano 2009-2013) and the sociolinguistic variation, and their implications in L2 acquisition. More details
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Growing in the bilingual city of Barcelona awoke in Marta an early interest in languages and bilingualism. After studying Romance Philology at Universitat de Barcelona, Marta earned an M.A. in Speech and Hearing and a Ph.D. in Linguistics at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her post-doc at University College London focused on speech perception and second languages. Currently, she works as an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at University of Pittsburgh. Marta is a phonetician working in prosody, i.e., the variations of pitch, duration and intensity that convey melody, meaning, and emotion to language. She is interested in how prosody shapes speech perception and the mental representations of words and sentences. Her background in Hispanic linguistics, acoustics, laboratory phonology, and speech therapy inform her experimental work.
In Person and Zoom Participation. See announcement.