2016 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
第二言語使用時における無声・有声休止と文構造の関連性
| Project/Area Number |
15K02765
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| Research Institution | Waseda University |
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Principal Investigator |
Rose Ralph 早稲田大学, 理工学術院, 准教授 (30404916)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2015-04-01 – 2018-03-31
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| Keywords | 第２言語習得 / コーパス言語学 / 無声休止 / 有声休止 / silent pause / filled pause |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
Annotation of the Crosslinguistic Corpus of Hesitation Phenomena to include structural information including utterance and clause boundary markers was completed. Analysis of these results leads to the conclusion that silent pauses are closely related to both utterance and clause boundaries in both first and second language production. Filled pauses, on the other hand, did not show any special connection to utterance or clause boundaries, occurring less often at such boundaries, and with a duration that was typical for filled pauses as a whole. This leads to the conclusion that silent pauses, moreso than filled pauses, are related to problems in discourse and syntactic processing.
These results set the stage for carrying out several psycholinguistic tests of hypotheses concerning the perception and production of silent and filled pauses in speech. In order to carry out these experiments, a specialized tool was created called JESPR (Javascript-enabled self-paced reading), a Javascript library for carrying out psycholinguistic experiments using a self-paced reading paradigm. The library is capable of managing self-paced reading experiments on desktop or touch-screen platforms and allows an experimenter to customize their experiment freely while getting results that afterward can be quickly analyzed in popular statistics applications. The library is an open-source project hosted for public use on the GitHub platform for project sharing.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
3: Progress in research has been slightly delayed.
Reason
The corpus annotation process took more time than anticipated and delayed the analysis of the data. In particular, the process of marking clause boundaries in the transcripts was very time-consuming because of the sometimes disconnected and disfluent nature of spontaneous speech. Also, the process of determining time-interval data for the transcripts took much time and labor. Although the process can be performed partially automatically, manual checking is still needed
The next main procedure--gathering experimental data through a perceptual paradigm--was also partly delayed while completing and testing the JESPR library. Although the library was completed before the year end, it was decided to delay the actual experimentation until the following project year for the purposes of easier experimental management.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
Based on the results of the corpus investigation, two experiments will be carried out in this year. First will be a perceptual experiment using a self-paced reading task paradigm. In this test, the use of silent and filled pauses will be manipulated in listening stimuli in order to see how it affects the subsequent reaction times of participants in a time-limited task. The results of this experiment will then be used as the basis for the final experiment, a production experiment. In this test, participants’ discourse and syntactic planning capability will be controlled in order to elicit different predicted patterns in their use of silent and filled pauses in speech.
Finally, as the project approaches its conclusion, a workshop will take place during the year to report on findings for this specific project as well as to invite speakers with related research projects to share their own findings in a collaborative event.
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| Causes of Carryover |
Originally, a public workshop had been planned for the second year of the project, but given certain delays in the corpus analysis as well as some logistical difficulties in scheduling the project during the year, it was decided to put off the event until the third year, and therefore to carry over some of the funds originally designated for the event to the following year.
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| Expenditure Plan for Carryover Budget |
Together with the funds leftover from the previous year of the project, the funds for the final year of this project will be used for carrying out the two planned experiments. This involves remuneration to the experimental participants as well as payment to the research support staff for assistance in managing the experiments and carrying out annotation and analysis of the data afterward. Funds will also be used to support the planned workshop, including transportion and communication funds for some of the invited speakers. Finally, results of the work on this project will be reported at conferences and other events during the year, so some funds will be used to cover travel expenses to these events.
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