1. Speech sound perception is influenced by higher order knowledge and believes about the language variety one is listening to. This holds for linguistically naïve and linguistically trained listeners. In a matched-guise experiment, we investigated the perception of voiced stops [b d ɡ] and plain voiceless stops [p t k] in Chinese and whether linguistically trained subjects were biased toward the information regarding the variety they were listening to: Wu or Mandarin dialect. Wu dialects have breathy consonants but Mandarin dialects do not. In reality they listened to the same stimuli twice.
It turned out that neither native Mandarin nor native Wu subjects were able to correctly perceive the voicing contrast. Wu listeners mainly relied on tone to distinguish the voicing contrast—since voicing always co-occur with low register tones. Mandarin subjects relied on tone as well as the information that the dialect was either Wu or Mandarin. They reported more voiced consonants if they believed they were listening to Wu.
2. During a substantial part of signed interaction, the non-dominant hand is not active in articulating new lexical information: one-handed signs constitute about half of the lexicon in many sign languages, and in signed interaction one-handed signs are used for more than half of the time. A variety of linguistic activities is performed by the non-dominant hand during that time, while being held steady in space: from the prosodic spreading analysed by Sandler and others to discourse markers (buoys) described by Liddell and colleagues. Each of these functions can be clearly linked to the grammar of the language. The present study aims to find out what the non-dominant hand does the rest of the time. Investigating data from the Corpus NGT (Sign Language of the Netherlands), different types of activity were found other than ‘full rest on the lap’. In this presentation, I will discuss both spreading of individual phonological features overneighbouring signs and ‘echoing’ movements, where the non-dominant hand copies features of the dominant hand.
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