Lawrence Today magazine, Fall 2004
Professor
of Psychology Terry Rew-Gottfried has
been awarded a 10,000 kroner grant (approximately $1,500 U.S.) by the Norwegian
Marshall Fund Committee to help support his sabbatical research during April
and May of 2005 in Trondheim, Norway.
Rew-Gottfried will pursue a two-part research project. The first phase is
an extension of earlier work he conducted in Denmark, comparing Danish and
English spectral and durational
information in vowels. In collaboration with a Norwegian colleague, he will
investigate differences in how Norwegian listeners, in comparison to Danes,
perceive the vowel contrasts
of their native and their second language.
The second part of his research will focus on determining whether the use
of linguistic tones in Norwegian provides native speakers of that language
with an advantage in learning the lexical tones of Mandarin Chinese.
Mandarin
Chinese uses phonemic tones that are primarily cued acoustically by contours
of pitch. For example, the syllable ma means “mother,” “hemp,” “horse,” or “scold,” depending
on whether the pitch is high-level, mid-rising, low-dipping or high-falling,
respectively. Like Mandarin, Norwegian varies pitch contour in some words
to indicate different meanings. While American English listeners have considerable
difficulty in differentiating the phonemic tones of Mandarin, native Norwegian
listeners may have less difficulty, given their native language’s use
of linguistic tone to make phonemic distinctions.
Rew-Gottfried’s research is expected to address more broadly the question
in psycholinguistics and second-language learning of what factors help or
hinder language learners in speaking and understanding a second language.
Learners vary considerably, according to the Lawrence psychologist, in their
ability to achieve native-like competence in producing and perceiving speech
sounds.
The research has important implications for theories of speech processing
across many different languages.
A member of the Lawrence psychology department since
1986, Rew-Gottfried has spent more than 20 years investigating the effect
of second-language
learning
on listeners’ ability
to identify and discriminate unfamiliar speech sounds, how acoustic characteristics
of different languages differ with the context in which they are spoken,
as well as the relationship of musical ability and second-language learning.