Purpose: One of the central questions in speech production research is to what degree certain structures have an inherent difficulty and to what degree repeated encounter and practice make them easier to process. The goal of this article was to determine the extent to which frequency and sonority distance of consonant clusters predict production…

Across many language backgrounds, a consistent hurdle to accessing United States higher education is understanding the basic information necessary to apply for admission and financial aid and complete the many enrollment management processes necessary to begin one's college career (apply for housing, receive and submit vaccinations, register for…

Intelligibility is a critically important aspect for effective oral communication. This study explored salient (important) pronunciation errors and their relative roles in the intelligibility of nonnative speech based on listener judgments. Speech samples, collected from speakers with a Turkish as a native language (L1) background, were presented…

In this study, neural representation of adult second language (L2) speakers' implicit grammatical knowledge was investigated. Advanced L2 speakers of Japanese living in Japan, as well as L1 Japanese speakers, performed a word-monitoring task (proposed as an implicit knowledge test) in the MRI scanner. Behavioral measures were obtained from…

This study aimed to develop the pronunciation skills of students who learned Turkish as a foreign language and determine the extent of the instruction given for that purpose by observing its cognitive effects. It was designed as an in-class action research and carried out with nine students speaking different languages. Of those, five were…

This study seeks to clarify whether teachers are able to distinguish between essays written by English L2 students or generated by ChatGPT. 47 instructors who hold experience teaching English to native speakers of Japanese in universities or other higher education institutions were tested on whether they could identify between human written essays…

When acquiring a second language, learners must become able to perceive the difference between novel sounds ("discrimination") and also associate strings of sounds with distinct vocabulary items ("lexical encoding"). Recent research has questioned whether discrimination is a sufficient or necessary condition for encoding, and…

Children are adept at learning their language's speech-sound categories, but just how these categories function in their developing lexicon has not been mapped out in detail. Here, we addressed whether, in a language-guided looking procedure, 2-year-olds would respond to a mispronunciation of the voicing of the initial consonant of a newly learned…

Previous event-related potentials (ERP) research has investigated how foreign accent modulates listeners' neural responses to lexical-semantic and morphosyntactic errors. We extended this line of research to consider whether pronunciation errors in Mandarin Chinese are processed differently when a foreign-accented speaker makes them relative to…

Previous studies on spoken word production have shown that native English speakers used phoneme-sized units (e.g., a word-initial phoneme, C) to produce English words, and native Mandarin Chinese speakers employed syllable-sized units (e.g., a word-initial consonant and vowel, CV) as phonological encoding units in Chinese. With spoken word…