36 Saudi EFL freshmen students, at the College of Languages and Translation, took a listening-spelling test in which they filled out 100 blanks in a dialogue. Results indicated that 63% of the spelling errors were phonemic and 37% were graphemic. It was also found that the subjects had more problems with whole words than problems with graphemes…

People often experience difficulties when they first hear a novel accent. Prior research has shown that relatively fast natural accent accommodation can occur. However, there has been little investigation of the underlying perceptual mechanism that drives the learning. The current study examines whether phonemic boundary changes play a central…

The present study investigated Korean-accented English (KoE) intelligibility and conducted experiments in Korea, Japan, and the USA to test the benefits of listener's familiarity and identify the key phonological features of KoE. In the experiments, the participants were asked to transcribe the target (KoE) of 100 English statements each…

In two-way interactive listening, listeners are expected to use interactional skills or strategies to understand meaning, recognize interlocutors' intentions, make responses, and establish common ground. However, strategy use can be affected by learner differences and affective factors. The present study investigated the effects of group…

Building up on Munro and Derwing, the current study set out to re-examine and generalize the Functional Load (FL) principle (Brown, 1988) as a tool to identify a set of relatively crucial segmental features for successful understanding in L2 communication. In Experiment 1, 40 Japanese learners of English in English-as-Foreign-Language settings…

This paper investigates the difficulties adult second language (L2) users of English encounter with plosive consonants in the L2. It presents the results of a task examining the acquisition of plosive voicing contrasts by college students with Cypriot Greek (CG) linguistic background. The task focused on the types of errors involving plosive…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the intelligibility of English consonants and vowels produced by Chinese-native (CN), and Korean-native (KN) students enrolled in American universities. Method: 16 English-native (EN), 32 CN, and 32 KN speakers participated in this study. The intelligibility of 16 American English consonants and 16…

Access to morphological structure during lexical processing has been established across a number of languages; however, it remains unclear which constituents are held as mental representations in the lexicon. The present study examined the auditory recognition of different noun types across 2 experiments. The critical manipulations were…

This study examines common claims associated with shadowing. Studies in Japan conclude that shadowing is effective for improving learners' listening skills. Two common claims are that shadowing is effective for lower-proficiency learners and that it enhances learners' phoneme perception, thus improving listening comprehension skills. The former…