Two experiments (N = 154 in total) using the Hebb repetition effect--the enhancement of serial recall performance for a repeated sequence in among otherwise nonrepeated sequences--reveal a key role for active articulatory-planning processes in verbal sequence learning, contrary to a prominent, phonological-store based, model (Burgess & Hitch,…

This study examined Korean learners' production of intervocalic English biconsonantal clusters consisting of /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/, or /[eng] / followed by /l/ or /[voiced alveolar approximant]/. The results of the production experiment showed several factors influencing Korean learners' production. First, Korean learners' production was…

This article provides a review of previous studies that have examined the effects of orthography on establishing contrastive phonological representations in second language acquisition and presents results from an original study on Mandarin speakers' production of English stops investigating how the presence of orthography affects the production…

Most psycholinguistic models of reading aloud and of speech production do not include linguistic representations more fine-grained than the phoneme, despite the fact that the available empirical evidence suggests that feature-level representations are activated during reading aloud and speech production. In a series of masked-priming experiments…

Auditory speech appears to be linked to visual articulatory gestures and orthography through different mechanisms. Yet, both types of visual information have a strong influence on speech processing. The present study directly compared their contributions to speech processing using a novel word learning paradigm. Native speakers of French, who were…

The "gleam-glum effect" is a novel sound symbolic finding that words with the /i:/-phoneme (like "gleam") are perceived more positive emotionally than matched words with the /[open-mid back unrounded vowel]/-phoneme (like "glum"). We provide data that not only confirm the effect but also are consistent with an…

Purpose: As a class, fricatives are more "resistant" to consonant-vowel coarticulation than other English sounds. This study investigates the relative coarticulatory resistance of /[voiceless dental fricative], s, [voiceless palato-alveolar fricative]/ in child and adult speech to better understand the acquisition of individuated speech…

Purpose: Liquids are among the last sounds to be acquired by English-speaking children. The current study considers their acquisition from an articulatory timing perspective by investigating anticipatory posturing for /l/ versus /[voiced alveolar approximant]/ in child and adult speech. Method: In Experiment 1, twelve 5-year-old, twelve…

This study investigated the role of cross-linguistic similarity in the acquisition of Russian initial stop contrasts by Chinese learners, addressing two specific research questions: (1) How similar are Russian voiced stops to Mandarin stops for Chinese learners?; and (2) How can the speech learning model (SLM) be applied to account for the…

Purpose: This study used a cross-sequential design to identify developmental changes in narrative speech rhythm and intonation. The aim was to provide a robust, clinically relevant characterization of normative changes in speech prosody across the early school-age years. Method: Structured spontaneous narratives were elicited annually from 60…

Research attempting to understand the intermediate stages of first-language acquisition and disordered speech has led to the discovery of covert contrast. A covert contrast is a statistically reliable difference between phonemes that is produced by a language learner, but in a way that cannot be heard readily by a listener of the target language.…

The present study aimed to identify Turkish language sounds that Arabic native speakers experience pronunciation difficulties with when learning Turkish and make various suggestions on how to resolve this problem. Qualitative research method and observation technique were used in the study. The data were collected in 2016 and the second half of…

Perhaps it is inevitable that non-native speakers' English articulations are displayed with their local accents, which are usually based on their mother tongues or dominant languages. However, fluency in English pronunciation and communication is still achievable by these groups of speakers in outer and expanding circles. In these two circles,…

We examined the contribution of the phonological loop to immediate free recall (IFR) and immediate serial recall (ISR) of lists of between one and 15 words. Following Baddeley (1986, 2000, 2007, 2012), we assumed that visual words could be recoded into the phonological store when presented silently but that recoding would be prevented by…

Motivated by predictions of the theory of Input Processing, this study adds to previous research on second language (L2) Spanish pronunciation learning by investigating the impact of two distinct types of pronunciation assignments on first language (L1) English L2 Spanish students' improvement in pronunciation of the vowels /e, o/. Two sections of…