Intonation is the melody and soul of speech, and plays an important role in oral communication. Nevertheless, the acquisition of English intonation by Chinese EFL learners is far from being satisfactory. It is found by empirical study that the main problems existing in acquiring English rising tone are improper placement of nucleus stress, failure…

Considering the contradictory research on explicit teaching of suprasegmentals, the present study aims to investigate the effects of explicit instruction of L2 English learners' perception of prosodically ambiguous intonation patterns, as well as the possible effects of reported musical familiarity on intonation acquisition. A control group and a…

Saudi college students majoring in translation take 6 interpreting courses. In those courses, they practice listening to and interpreting authentic lectures in a variety of subject areas. Results of an interpreting pretest showed that college students majoring in an interpreting course have problems with media reports. They have difficulty…

Undoubtedly, different learning contexts offer different opportunities for foreign language practice. This article focuses on context effects, and reports on the findings of the "Study Abroad and Language Acquisition" (SALA) project, which has examined in depth the impact of two learning contexts, SA within the European Community Action…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine sentence-recognition performance for a large, diverse group of nonnative speakers of English on the recently developed Basic English Lexicon (BEL) sentence materials and to determine whether BEL sentence lists are equated in difficulty for this population. Method: The BEL sentences were presented…

The mechanisms underlying the poorer serial recall of talker-variable lists (e.g., alternating female-male voices) as compared with single-voice lists were examined. We tested the novel hypothesis that this "talker variability effect" arises from the tendency for perceptual organization to partition the list into streams based on voice…

Neighborhood density refers to the number of words that sound similar to a given word. Previous studies have found that neighborhood density influences the recognition of spoken words (Luce & Pisoni, 1998); however, this work has focused almost exclusively on monosyllabic words in English. To investigate the effects of neighborhood density on…

This article honours Adele Miccio's life work by reflecting on the utility of phonetic transcription. The first section reviews the literature on cases where children whose speech appears to neutralize a contrast in the adult language are found on closer examination to produce a contrast ("covert contrast"). This study presents evidence…

The value of waveform displays as visual feedback was explored in a training study involving perception and production of L2 Japanese by beginning-level L1 English learners. A pretest-posttest design compared auditory-visual (AV) and auditory-only (A-only) Web-based training. Stimuli were singleton and geminate /t,k,s/ followed by /a,u/ in two…

Listeners rely on native-language rhythm in segmenting speech; in different languages, stress-, syllable- or mora-based rhythm is exploited. The rhythmic similarity hypothesis holds that where two languages have similar rhythm, listeners of each language should segment their own and the other language similarly. Such similarity in listening was…

This laboratory experiment utilizes the characteristic aromas of some functional groups to exploit the sense of smell as a discriminating tool in an organic qualitative analysis scheme. Students differentiate a variety of compounds by their aromas and based on their olfactory classification identify an unknown functional group. Students then…

One of the major challenges facing South African higher education institutions is to deal with the learning preferences and styles of an increasing diverse student population. Although much research has been conducted on the identification of learning styles theories for classroom application, little attention has been devoted to the investigation…

Applying optimal stimulation theory, the present study explored the development of sustained attention as a dynamic process. It examined the interaction of modality and temperament over time in children and adults. Second-grade children and college-aged adults performed auditory and visual vigilance tasks. Using the Carey temperament…

We present the results from an experiment that tests the perception of English consonantal sequences by Korean speakers and we confirm that perceptual epenthesis in a second language (L2) arises from syllable structure restrictions of the first language (L1), rather than linear co-occurrence restrictions. Our study replicates and extends Dupoux,…

Auditory perception of English minimal pairs was tested with or without noise background. Each subject was interviewed after the test to collect information regarding their early experience on learning English as a foreign language. This study was designed to examine the differential effects of learning English at three age-starting points and two…