This paper examines the intonation of English statements and questions produced by Vietnamese speakers at two differing levels of proficiency. The goal of the study is three-fold: (1) analysing the final tunes and the prosodic structure observed in information-seeking questions, namely Yes-No question, Or-question, Tag-question and Wh-question,…

Musical expertise and working memory (WM) have been isolated as being the most important predictors of phonetic aptitude -- meaning the ability to imitate unfamiliar speech material. Although the link between language functions and musical expertise has been subject to many investigations, specific languages and their individual link to musical…

This study examined the differential effects of systematic perception and production practice and the role of musical ability in learning Mandarin tone-words by native English-speaking adults in a training study. In this study, all participants (N = 38; 19 for each practice group) were first taught declarative knowledge of Mandarin tones and of…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…

This study investigated the effects of temporal distribution of practice on the learning and retention of Mandarin tonal word production. Eighty native English-speaking adults with no prior knowledge of a tonal language participated in this study. They were randomly assigned to four experimental conditions varying in intersession interval (ISI)…

The high-variability training paradigm (multiple words, phonetic contexts, and talkers) has been successful for perceptual learning of tone contrasts. Here, it is extended to training native English listeners on Tokyo Japanese pitch-accent contrasts. Participants had no previous experience with lexically contrastive pitch patterns. They learned to…

This paper reports on a study investigating features related to Chinese linguistic complexities among international students enrolled in Chinese courses in China. The main objective of this study is to highlight the major feature of Chinese complexities encountered by international students and explore whether international students' native…

Increasing evidence suggests that children with developmental dyslexia exhibit a deficit not only at the segmental level of phonological processing but also, by extension, at the suprasegmental level. However, it remains unclear whether such a suprasegmental phonological processing deficit is due to a difficulty in processing acoustic cues of…

The current study investigates the effects of more explicit versus more implicit corrective feedback on beginner Mandarin learners' perception and production of Mandarin tones. The effects of oral corrective feedback have been extensively investigated for various domains of second language acquisition (see Mackey & Goo, 2007). For phonological…

Purpose: Previous studies reported that children acquire Cantonese tones before 3 years of age, supporting the assumption in models of phonological development that suprasegmental features are acquired rapidly and early in children. Yet, recent research found a large disparity in the age of Cantonese tone acquisition. This study investigated…

Prior research on ambient-language effects in babbling has often suggested infants produce language-specific phonological features within the first year. These results have been questioned in research failing to find such effects and challenging the positive findings on methodological grounds. We studied English- and Chinese-learning infants at 8,…

While it is well established that non-native speakers differ from native speakers in their perception and/or production of Mandarin lexical tones, empirical studies focusing on non-native "learners" are still limited. The objective of this study is to add to the current understanding of lexical tone perception by comparing native…

Recent research has begun to explore individual differences in statistical learning, and how those differences may be related to other cognitive abilities, particularly their effects on language learning. In this research, we explored a different type of relationship between language learning and statistical learning: the possibility that learning…

This study examined language-specific links among auditory processing, linguistic prosody awareness, and Mandarin (L1) and English (L2) word reading in 61 Mandarin-speaking, English-learning children. Three auditory discrimination abilities were measured: pitch contour, pitch interval, and rise time (rate of intensity change at tone onset).…

This article reports a study that aimed to find out whether F0 patterns of L2 English produced by Vietnamese speakers are different to those of native English speakers, whether the non-native F0 patterns are transferred from Vietnamese, and to what extent English and Vietnamese F0 profiles differ. Ten native/L1 Australian English speakers, 20…