A premise of statistical learning research is that learners attend to and learn the frequencies of co-occurring sounds in the input, or phonotactic sequences. Inherent to the concepts of both frequency and phonotactics is order, or the temporal arrangement of the relevant elements. Order is similarly inherent to statistical learning, yet the…

Phonological duration differences in quantity languages can be problematic for second language learners whose native language does not use duration contrastively. Recent studies have found improvement in the processing of non-native vowel duration contrasts with the use of listen-and-repeat training, and the current study explores the efficacy of…

This study investigates the production of Arabic intervocalic geminate obstruents as produced by American L2 learners of Arabic. The participants of the study were 24 Arabic learners (12 advanced, 12 beginners) at North Georgia University and 12 native speakers of Jordanian Arabic (the control group). An examination of the results reveals that…

This paper examines the understudied phenomenon of consonant gemination in the pronunciation of English among Levantine Arabic learners of English (LA learners). The very few studies that touched on gemination among LA learners attributed gemination to spelling in the target language (English). This study challenges this analysis and demonstrates…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the uniqueness of the pop singing genre by determining the role of the Chinese language in the creation of popular singing in education with modern innovative technologies. The paper began by determining which types of popular music were the most popular among respondents and the influence of modern…

A phoneme-detection task shows that listeners of Sepedi use semantic information in processing but not prosody (Experiment 1). Sepedi is a language with no grammaticalised prosodic expression of focus. Sepedi listeners detected phoneme targets faster when the phoneme-bearing words were focussed (as opposed to unfocussed) but not when occurring in…

Recent work has shown significant sublexical effects of long-term memory in nonword repetition (NWR) using a dichotomous consonant age of acquisition (CAoA) variable (Moore, 2018; Moore, Fiez, and Tompkins, 2017). Performance consistently decreased when stimuli comprised consonants acquired later versus earlier in speech development. To address…

In traditional, generative phonology, sound patterns are represented in terms of abstract features, typically based on the articulatory properties of the sounds. The present study makes use of an artificial language learning experiment to explore when and how learners extend a novel phonological pattern to novel segments. Adult, English-speaking…

Although extensive research has focused on the perceptual abilities of second language (L2) learners, a significant gap persists in understanding how cognitive functions like phonological short-term memory (PSTM) and nonverbal intelligence (IQ) impact L2 speech perception. This study sets out to investigate the discrimination of L2 English…

How could individual differences in processing non-speech acoustic signals influence their cue weighting strategies for L2 speech contrasts? The present study investigated this question by testing forty L1 Chinese-L2 English listeners with two tasks: one for testing the listeners' sensitivity to pitch and temporal information of non-speech…

This study aimed at examining the impact of phonemes and lexical status on phonological manipulation among pre-school children. Specifically, we tested the impact of phonemic positions (initial vs. final) and lexical status (shared, spoken, standard and pseudo-words) on phonemic isolation performance. Participants were 1012 children from the…

This study examines the nature of stop accuracy and substitute patterns of word-initial Japanese and Mandarin stops produced by Mandarin-Japanese bilingual children. The purpose of the study is to understand phonological development in bilinguals. The sample consists of 36 bilingual children between the ages of three and six, who simultaneously…

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of phonological information on visual word recognition by using letter transposition effects. The Korean writing system gives a unique opportunity to investigate such phenomenon since the transposition of the beginning consonant (onset) and the end consonant (coda) of a certain syllable allows one…

Reading is a complex process that includes the integration of information about letters (graphemes) and sounds (phonemes). In many circumstances, such as noisy environments, response inhibition is an additional factor that plays a marked role in successful oral reading. Response inhibition can take the form of task relevant inhibition (i.e., foils…

The prominent role of allophonic cues in English speech segmentation has widely been recognized by phonologists and psycholinguists. However, very meager inquiry was devoted to analysing the perception of these noncontrastive allophonic cues by Arab EFL learners. Accordingly, the present study is an attempt to examine the exploitation of…