Non-native phoneme perception can be challenging for adult learners. This article explores two routes to strengthening early representations of non-native targets: perceptual training, which focuses on auditory discrimination of novel contrasts, and articulatory training, which highlights the articulatory gestures of non-native categories. Of…

Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in "esport" for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. "spi" instead of "espi" was related to accurate perceptual discrimination of this…

This study investigates how second language (L2) listeners' perception is affected by two factors: the listeners' experience with the target dialect -- North American English (NAE) vs. Standard Southern British English (SSBE) -- and talkers' language background: native vs. non-native talkers; i.e. interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit…

This study examines relative weighting of two acoustic cues, vowel duration and spectra, in the perception of high front vowels by Japanese learners of English. Studies found that Japanese speakers rely heavily on duration to distinguish /i?/ and [character omitted] in American English (AmE) as influenced by phonemic length in Japanese /ii/ and…

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…

This study investigates the role of orthography in German vowel production by Polish native speakers (L1) with German as a second language (L2). Eighteen intermediate to advanced Polish L2 German learners and 20 German native speakers were recorded during a picture-naming task in which half of the experimental items were explicitly marked in their…

Learners of a foreign language (FL) typically have to learn to process sounds that do not exist in their first language (L1). As this is known to be difficult for adults, in particular, it is important for FL pedagogy to be informed by phonetic research. This study examined the role of FL learners' previous linguistic experience in the processing…

According to the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH), second language (L2) speakers, unlike native speakers, build shallow syntactic representations during sentence processing. In order to test the SSH, this study investigated the processing of a syntactic movement in both native speakers of English and proficient late L2 speakers of English using…

We consider how orthography activates sounds that are in a noncontrastive relationship in the second language (L2) and for which only one variant exists in the first language (L1). Participants were L1 English / L2 Spanish and native Spanish listeners. Intervocalically, Spanish graphemes "b d g" correspond phonetically to stops and…

With eye-tracking technology the eye is thought to give researchers a window into the mind. Importantly, eye-tracking has significant advantages over traditional online processing measures: chiefly that it allows for more "natural" processing as it does not require a secondary task, and that it provides a very rich moment-to-moment data…

Adult second language (L2) learners often experience difficulty producing and perceiving nonnative phonological contrasts. Even relatively advanced learners, who have been exposed to an L2 for long periods of time, struggle with difficult contrasts, such as /?/-/l/ for Japanese learners of English. To account for the relative ease or difficulty…

This Event Related Potentials (ERP) study investigates auditory processing of sentences with so-called code-switches in Russian learners of German. It has often been argued that switching between two languages results in extra processing cost, although it is not completely clear yet what exactly causes these costs. ERP presents a good method to…

Recent research has shown that speakers are sensitive to non-contrastive phonetic detail present in nonnative speech (e.g. Escudero et al. 2012; Wilson et al. 2014). Difficulties in interpreting and implementing unfamiliar phonetic variation can lead nonnative speakers to modify second language forms by vowel epenthesis and other changes. These…

This study investigates how fluent second-language (L2) learners of English produce and perceive the /ae/-/?/ vowel contrast of Southwestern American English. Two learner groups are examined: (1) early, proficient English speakers who were raised by Spanish-speaking families but who became dominant in English during childhood and, as adults, lack…

Acoustic and perceptual studies investgate B2-level Polish learners' acquisition of second language (L2) English word-boundaries involving word-initial vowels. In production, participants were less likely to produce glottalization of phrase-medial initial vowels in L2 English than in first language (L1) Polish. Perception studies employing word…