Purpose: This research compared individuals from two first language (L1) backgrounds (English and Japanese) to determine how they may differ in their perception of Mandarin tones (Tones 1 vs. 2 [T1-T2], Tones 1 vs. 3 [T1-T3], Tones 1 vs. 4 [T1-T4], Tones 2 vs. 3 [T2-T3], Tones 2 vs. 4 [T2-T4], Tones 3 vs. 4 [T3-T4]) on account of their L1. Method:…

Purpose: This study tested the hypothesis that audiovisual training benefits children more than it does adults and that it improves Japanese-speaking children's English /r/-/l/ perception to a native-like level. Method: Ten sessions of audiovisual English /r/-/l/ identification training were conducted for Japanese-speaking adults and children.…

Scholars have extensively investigated the effectiveness of high variability phonetic training (HVPT), that is, identification and discrimination of second language speech sounds produced by multiple speakers followed by trial-by-trial feedback. Building on the notion of incidental and multimodal learning in cognitive psychology (e.g., Lim &…

Previous research has shown that an increased second language (L2) vocabulary size leads to better attunement to the cues required to distinguish L2 contrastive phones. This has been the central tenet of the vocabulary-tuning model (vocab) on the basis of evidence by Japanese learners of English in Australia. We aim to test the validity of the…

This study examines second (L2) and third (L3) language learners' pitch perception. We test the hypothesis that a listener's discrimination of and sensitivity (d') to Japanese pitch accent reflects how pitch cues inform all words a listener knows in an additive, nonselective manner rather than how pitch cues inform words in a selective,…

In adults, native language phonology has strong perceptual effects. Previous work has shown that Japanese speakers, unlike French speakers, break up illegal sequences of consonants with illusory vowels: they report hearing "abna" as "abuna". To study the development of phonological grammar, we compared Japanese and French infants in a…

This study aimed to compare the perception of short vs. long vowel contrasts in Japanese and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) by four groups of listeners differing in their linguistic backgrounds: native Arabic (NA), native Japanese (NJ), non-native Japanese (NNJ) and Australian English (OZ) speakers. The NNJ and OZ groups shared the first language…

American listeners' perception of Japanese contrasts of vowel length (e.g., kiro vs. kiiro), consonant length (e.g., kite vs. kitte) and syllable number/length (e.g., kjoo vs. kijoo) was examined. Stimuli consisted of sentence-length utterances produced by a native Japanese talker; five minimal pairs of each contrast type were included. Questions…

This study assessed the prediction that individuals are able to use the knowledge from their first language (L1) in processing the comparable sound contrasts in an unknown language. Two languages, Arabic and Japanese, which utilize vowel duration contrastively, were examined. Native Arabic (NA) and native Japanese (NJ) listeners' discrimination…