Although statistical learning (SL) has been studied extensively in developmental dyslexia (DD), less attention has been paid to other fundamental challenges in language acquisition, such as cross-situational word learning. Such investigation is important for determining whether and how SL processes are affected in DD at the word level. In this…

Purpose: In individuals with cochlear implants, speech recognition is not associated with tests of working memory that primarily reflect storage, such as forward digit span. In contrast, our previous work found that vocoded speech recognition in individuals with normal hearing was correlated with performance on a forward digit span task. A…

Purpose: The intelligibility of an accent strongly depends on the specific talker-listener pairing. To explore the causes of this phenomenon, we investigated the relationship between acoustic-phonetic similarity and accent intelligibility across native (1st language) and nonnative (2nd language) talker-listener pairings. We also used online…

This study explored South Korean university students' perceptions of different English varieties and their speakers, student attitudes towards the learning of English and its varieties, and the role of these attitudinal variables in the learning of English as a foreign language. One-hundred-one students who were enrolled in four sections of a…

Similar to many sighted children who struggle with learning to read, a proportion of blind children have specific difficulties related to reading braille which cannot be easily explained. A lot of research has been conducted to investigate the perceptual and cognitive processes behind (impairments in) print reading. Very few studies, however, have…

Research suggests that listener perceptions of a speaker's oral language use, or a speaker's "comprehensibility," may be influenced by a variety of speaker-, listener-, and context-related factors. Primary speaker factors include aspects of the speaker's proficiency in the target language such as pronunciation and…

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…