A challenge for listeners is to learn the appropriate mapping between acoustics and phonetic categories for an individual talker. Lexically guided perceptual learning (LGPL) studies have shown that listeners can leverage lexical knowledge to guide this process. For instance, listeners learn to interpret ambiguous /s/-/[esh]/ blends as /s/ if they…

The study investigates the relationship between lexical encoding and production in order to establish whether learners are able to produce a difficult contrast in words that they merged in their mental lexicon. Forty American English learners of Russian were tested on their production and lexical encoding of familiar and highly-frequent words with…

Speech is highly variable and systematic, governed by the internal linguistic system and socio-indexical factors. The systematic relationship of socio-indexical factors and variable phonetic forms, referred to here as "socio-indexical structure," has been the cornerstone of sociophonetic research over the last several decades. Research…

This article revisits Lee and Mok (2018) and examines how the Cantonese learners in the study produced second language (L2) Japanese short vs. long consonants which are absent in their first language (L1). Specifically, our goal is to find out whether these learners were substituting real geminates (i.e. long consonants) with the improvised…

The aim of the paper is to present the findings of an empirical study which contributes to the ongoing research into gender effects on second language acquisition by exploring a biological influence on L2 pronunciation learning. One of the most frequent arguments used to vindicate single-sex education is that there are substantial sensory and…

There is evidence that orthographic knowledge can influence on-line spoken-word recognition. Interestingly, when graphic and phonetic codes are not congruent due to the application of phonological alternation processes, people report hearing sounds that are matched to graphic (underlying), not phonetic codes (Hallé et al. in J Mem Lang 43:618-639,…

Purpose: This study aimed to examine whether abstract knowledge of word-level linguistic prosody is independent of or integrated with phonetic knowledge. Method: Event-related potential (ERP) responses were measured from 18 adult listeners while they listened to native and nonnative word-level prosody in speech and in nonspeech. The prosodic…

Word-initial stops in Mandarin and English show a distinctive phonological categorization but a similar phonetic realization along the VOT (Voice Onset Time) continuum. Previous research reported that native Mandarin adults produce measurably longer long-lag VOTs than native English adults. The present study examined whether and how the difference…

The present study explored whether the phonological bias favoring consonants found in French-learning infants and children when learning new words (Havy & Nazzi, 2009; Nazzi, 2005) is language-general, as proposed by Nespor, Peña and Mehler (2003), or varies across languages, perhaps as a function of the phonological or lexical properties of…

Purpose: When learning novel word forms, preschoolers with developmental language disorder (DLD; also known as "specific language impairment") produce speech targets inaccurately and with a high degree of intraword variability. The aim of the current study is to specify whether and how layering lexical-semantic information onto novel…

Consonants and vowels differ acoustically and articulatorily, but also functionally: Consonants are more relevant for lexical processing, and vowels for prosodic/syntactic processing. These functional biases could be powerful bootstrapping mechanisms for learning language, but their developmental origin remains unclear. The relative importance of…

The present study investigated the potential benefits of extended exposure to captioned videos for second language pronunciation. We tested 90 L2 adult learners of English on speech processing skills (segmentation, speed of lexical access, and sentence processing) and phonological accuracy in perception (ABX discrimination) and production…

How are languages learned, and to what extent are learning mechanisms similar in infant native-language (L1) and adult second-language (L2) acquisition? In terms of vocabulary acquisition, we know from the infant literature that the ability to discriminate similar-sounding words at a particular age does not guarantee successful word-meaning…

A group of children with dyslexia (mean ages 9 and 14 years) was studied, together with group of children without dyslexia matched for age. Participants were monolingual native speakers of the Bosnian language with transparent orthography. In total, the diagnostic tests were performed with 41 children with dyslexia and 41 nondyslexic children. The…

Studies of connected speech have repeatedly shown that the contextual predictability of a word is related to its phonetic duration; more predictable words tend to be produced with shorter duration, when other factors are controlled for (Aylett & Turk, 2004, 2006; Bell et al., 2003; Bell, Brenier, Gregory, Girand, & Jurafsky, 2009; Gahl,…