The present study examines the effect of feedback (FB) and feedforward (FF) in prosody instruction for developing listening comprehension skills in the nonnative language by interpreter trainees, using a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest design. Three groups of 25 interpreter trainees at Bu-Ali Sina University in Iran took part in the study, all…

Precise auditory perception at a subcortical level (neural representation and encoding of sound) has been suggested as a form of implicit L2 aptitude in naturalistic settings. Emerging evidence suggests that such implicit aptitude explains some variance in L2 speech perception and production among adult learners with different first language…

This study investigates for the first time the comprehension of rhetorical questions (RhQs) in bilingual children. RhQs are non-canonical questions, as they are not used to request information, but to express the speaker's belief that the answer is already obvious. This special pragmatic meaning often arises by means of specific prosodic and…

Purpose: This study investigates how Cantonese language experience influences the potential effects of (a) musicianship and (b) musical ability on English stress perception. Method: The sample contained 124 participants, evenly split into Cantonese musician, Cantonese nonmusician, English musician, and English nonmusician groups. They completed…

Eighty Japanese learners of English as a foreign language encountered 40 target words in one of four experimental conditions (three encounters, six encounters, three encounters with talker variability, and six encounters with talker variability). A picture-naming test was conducted three times (pretest, immediate posttest, and delayed posttest)…

This study investigated the relationship among intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness in the speech of second language learners of Spanish of varying proficiency in instructed contexts. It conceptually replicated studies by Munro and Derwing (1995a) and Derwing and Munro (1997), who found partial independence among the three speech…

This study analyzes four English synonyms -- clear, obvious, apparent, and evident -- concentrating on meanings, distribution across genre, collocations, and semantic preference and prosody. The data were drawn from learner's dictionaries and the Corpus of the Contemporary American English (COCA). It was discovered that the four synonyms share the…

We investigated the role of cue weighting, second language (L2) proficiency, and L2 daily exposure in L2 learning of suprasegmentals different from the first language (L1), using eye-tracking. Spanish monolinguals, English-Spanish learners, and Mandarin--Spanish learners saw a paroxytone and an oxytone verb (e.g., "FIRma-firMÓ"…

Previous studies have shown that Chinese speakers and non-Chinese speakers exhibit different patterns of cross-modal congruence for the lexical tones of Mandarin Chinese, depending on which features of the pitch they attend to. But is this pattern of language-specific listening a conscious cultural strategy or an automatic processing effect? If…

This study tested the effects of hand-clapping to the rhythm of newly learned French words on the pronunciation of these words by 7- to 8-year-old Catalan children. In a short training experiment with a pre- and posttest design, 28 children either repeated cognate words in French (e.g. French "aspirateur," Catalan "aspirador"…

This study investigated the effects of L2 pronunciation instruction on speech intelligibility and fluency, the relationship between intelligibility and fluency, and the extent to which utterance fluency can predict perceived fluency. Participants were 30 beginning adult EFL learners who received either segmental or suprasegmental instruction. Oral…

This article discusses the implications of phonological representation for the study of L2 speech acquisition. It is argued, on the basis of empirical findings from diverse phenomena in L2 phonology, that refined representations in which 'segments' have internal prosodic structure offer a more insightful view of cross-linguistic phonetic…

This study investigates the nature of L2 sentence processing mechanisms by examining whether or to what extent the sensitivity to prosody would affect the resolution of relative clause attachment ambiguity. The study examines how native speakers of a high attachment language would resolve the attachment ambiguity of their second language which has…

The primary aim of this study was to investigate prosodic prominence across three groups of Sylheti-English bilinguals: first-generation who arrived as adults, first-generation who arrived as children, and second-generation, i.e., born in the United Kingdom to parents who grew up in Bangladesh. To measure prominence, f0, duration, and intensity…

To contribute to a better understanding of first language (L1) and second language (L2) sentence processing, this study investigated the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC) and relative clause (RC) attachment preference of Persian learners of English as a foreign language . Additionally, the impact of segmentation of experimental…