Arabic emphasis refers to the production of consonants resulting from a primary constriction in the dental or alveolar region and a secondary constriction in the back of the vocal tract, recognized as 'Emphatic.' These have contrastive consonants produced in the dental or alveolar region, recognized as 'Plain.' The existing research on emphasis in…

In two artificial language learning experiments with four groups of highly proficient Basque-Spanish bilinguals and two groups of Spanish monolinguals, we examine the cues that allow adult listeners to parse new input into phrases. In addition, we investigate which factors lead bilinguals to switch between the segmentation strategies…

The present dissertation explores the effect of exposure to non-native speech via foreign film on non-native speech production and perception. In order to explore potential effects, two main experiments were developed, which examined French production and perception by monolingual native speakers of English before and after exposure to French…

When learning English, learners might face a challenging task in mastering pronunciation due to differences in both languages such as sound-to-letter correspondence, size of phoneme inventory, allophonic realization of sounds, place and manner of articulation, among others. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to review both theoretical and…

Initial instruction emphasizing large grain units (i.e., words) showed distinct advantages over small grain instruction for English-speaking adults learning to read an artificial orthography (Brennan and Booth in Read Writ 28(7):917-938, 2015. 10.1007/s11145-015-9555-2). The current study extends this research by training 34 English-speaking…

This dissertation examines the development of the internal structure of the Korean syllable by adult Korean learners whose native language is English. Prior research has identified the prominence of the body constituent in Korean and the rime constituent in English. The current study focuses on the acquisition of the body unit by English speakers…

The age at which people acquire a word influences word recognition, known as the age of acquisition (AoA) effect. In the first language (L1), AoA effects are widely found in various languages and experimental tasks. Arbitrary Mapping Hypothesis proposes that AoA effects reflect the loss of network plasticity during the learning of mappings between…

This study reports syllable position effects on second language (L2) Portuguese speech perception, revealing that L2 segmental learning may be prone to an influence from the suprasegmental level. The results show that first language (L1) Mandarin learners had diminished performance on the discrimination between the target Portuguese liquids (/l/…

Many studies evidence the flexibility of speech perception in the first language (L1), which allows rapid adaptation to unfamiliar foreign accents. Two influential studies by Bradlow and Bent (2008) and a follow-up study by Baese-Berk et al. (2013) found that increased variability as a function of the number of talkers and accents facilitated the…

Language-specific features necessitate certain processes and skills in reading. The visually unmarked between-word boundaries in written Chinese render it critical that readers be able to segment words in the continuous texts. It may pose challenges for second language (L2) readers whose first language (L1) is word-spaced. In light of the lack of…

Songs and chants in EFL education are both artistic and pedagogical acts belonging to the same family of musical expressions, whose practical use in the classroom is not unfamiliar among teachers. Nevertheless, little effort has been made to distinguish between each other. In this sense, the popularity of songs in the context of EFL/ESL education…

This study investigated how experience with a first language (L1) writing system affects the development of the second language (L2) word recognition subskills and how L2 linguistic knowledge constrains such L1 impacts. In this study, word recognition is conceptualized as a complex construct that entails multiple subskills necessary for…

Featural approaches to second language phonetic acquisition posit that the development of new phonetic norms relies on sub-phonemic features, expressed through a constellation of articulatory gestures and their corresponding acoustic cues, which may be shared across multiple phonemes. Within featural approaches, largely supported by research in…

Although studies on English sound learning by L2 Thai learners have been widely examined, there have been no studies on the production of the English [ch] and [sh] sounds in the initial position by L2 Thai learners with consideration of vowel contexts, the experience of L2 learners and target sounds. The aim of this study is to examine the…

As an international financial centre, Hong Kong is a metropolitan city that has given rise to multilingual characteristics in recent years. In addition to Cantonese and English, which serve mostly as first and second languages, Hong Kong residents have increasingly begun to develop a third or even a fourth language. The biliteracy and…