Although Spanish and Italian voiced stops are similar in articulatory (place of articulation) and acoustic (prevoicing) terms, there are important contrasts associated with these sounds in each language that may affect second language (L2) learners' acquisition. Spanish maintains an allophonic alternation between word-initial voiced stops and…

High frequency words have been suggested to benefit both speech segmentation and grammatical categorization of the words around them. Despite utilizing similar information, these tasks are usually investigated separately in studies examining learning. We determined whether including high frequency words in continuous speech could support…

Refugees have received considerable attention in recent years, across academic, popular, and political spheres. Using a range of methodologies, the three articles in this dissertation illuminate several aspects of the linguistic and social lives of Chin refugees from Burma (Myanmar) now living in Indiana, U.S.A. This includes an examination of…

Research attempting to understand the intermediate stages of first-language acquisition and disordered speech has led to the discovery of covert contrast. A covert contrast is a statistically reliable difference between phonemes that is produced by a language learner, but in a way that cannot be heard readily by a listener of the target language.…

Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in "esport" for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. "spi" instead of "espi" was related to accurate perceptual discrimination of this…

Orthographic forms (spellings) can affect pronunciation in a second language (L2); however, it is not known whether the same orthographic form can affect both L2 pronunciation and metalinguistic awareness. To test this, we asked 260 speakers of English--first-language (L1) English speakers, L1 Italian and L2 English sequential bilinguals, and L1…

Purpose The aims of the present study are (a) to quantify the developmental sequence of fricative mastery in Putonghua-speaking children and discuss the observed pattern in relation to existing theoretical positions, and (b) to describe the acquisition of the fine-articulatory/acoustic details of fricatives in the multidimensional acoustic space.…

Purpose: Subjective speech intelligibility assessment is often preferred over more objective approaches that rely on transcript scoring. This is, in part, because of the intensive manual labor associated with extracting objective metrics from transcribed speech. In this study, we propose an automated approach for scoring transcripts that provides…

Recently it has been proposed that sensitivity to nonarbitrary relationships between speech sounds and objects potentially bootstraps lexical acquisition. However, it is currently unclear whether preverbal infants (e.g., before 6 months of age) with different linguistic profiles are sensitive to such nonarbitrary relationships. Here, the authors…

Studies on the acquisition of Spanish as a first language do not agree on the patterns and factors relevant for coda development. In order to shed light on the questions involved, a longitudinal study of coda development in Northern European Spanish was carried out to explore the relationship between accuracy, markedness and frequency. The study…

Mastery of the alphabetic principle necessitates learning letter--sound correspondences. In this study, we found evidence of the importance of spoken phonology in the letter--sound learning of 89 deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) preschoolers. Only DHH children with at least some ability to perceive speech were included in the study. DHH children were…

Choosing specific implementational details is one of the most important aspects of creating and evaluating a model. In order to properly model cognitive processes, choices for these details must be made based on empirical research. Unfortunately, modelers are often forced to make decisions in the absence of relevant data. My work investigates the…

Background: The use of standardized tests specifically designed for and normed on bilingual groups is crucial for the accurate diagnosis and language profiling of bilingual speakers with aphasia. Currently, there is a dearth of norms and supporting psychometric data for the few available bilingual aphasia assessments. The only available aphasia…

Despite English being a core and compulsory part of the curriculum for Chinese English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners, it is nevertheless often highly challenging for them. This is partly due to the discrepancies between English's citation and spoken form and the lack of recognition this pronunciation receives within ESL classrooms. With this…

This study aimed to investigate the effect of written cues on the second- language (L2) language perception, processing, and word learning, especially when the person's first language (L1) belongs to a different rhythmic type of language than L2. The first objective was to examine whether late bilinguals as L2 learners can benefit more from…