Substantial individual differences exist in regard to type and amount of experience with variable speech resulting from foreign or regional accents. Whereas prior experience helps with processing familiar accents, research on how experience with accented speech affects processing of unfamiliar accents is inconclusive, ranging from perceptual…

Junctures are specific phonemes in English language and work like what the traffic lights do in the structures of phrases at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of the words, phrases, clauses, and sentences. They indicate both the pauses and continuation in the flow of speech in between or among the utterances some of which can be the…

During the first two years of life, infants concurrently refine native-language speech categories and word learning skills. However, in the Switch Task, 14-month-olds do not detect minimal contrasts in a novel object--word pairing (Stager & Werker, 1997). We investigate whether presenting infants with acoustically salient contrasts (liquids)…

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…

Purpose: The spacing effect in human memory research refers to situations in which people learn items better when they study items in spaced intervals rather than massed intervals. This investigation was conducted to compare the efficacy of meaning-oriented auditory training when administered with a spaced versus massed practice schedule. Method:…

Purpose: The aim of the study was to examine the precision of forced-choice (closed-set) and open-ended (open-set) word recognition (WR) tasks for identifying a change in hearing. Method: WR performance for closed-set (4 and 6 choices) and open-set tasks was obtained from 70 listeners with normal hearing. Speech recognition was degraded by…

Purpose: Emotion classification for auditory stimuli typically employs 1 of 2 approaches (discrete categories or emotional dimensions). This work presents a new emotional speech set, compares these 2 classification methods for emotional speech stimuli, and emphasizes the need to consider the entire communication model (i.e., the talker, message,…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the listening effort made by young children in real classrooms during a prolonged speech reception task in the presence of background noise. Method: The experiment was proposed to 117 typically developing kindergarten and primary school pupils, aged 5-7 years old. An ecological experimental approach was…

An ongoing debate in phonology concerns the extent to which the phonological typology is shaped by synchronic learning biases. The two best-studied types of synchronic bias are complexity bias, a bias against formally complex patterns, and substantive bias, a bias against phonetically unnatural patterns. While most previous work has focused on…

E-storybooks are the most important auxiliary learning materials for English-as-Foreign-Language (EFL) learners. Few studies reported positive results on pronunciation and speech development from using audio accompanied e-storybooks, although audios are expected to play the role of recasts in providing pronunciation feedback for learners.…

This exploratory study examined the usage of speech recognition (SR) technology by students with high incidence disabilities in grades 4-8 and student and teacher perceptions of using SR as part of the writing process. The study also examined factors contributing to students' use of SR and barriers to using this technology. Results indicated that…

The question of whether second languages (L2s) are best learned implicitly or explicitly has been a topic of much empirical discourse, with the majority of studies pointing to the benefits of explicit instruction when learning L2 grammar rules. However, given the focus on grammar, it is unclear how generalizable these findings are to other…

Listeners interpret cues in speech processing immediately rather than waiting until the end of a sentence. In particular, prosodic cues in auditory speech processing can aid listeners in building information structure and contrast sets. Native speakers even use this information in combination with syntactic and semantic information to build mental…

The research reported in this article investigated how students learning Japanese or Russian as a third language (L3) perceived and produced word-initial stops in their respective target language and the link between perception and production. The participants in the study were 39 Chinese university students who spoke Mandarin Chinese as their…

Purpose: Speech perception in noise becomes difficult with age but can be facilitated by audiovisual (AV) speech cues and sentence context in healthy older adults. However, individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) may present with deficits in AV integration, potentially limiting the extent to which they can benefit from AV cues. This study…