The current study presents two meta-analyses to explore what underlies the assessment and teaching of comprehensible and nativelike pronunciation among English-as-a-Second-Language speakers. In Study 1, listener studies (n = 37) were retrieved examining the influence of segmental, prosodic, and temporal features on listeners' intuitive judgements…

As there is no vowel length contrast in Chinese, Chinese learners of Thai (CLTs) often have difficulty distinguishing between short and long vowels, especially when the same vowel grapheme in Thai orthography can be pronounced as both a short and a long vowel. This study examined the importance of metalinguistic knowledge (MLK) used by CLTs before…

Aims: To describe typical phonological development of Brazilian Portuguese (BP)-speaking children, considering the following parameters: age of customary production, acquisition and mastery. Methods & Procedures: Data were collected from 857 children aged between 3 years and 8 years 11 months with typical language and speech development. The…

This article investigates the production of the emphatic consonants /?, ?, ?/ by typically developing Jordanian children. Sixty typically developing monolingual Ammani Arabic-speaking children (30 boys and 30 girls) with ages ranging from 2 to 7;11 years were recruited in a production experiment. In the experiment, they were asked to produce 18…

Purpose: Evidence increasingly indicates that people with developmental stuttering have auditory perception deficits. Our previous research has indicated similar but slower performance in categorical perception of the speech sounds under the quiet condition in children who stutter and adults who stutter (AWS) compared with their typically fluent…

The current study examined the effectiveness of a reading curriculum of explicit instruction on the letter-sound knowledge of a sample of elementary-aged students with Down syndrome. The procedures were adapted from prior research (King et al., 2020; Lemons et al., 2018; Lemons et al., 2015). Three participants between 9 and 11 years old…

Korean learners of English are known to repair consonant clusters, which are not allowed in their native language, with an epenthetic vowel [close central unrounded vowel]. The purpose of the present study is to examine whether the perception-production link of such an illusory vowel in a second language (L2) is only within and not across…

This study investigates the effects of native language experience and phonetic properties on the discrimination of labial-velar versus labial and velar contrasts, as well as voicing contrasts in labials, velars, and labial-velars. Research indicates that phonological perceptions are influenced by native language experience and the specific…

Children with autism often show atypical brain lateralization for speech and language processing, however, it is unclear what linguistic component contributes to this phenomenon. Here we measured event-related potential (ERP) responses in 21 school-age autistic children and 25 age-matched neurotypical (NT) peers during listening to word-level…

The science of reading has captured the attention of educators, policy makers, and the public. Elfrieda H. Hiebert recounts some of what she's learned from her recent exploration of the topic. She has found that research evidence tends to fall into three categories: research that provides unequivocal conclusions, research that holds promise for…

Kindergarten reading screening measures typically identify many students as at risk who later meet criteria on important outcome measures (i.e., false positives). To address this issue, we evaluated a gated screening process that included accelerated progress monitoring, followed by a simple goal/reward procedure (skill vs. performance assessment,…

Our study proposes the use of a free classification task for investigating the dimensions used by listeners in their perception of nonnative sounds and for predicting the perceptual discriminability of nonnative contrasts. In a free classification task, participants freely group auditory stimuli based on their perceived similarity. The results can…

Purpose: This article reports on the effectiveness of a novel tablet-based approach to phonological intervention and compares it to a traditional tabletop approach, targeting children with phonologically based speech sound disorders (SSD). Method: Twenty-two Portuguese children with phonologically based SSD were randomly assigned to 1 of 2…

Learning to read in most alphabetic orthographies requires not only the acquisition of simple grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) but also the acquisition of context-sensitive GPCs, where surrounding letters change a grapheme's pronunciation. We aimed to explore the use and development of simple GPCs (e.g. a [right arrow] /ae/) and…

Animals have long been used as comparative models for adult human speech perception. However, few animal models have been used to explore developmental speech perception questions. This dissertation encourages the use of domestic dogs as a behavioral model for speech perception processes. Specifically, dog models are suggested for questions about…