This study investigates whether the use of prosodic cues during instruction facilitates the processing of German accusative case markers. Two groups of third semester L1 English learners of L2 German completed Processing Instruction (PI) with aural input: Learners in the PI+P group heard sentences that included focused prosodic cues; learners in…

This study investigates L2 comprehension of focus-to-accentuation mapping in English sentences with focus particle "only" by advanced learners of English whose L1 was either Cantonese or Dutch. Two experiments were conducted to examine (a) whether L2 learners could map accentuation to focus; and (b) whether they could perceive…

Lexical tones are widely believed to be a formidable learning challenge for adult speakers of nontonal languages. While difficulties--as well as rapid improvements--are well documented for beginning second language (L2) learners, research with more advanced learners is needed to understand how tone perception difficulties impact word recognition…

This study investigates whether (a) Cantonese and (b) English listeners integrally or independently perceive Thai tone and segmental information. Listeners completed a modified AX discrimination task that contained a control block (without segmental variation) and an orthogonal block (with segmental variation). Relative to their own performance in…

We examined what causes L1-L2 differences in sensitivity to prominence cues in discourse processing. Participants listened to recorded stories in segment-by-segment fashion at their own pace. Each story established a pair of contrasting items, and one item from the pair was rementioned and manipulated to carry either a contrastive or…

To test the effects of talker variability and explicit instruction on the statistical learning of lexical tone, 80 monolingual English listeners were taught an artificial language that mimicked Mandarin's asymmetric distribution of syllable-tone co-occurrences. Training stimuli consisted of either speech from one talker or speech from four…

Pitch perception plays a more important role in emotional communication in English than in Korean. Interpreting the semantic aspects of pitch levels therefore presents a challenge for Korean learners of English. This study investigated how 49 Korean learners of English perceived 20 English emotional utterances. Participants were asked to complete…

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…

While empirical studies have shown the beneficial role of observing and producing hand gestures mimicking pitch features in the learning of L2 tonal or intonational contrasts, mixed results have been obtained for the use of gestures encoding durational contrasts at the perceptual level. This study investigates the potential benefits of horizontal…

It has been proposed that second language (L2) learners differ from native speakers in processing due to either influence from their native language or an inability to integrate information from multiple linguistic domains in a second language. To shed new light on the underlying mechanism of L2 processing, we used an event-related potentials…

In this study, we propose a hypothesis that domain-general auditory processing, a perceptual anchor of L1 acquisition, can serve as the foundation of successful post-pubertal L2 learning. This hypothesis was tested with 139 post-pubertal L2 immersion learners by linking individual differences in auditory discrimination across multiple acoustic…

Whereas many scholars have emphasized the relative importance of "comprehensibility" as an ecologically valid goal for L2 speech training, testing, and development, eliciting listeners' judgments is time-consuming. Following calls for research on more efficient L2 speech rating methods in applied linguistics, and growing attention toward…

While monolingual speakers can use contrastive pitch accents to predict upcoming referents, bilingual speakers do not always use this cue predictively in their L2. The current study examines the role of recent exposure for predictive processing in native German (L1) second language learners of English (L2). In Experiment 1, participants followed…

Prosody is crucial for language comprehension because it highlights underlying structures. This study explores whether prosody facilitates "memory recall" to the same extent in L1 and L2, and whether memory recall is poorer in L2 or whether language-specific differences can mitigate L2 processing difficulties. Nineteen Greek learners of…

L2 sounds present different kinds of challenges to learners at the phonetic, phonological, and lexical levels, but previous studies on L2 tone learning mostly focused on the phonetic and lexical levels. The present study employs an innovative technique to examine the role of prior tonal experience and musical training on forming novel abstract…