This study investigated how adult second language (L2) learners of Mandarin Chinese use knowledge of phonological and lexical statistical regularities when acoustic information is insufficient for word recognition. A gating task was used to test intermediate L2 learners at two time points across a semester of classroom learning. Native Mandarin…

The focus of this dissertation is on how language experience shapes perception of a non-native prosodic contrast. In Tokyo Japanese, fundamental frequency (F0) peak and fall are acoustic cues to lexically contrastive pitch patterns, in which a word may be accented on a particular syllable or unaccented (e.g., "tsuru" "a crane", "tsuru" "a vine",…