This study investigates whether listeners' cue weighting predicts their real-time use of asynchronous acoustic information in spoken word recognition at both group and individual levels. By focusing on the time course of cue integration, we seek to distinguish between two theoretical views: the "associated" view (cue weighting is linked…

This study investigates the effects of Processing Instruction (PI) on the acquisition of grammatical gender and gender-marked pronouns in German. PI was compared to Traditional Instruction, i.e. a traditional, vocabulary-oriented approach using color cues (TI) and a Categorization and Memorization task (CM). The results of an immediate posttest…

This study investigates the perception of the three Mandarin high vowels /i, u, y/ after dental, retroflex, and palatal fricatives and affricates (/s/-/[voiceless alveolar affricate]/-/[voiceless alveolar affricate][superscript voiceless glottal fricative]/; /[voiceless retroflex sibilant fricative]/-/[voiceless alveolar affricate]/-/[voiceless…

The processing of structurally ambiguous sentences has proven resourceful in understanding the human parser. In particular, the resolution of globally and temporarily ambiguous relative clauses (RC) preceded by a complex noun phrase (NP) such as "Someone shot [the servant]NP1 of [the actress]NP2 [who was on the balcony]RC" has been found…

In this dissertation, I investigated how cognitive resources as well as formal, and informal language experience impact language learning in two studies. In the first study (Chapter 2), I examined the learning of Spanish grammatical gender by Chinese international students who were studying abroad in the US. The goal of that study was to uncover…

Reviews studies in which perceptual cue trading data have been compared with computational models and examines the perception of contrast between the voiceless fricative "s" and the voiceless affricate "ts." Nine subjects listened to a total of 6 tokens each of 193 stimuli and labeled each stimulus as containing either of the…

We report four experiments designed to determine whether visual information affects judgments of acoustically-specified nonspeech events as well as speech events (the "McGurk effect"). Previous findings have shown only weak McGurk effects for nonspeech stimuli, whereas strong effects are found for consonants. We used click sounds that…

A study investigated the role of phonemic (sound-based) information during silent reading to determine whether the visual tongue-twister effect occurs only when readers make judgments of sentence acceptability or whether the visual tongue-twister effect is due to the way sentences are represented in memory. Data were collected from 45 university…

This study used perceptual and articulatory data to investigate a language specific phonemic inventory, and allophonic rules for homorganic initial voiced stops versus homorganic nasal stops, and oral versus nasal vowels in Taiwanese. Four experiments were conducted: concept formation, gating, and two airflow studies. Results of a first nasal…