Adult second language learners often show considerable individual variability in the ease with which lexical tones are learned. It is known that factors pertaining to a learner's first language (L1; such as L1 tonal status or L1 tone type) as well as extralinguistic factors (such as musical experience and working memory) modulate tone learning…

This study investigates for the first time the comprehension of rhetorical questions (RhQs) in bilingual children. RhQs are non-canonical questions, as they are not used to request information, but to express the speaker's belief that the answer is already obvious. This special pragmatic meaning often arises by means of specific prosodic and…

This article discusses the implications of phonological representation for the study of L2 speech acquisition. It is argued, on the basis of empirical findings from diverse phenomena in L2 phonology, that refined representations in which 'segments' have internal prosodic structure offer a more insightful view of cross-linguistic phonetic…

Two acoustic studies of voice onset time (VOT) in sibilant-stop (ST) consonant clusters, produced by first language (L1) speakers of Polish, are presented. In the first, a baseline study of L1 Polish comparing ST clusters with initial singleton stops, a small degree of VOT shortening after /s/ was found for /p/, but not /t/. The second study…

The current study examined the phonolexical processing of Mandarin segments and tones by English speakers at different Mandarin proficiency levels. Eleven English speakers naive to Mandarin, 15 intermediate and 9 advanced second language (L2) learners participated in a word-learning experiment. After learning the sound and meaning of 16 Mandarin…

This article reports on two experiments that examine the computation of contrastive focus in Russian on the part of adult English-dominant heritage speakers and second language learners of Russian, in comparison with baseline monolinguals. The first experiment uses an acceptability judgment task to determine whether bilingual and monolingual…

This study explores the effects of embodied prosodic training on the production of non-native French front rounded vowels (i.e. /y, ø, oe/) and the overall pronunciation proficiency. Fifty-seven Catalan learners of French practiced pronunciation in one of two conditions: one group observed hand gestures embodying prosodic features of the sentences…

While much research has examined second language (L2) phonetic acquisition, less research has examined first language (L1) attrition in terms of the voice onset time (VOT) of voiceless stops. The current study examined L2 acquisition and L1 attrition in the VOT of word-initial voiceless stops among late English-Arabic and Arabic-English bilinguals…

In this article we look at some of the structural properties of second language (L2) Japanese WH questions. In Japanese the WH words are licensed to remain "in situ" by the prosodic contiguity properties of the phrases which have no prosodic boundaries between the WH word and the question particle. In a rehearsed-reading, sentence…

This article explores how multiple linguistic cues interact in predictive processing among second language (L2) learners. In a visual-world eye-tracking experiment, we investigated whether learners of German use case and prosody cues together to assign thematic roles and predict post-verbal arguments. During the experiment, participants listened…

We examine the second language (L2) acquisition of variable Spanish word order by first language (L1) speakers of English via the acquisition of unaccusative and transitive predicates in various focus-related contexts. We employ two bimodal linguistic tasks: (1) acceptability judgment task (B-AJT) and (2) appropriateness preference task (B-APT).…

Mandarin speakers tend to adapt intervocalic nasals as either an onset of the following syllable (e.g. Bruno [right arrow] "bù.lu.nuò"), as a nasal geminate (e.g. Daniel [right arrow] "dan.ní.er"), or as one of the above forms (e.g. Tiffany [right arrow] "dì.fú.ní" or "dì.fen.ní"). Huang and Lin (2013, 2016)…

The study investigates the relationship between lexical encoding and production in order to establish whether learners are able to produce a difficult contrast in words that they merged in their mental lexicon. Forty American English learners of Russian were tested on their production and lexical encoding of familiar and highly-frequent words with…

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…

Successful listening in a second language (L2) involves learning to identify the relevant acoustic-phonetic dimensions that differentiate between words in the L2, and then use these cues to access lexical representations during real-time comprehension. This is a particularly challenging goal to achieve when the relevant acoustic-phonetic…