This cross-sectional study examines the sociopragmatic use of pitch and fluency features in requests among second language (L2) Chinese learners at two proficiency levels alongside native Chinese speakers. Twenty-eight L2 learners completed a 40-item oral discourse task with two types of request-making situations: (a) a high-imposition request to…

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…

Duration-based auditory grouping preferences are presumably shaped by language experience in adults and infants, unlike intensity-based grouping that is governed by a universal bias of a loud-soft preference. It has been proposed that duration-based rhythmic grouping preferences develop as a function of native language phrasal prosody.…