The perception of non-native speech sounds is heavily influenced by the acoustic cues that are relevant for differentiating members of a listener's native (L1) phonological contrasts. Many studies of both (naive) non-native and (not naive) second language (L2) speech perception implicitly assume continuity in a listener's habits of…

Background: Previous research has shown a relationship between speech perception and dyslexia in alphabetic writing. In these studies speech perception was measured using phonemes, a prominent feature of alphabetic languages. Given the primary importance of lexical tone in Chinese language processing, we tested the extent to which lexical tone and…

This study examined word identification skills between two groups of college students with different first language (L1) backgrounds (Chinese and Korean) learning to read English as a second language (ESL). Word identification skills were tested in a naming experiment and an auditory category judgment task. Both groups of ESL learners demonstrated…