This study aimed to develop a Vietnamese word recognition test for Taiwanese undergraduate students and to investigate students' performances at different learning stages. The formal test consists of 100 words as test items. With each word, test takers were asked to select the correct Vietnamese word form corresponding to the pronunciation they…

The present study investigates the effect of high variability phonetic training (HVPT) on the discrimination of second language (L2) vowel contrasts by adult speakers who live in a country where the L2 is dominant. The same subjects who participated in a previous discrimination task were trained in the discrimination of four L2 vowel contrasts…

This study examined how discriminability and prototypicality of nonnative phones modulate the amplitude of the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) event-related brain potential. We hypothesized that if a frequently occurring (standard) stimulus is not prototypical to a listener, a weaker predictive memory trace will be formed and a smaller MMN will be…

The current study explores variation in phonemic representation among Spanish--English dual language learners (DLLs, n = 60) who were dominant in English or in Spanish. Children were given a phonetic discrimination task with speech sounds that: 1) occur in English and Spanish, 2) are exclusive to English, and 3) are exclusive to Russian, during…

When acquiring a second language, learners must become able to perceive the difference between novel sounds ("discrimination") and also associate strings of sounds with distinct vocabulary items ("lexical encoding"). Recent research has questioned whether discrimination is a sufficient or necessary condition for encoding, and…

The extent to which exposure to new phonemic contrasts (i.e. contrasts that are present in the L2 but not in the L1) will lead to the creation of a new phonemic category in L2 speakers, as well as the phonological nature of these categories, remains an open question insofar as there is no consensus on whether acquiring a new contrast would result…

This study investigated the role of orthographic information in the acquisition of non-native speech sounds by monolingual English listeners. Two potentially important orthographic variables were explored: Orthographic compatibility (whether the orthographic information supports or contradicts the distributional information) and orthographic…

This study reports syllable position effects on second language (L2) Portuguese speech perception, revealing that L2 segmental learning may be prone to an influence from the suprasegmental level. The results show that first language (L1) Mandarin learners had diminished performance on the discrimination between the target Portuguese liquids (/l/…

We provide an exhaustive review of studies in the relatively new domain of research on the influence of orthography on second language (L2) phonological acquisition. While language teachers have long recognized the importance of written input--in addition to spoken input--on learners' development, until this century there was very little…

Purpose: This research compared individuals from two first language (L1) backgrounds (English and Japanese) to determine how they may differ in their perception of Mandarin tones (Tones 1 vs. 2 [T1-T2], Tones 1 vs. 3 [T1-T3], Tones 1 vs. 4 [T1-T4], Tones 2 vs. 3 [T2-T3], Tones 2 vs. 4 [T2-T4], Tones 3 vs. 4 [T3-T4]) on account of their L1. Method:…

This article reports on the second language (L2) perception of contrasts among British English monophthongs. This study has two aims: 1) to explore the discriminability of contrasts in L2 British English monophthongs; and 2) to test the perceptual assimilation model-L2 (PAM-L2) towards the ability to discriminate British English contrasts. The…

Scholars have extensively investigated the effectiveness of high variability phonetic training (HVPT), that is, identification and discrimination of second language speech sounds produced by multiple speakers followed by trial-by-trial feedback. Building on the notion of incidental and multimodal learning in cognitive psychology (e.g., Lim &…

Children are known to be fast learners due to their neural plasticity. Learning a non-native language (L2) requires the mastering of new production patterns. In classroom settings, learners are not only exposed to the acoustic input, but also to the unfamiliar grapheme-phoneme correspondences of the L2 orthography. We tested how 9-10-year-old…

Non-native phoneme perception can be challenging for adult learners. This article explores two routes to strengthening early representations of non-native targets: perceptual training, which focuses on auditory discrimination of novel contrasts, and articulatory training, which highlights the articulatory gestures of non-native categories. Of…

[For the complete volume, "CALL and Professionalisation: Short Papers from EUROCALL 2021 (29th, Online, August 26-27, 2021)," see ED616972.]This study investigated whether a translation tool (Microsoft Translator -- MT) and its built-in speech features (Text-To-Speech synthesis -- TTS -- and speech recognition) can promote learners'…