This study investigates whether the use of prosodic cues during instruction facilitates the processing of German accusative case markers. Two groups of third semester L1 English learners of L2 German completed Processing Instruction (PI) with aural input: Learners in the PI+P group heard sentences that included focused prosodic cues; learners in…

The present study investigated six experienced English as a second language (ESL) teachers' metalinguistic knowledge of the English intonation system through analysis of their metalanguage. Participants' metalanguage related to intonation was collected while completing three tasks: (1) a semi-structured interview, (2) a simulated teaching…

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…

Listeners selectively tune in to the most relevant cues for contrasting sounds, and this process impacts their perceptual sensitivity to these cues (Nosofsky, 1986; Pisoni, 1991). For bilingual listeners, recent work suggests a shared L1/L2 phonology system with the phonetic properties of each sound established in a language-specific way…

This study examined the importance of syllable position, duration, and tone/pitch for the assignment of stress in Chinese hums. Twenty native Mandarin speakers and 20 native English speakers were asked to assign primary stress to two-syllable Chinese hums. The importance of acoustic cues for stress assignment was also evaluated. Our findings…

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…

Whereas many scholars have emphasized the relative importance of "comprehensibility" as an ecologically valid goal for L2 speech training, testing, and development, eliciting listeners' judgments is time-consuming. Following calls for research on more efficient L2 speech rating methods in applied linguistics, and growing attention toward…

This dissertation examines heritage language learners of Spanish enrolled in university Spanish courses, focusing on their strategic use of suprasegmental speech features in two speaking tasks. The research investigates attitudes' influence on heritage language learners' speech production in different task types. Participants engaged in two…

This study examines the effect of native "vs." non-native prosody instruction on developing interpreter trainees' speech comprehensibility in English as a foreign language (EFL) using a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest design. Twenty-three groups of 28 interpreter trainees at a University in Iran (six different branches) took part in…

While monolingual speakers can use contrastive pitch accents to predict upcoming referents, bilingual speakers do not always use this cue predictively in their L2. The current study examines the role of recent exposure for predictive processing in native German (L1) second language learners of English (L2). In Experiment 1, participants followed…

We investigated how native and fluent users of English segment continuous speech and to what extent they use sound-related and structure-related cues. As suggested by the notion of multi-competence, L1 users are not seen as ideal models with perfect command of English, and L2 users not as lacking in competence. We wanted to see how language…

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…

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…

This study investigated bilingualism effects on the production of focus in 5- to 9-year-old Cantonese-English bilingual autistic children's L1 Cantonese, compared to their monolingual autistic peers as well as monolingual and bilingual typically developing children matched in nonverbal IQ, working memory, receptive vocabulary and maternal…

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…