Purpose: This study tested the hypothesis that audiovisual training benefits children more than it does adults and that it improves Japanese-speaking children's English /r/-/l/ perception to a native-like level. Method: Ten sessions of audiovisual English /r/-/l/ identification training were conducted for Japanese-speaking adults and children.…

Speech sounds that contain multiple phonetic cues are often difficult for foreign-language learners, especially if certain cues are weighted differently in the foreign and native languages. Greek adult and child speakers of English were studied to determine the effect of native language on second-language (L2) cue weighting and, in particular, to…

The focus of this dissertation is on how language experience shapes perception of a non-native prosodic contrast. In Tokyo Japanese, fundamental frequency (F0) peak and fall are acoustic cues to lexically contrastive pitch patterns, in which a word may be accented on a particular syllable or unaccented (e.g., "tsuru" "a crane", "tsuru" "a vine",…