Although intelligibility is a core concept in second language (L2) speech assessment and teaching research, the vast majority of previous work relies on audio-only stimuli. The current study set out to examine how linguistic and visual information jointly interact to determine the degree of speech intelligibility. Both first language (L1) and L2…

Despite the body of research on auditory-visual speech perception in infants and schoolchildren, development in the early childhood period remains relatively uncharted. In this study, English-speaking children between three and four years of age were investigated for: (i) the development of visual speech perception--lip-reading and visual…

The present study explored whether phonological awareness (PA), morphological awareness (MA) and visual attention (VA) independently predict word and pseudoword reading accuracy in native Arabic-speaking children from grades 4 and 5. A total of 141 participants took part in the study, and were divided into two groups of readers with (n = 30) and…

Purpose: It is not clear if behavioral indices of listening effort are sensitive to changes in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for young children (7-12 years old) from multilingual backgrounds. The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of SNR on listening effort in multilingual school-aged children (native English, nonnative English) as…

Between 6 and 9 months, while infant's ability to discriminate faces within their own racial group is maintained, discrimination of faces within other-race groups declines to a point where 9-month-old infants fail to discriminate other-race faces. Such face perception narrowing can be overcome in various ways at 9 or 12 months of age, such as…

The purpose of this follow-up study was to determine the specific contribution of phonological processing abilities, including phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN) and verbal short-term memory (VSTM), as well as visual perception (VP), in word reading accuracy. A sample of 62 native Arabic speaking children from Grade 1…

As a basic indicator of verbal ability, verbal fluency refers to the degree of fluency in the use of language to convey information. The different components of working memory play an important role in verbal fluency. The inhibiting control mechanism takes place during L2 production processing in bilinguals, which may affect their verbal fluency…

Multimodal approaches have been shown to be effective for many learning tasks. In this study, we compared the effectiveness of five multimodal methods for second language (L2) Mandarin tone perception training: three single-cue methods (number, pitch contour, color) and two dual-cue methods (color and number, color and pitch contour). A total of…

Our native tongue influences the way we perceive other languages. But does it also determine the way we perceive nonlinguistic sounds? The authors investigated how speakers of Italian, Turkish, and Persian group sequences of syllables, tones, or visual shapes alternating in either frequency or duration. We found strong native listening effects…

This study investigated the relationship between balanced multilingualism and working memory. Specifically, it reports on the relationship between balanced proficiency in speaking, reading and comprehension (across three languages), and verbal and visuospatial working memory in young South African adults. Information about participants' language…

Visual word N170 is an index of perceptual expertise for visual words across different writing systems. Recent developmental studies have shown the early emergence of visual word N170 and its close association with individual's reading ability. In the current study, we investigated whether fine-tuning N170 for Chinese characters could emerge after…

Audiovisual speech consists of overlapping and invariant patterns of dynamic acoustic and optic articulatory information. Research has shown that infants can perceive a variety of basic auditory-visual (A-V) relations but no studies have investigated whether and when infants begin to perceive higher order A-V relations inherent in speech. Here, we…

The perceptual fluency hypothesis claims that items that are easy to perceive at encoding induce an illusion that they will be easier to remember, despite the finding that perception does not generally affect recall. The current set of studies tested the predictions of the perceptual fluency hypothesis with a picture generation manipulation.…

English orthographic learning, among Chinese-L1 children who were beginning to learn English as a foreign language, was documented when: (1) "only" visual memory was at their disposal, (2) visual memory and either "some" letter-sound knowledge or "some" semantic information was available, and (3) visual memory,…

Eye movement measures demonstrate differences in first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) paragraph-level reading as a function of individual differences in current L2 exposure among bilinguals (Whitford & Titone, 2012). Specifically, as current L2 exposure increases, the ease of L2 word processing increases, but the ease of L1 word…