Purpose: This study examined spontaneous, spoken-to-a-model, and two sung modes in speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD), speakers with cerebellar disease (CD), and healthy controls. Vocal performance was measured by intelligibility scores and listeners' perceptual ratings. Method: Participants included speakers with hypokinetic dysarthria…

Speech perception research has commonly relied on untrained listeners to provide impressionistic judgments of second language (L2) speech, and training listeners has been rare. The current study therefore explores the implications of training novice listeners (NLs) to rate accented speech. A total of 60 listeners were recruited, 30 who remained…

This dissertation explores the relationship between quantitative phonetic measurements and listener identification of accents of English, focusing on phonetic distance and its perceptual correlates across various English accent varieties. The Levenshtein distance (LD) measure, which quantifies string similarity by calculating the minimum cost of…

The present study seeks to determine whether superior musical hearing is correlated with successful production of second language (L2) intonation patterns. Fifty Polish speakers of English at the university level were recorded before and after an extensive two-semester accent training course in English. Participants were asked to read aloud a…

Understanding speech in an accent or dialect different than one's own can be challenging. McLaughlin and Van Engen (2020) were the first to quantify this increase in listening effort using Task Evoked Pupillary Response (TEPR), a common measure of cognitive arousal. They found that monolingual, English speaking adults' pupils dilated more quickly…

This study investigates how Korean students produce and perceive single and double consonant letters in English words. To this end, twenty-eight Korean learners of English participated in the production and perception tests of English consonants /p, b, s, d, k, g/ with single and double letters. The participants were first asked to produce English…

Dialects vary in their allophonic patterns, which can affect listeners' phonological and lexical representations. I explore how different exposure to dialect-specific allophonic patterns for two vowels in American English, /ae ai/, affects listeners' lexical processing behaviors across three perception tasks: perceptual similarity, priming, and…

Korean learners of English are known to repair consonant clusters, which are not allowed in their native language, with an epenthetic vowel [close central unrounded vowel]. The purpose of the present study is to examine whether the perception-production link of such an illusory vowel in a second language (L2) is only within and not across…

This study investigates the effects of native language experience and phonetic properties on the discrimination of labial-velar versus labial and velar contrasts, as well as voicing contrasts in labials, velars, and labial-velars. Research indicates that phonological perceptions are influenced by native language experience and the specific…

Our study proposes the use of a free classification task for investigating the dimensions used by listeners in their perception of nonnative sounds and for predicting the perceptual discriminability of nonnative contrasts. In a free classification task, participants freely group auditory stimuli based on their perceived similarity. The results can…

Upon hearing someone's speech, a listener can access information such as the speaker's age, gender identity, socioeconomic status, and their linguistic background. However, an open question is whether living in different locales modulates how listeners use these factors to assess speakers' speech. Here, an audio-visual test was used to measure…

There is a scarcity of research into the relationship between speech perception and production from a multilingual perspective. The present exploratory study investigates longitudinally the acquisition of rhotic sounds in 24 adolescent learners who have the same language repertoires (English, German, Polish), with English being their L2, and…

In this study we show that the perception of lateral variants by Puerto Rican listeners changes according to who the listener believes is speaking. Puerto Rican listeners heard sentences with target words featuring either rhotic [voiced alveolar tap or flap] or lateral [l] (amo[voiced alveolar tap or flap] -- amo[l]) codas, a sociophonetic…

Whereas a growing amount of attention has been directed to the role of perceptual-cognitive aptitude in successful second language (L2) lexicogrammar learning, scholars have begun to investigate the same topic in the context of L2 pronunciation learning. To date, there is ongoing discussion on the mechanism underlying L2 speech learning in…

To become a native speaker, beyond obligatory rules, children need to learn systematic variation in the language, as it is present at all levels of language structure and is an integral part of linguistic knowledge. To give an example in English, speakers sometimes pronounce words ending in -ing with -in' (e.g., working vs. workin') depending on…