The development of L2 utterance fluency has been extensively researched, whereas that of cognitive fluency has rarely been examined. This study investigated the longitudinal development of L2 utterance and cognitive fluency and their relationship. Thirty-one Chinese learners of English completed speaking tasks and a set of tasks for cognitive…

This study examines four learner engagement dimensions (behavioural, cognitive, emotional and social) in pedagogical task performance and provides insights into the effects of two task types (information-seeking and direction-giving) and topic familiarity on learner engagement in a semester-long English course. A total of 28 foreign language…

Speaking constitutes one of the main goals of learning a second language (L2). Despite the increasing attention on the role of planning and language transfer in L2 learning, the combined effect of using different languages and pre-task planning on language production remains unclear. This study investigated whether the use of different languages…

We used the elicited production task to explore the production of short and long passives in 15 Mandarin-speaking preschool children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD; aged 4;2-5;11) in comparison with 15 Typically Developing Aged-matched (TDA) children (aged 4;3-5;8) and 15 Typically Developing Younger (TDY) children (aged 3;2-4;3). This…

This study aims to understand if Mandarin late learners of English can successfully manipulate acoustic and kinematic cues to deliver English stress contrast in production. Mandarin (N = 8) and English (N = 8) speakers were recorded producing English trochaic (initial stress) and iambic (final stress) items during a nonword repetition task.…

The use of three-dimensional virtual worlds (3DVWs) in language education has been widely acknowledged in the field, and researchers have expressed a growing interest in their proliferation in second language (L2) learning and instruction. In order to improve the Thai-speaking abilities of learners of Thai as a foreign language (TFL) in three…

This paper provides an experimental study of interlanguage phonological characteristics of Chinese students learning Thai as a foreign language and the accentedness perceived by native Thai speakers. Both production and perception experiments were designed to see how Chinese students acoustically produced Thai final nasal consonants and how Thai…

This article provides a review of previous studies that have examined the effects of orthography on establishing contrastive phonological representations in second language acquisition and presents results from an original study on Mandarin speakers' production of English stops investigating how the presence of orthography affects the production…

Purpose: A fundamental feature of human speech is variation, including the manner of phonation, as exemplified in the case of whispered speech. In this study, we employed whispered speech to examine an unresolved issue about congenital amusia, a neurodevelopmental disorder of musical pitch processing, which also affects speech pitch processing…

Purpose: Depicting the development pattern of vowel perception for children with normal hearing (NH) and cochlear implants (CIs) would be useful for clinicians and school teachers to monitor children's auditory rehabilitation. The study was to investigate the development of Mandarin Chinese vowel perception for Mandarin Chinese native-speaking…

This paper examined to what extent causal explanation speaking tasks (CESTs) are cognitively appropriate for assessing young language learners' (YLLs) L2 speaking. Ninety-six YLLs (48 from Grade 4 and 6 each) in China performed two CESTs in both L1 (Chinese) and L2 (English). They also completed receptive and productive L2 vocabulary size tests.…

The present study investigates the multiple constraints on the processing of English dative alternation by Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners. The intermediate and advanced learners completed an acceptability judgment task which was composed of 30 dative alternations selected from a spoken corpus. The results showed that the…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to explore when and how Mandarin-speaking children use contextual cues to normalize speech variability in perceiving lexical tones. Two different cognitive mechanisms underlying speech normalization (lower level acoustic normalization and higher level acoustic-phonemic normalization) were investigated through the…

This study investigated the role of cross-linguistic similarity in the acquisition of Russian initial stop contrasts by Chinese learners, addressing two specific research questions: (1) How similar are Russian voiced stops to Mandarin stops for Chinese learners?; and (2) How can the speech learning model (SLM) be applied to account for the…

The present study examined the effects of using automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology on oral complexity in a flipped English as a Foreign Language (EFL) course. A total of 160 undergraduates were enrolled in a 14-week quasi-experiment. The experimental group (EG) and the control group (CG) were taught with a flipped approach, but the EG…