In today's globalized world, strong English listening skills have become more essential than ever before. Whether you're a language learner, a professional conducting business internationally, or a traveler exploring new cultures, the ability to understand spoken English is an asset. Fortunately, advancements in technology have opened new avenues…

To date, the vast majority of research in second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition has looked at reading, but relatively few studies have explored the potential for vocabulary acquisition through listening. As for participants involved, studies concerning first language (L1) acquisition have mainly focused on pre- and emergent-reading children,…

This article reviews research findings involving visual input in speech processing in the form of facial cues and co-speech gestures for second-language (L2) learners, and provides pedagogical implications for the teaching of listening and speaking. It traces the foundations of auditory-visual speech research and explores the role of a speaker's…

Teachers' understanding of the process of speech perception could inform practice in listening classrooms. Catford (1950) developed a model for speech perception taking into account the influence of the acoustic features of the linguistic forms used by the speaker, whereby the listener "identifies" and "interprets" these…

Bilinguals have been shown to activate their two languages in parallel, and this process can often be attributed to overlap in input between the two languages. The present study examines whether two languages that do not overlap in input structure, and that have distinct phonological systems, such as American Sign Language (ASL) and English, are…

During speech comprehension, bilinguals co-activate both of their languages, resulting in cross-linguistic interaction at various levels of processing. This interaction has important consequences for both the structure of the language system and the mechanisms by which the system processes spoken language. Using computational modeling, we can…

Bilinguals have been shown to outperform monolinguals at suppressing task-irrelevant information. The present study aimed to identify how processing linguistic ambiguity during auditory comprehension may be associated with inhibitory control. Monolinguals and bilinguals listened to words in their native language (English) and identified them among…

A primary focus within neuroimaging research on language comprehension is on the distribution of semantic knowledge in the brain. Studies have shown that the left posterior middle temporal gyrus (LPMT), a region just anterior to area MT/V5, is important for the processing of complex action knowledge. It has also been found that motion verbs cause…

This study examined how 6-9 year-old English-speaking children and adults establish anaphoric dependencies during auditory sentence comprehension. Using eye-movement monitoring during listening and a corresponding sentence-picture judgment task, we investigated both the ultimate interpretation and the online processing of reflexives in comparison…

It is well-established that linguistic processing is primarily a left-hemisphere activity, while emotional prosody processing is lateralized to the right hemisphere. Does attention, directed at different regions of the talker's face, reflect this pattern of lateralization? We investigated visuospatial attention across a talker's face with a…

According to Gough and Tunmer's Simple View of Reading, Reading Comprehension = Decoding (D) x Listening Comprehension (C). The purpose of this study was to evaluate the model with a sample of First Nations children, known to have average decoding and listening comprehension but poor reading comprehension. In addition, the authors examined the…

In this study, we investigate the processing of morphologically complex words in Danish using auditory lexical decision. We document a second critical point in auditory comprehension in addition to the Uniqueness Point (UP), namely the point at which competing morphological continuation forms of the base cease to be compatible with the input,…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to assess the time course of spoken word recognition in 2-year-old children who use cochlear implants (CIs) in quiet and in the presence of speech competitors. Method: Children who use CIs and age-matched peers with normal acoustic hearing listened to familiar auditory labels, in quiet or in the presence of…

The architecture of the language processing system for speakers of more than one language remains an intriguing topic of research. A common finding is that speakers of multiple languages are slower at responding to language stimuli in their non-native language (L2) than monolingual speakers. This may simply reflect participants' unfamiliarity with…

The processing costs involved in regional accent normalization were evaluated by measuring differences in lexical decision latencies for targets placed at the end of sentences with different French regional accents. Over a series of 6 experiments, the authors examined the time course of comprehension disruption by manipulating the duration and…