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…

Purpose: The language processing of Mandarin-accented English (MAE) by older hearing-impaired (OHI), older normally hearing (NH), and younger NH listeners was explored. We examined whether OHI adults have more difficulty than NH listeners in recognizing and adapting to MAE speech productions after receiving brief training with the accent. Method:…

Immediate and lasting effects of music or second-language training were examined in early childhood using event-related potentials. Event-related potentials were recorded for French vowels and musical notes in a passive oddball paradigm in thirty-six 4- to 6-year-old children who received either French or music training. Following training, both…

This study examined whether high-variability auditory training on natural speech can benefit experienced second-language English speakers who already are exposed to natural variability in their daily use of English. The subjects were native French speakers who had learned English in school; experienced listeners were tested in England and the less…

Perceptual training was employed to characterize individual differences in non-native speech sound learning. Fifty-nine adult English speakers were trained to distinguish the Hindi dental-retroflex contrast, as well as a tonal pitch contrast. Training resulted in overall group improvement in the ability to identify and to discriminate the phonetic…

A perceptual fading technique was used to teach unilingual adult Canadian francophones to identify the voiceless and voiced linguadental fricatives of English. After just 90 minutes of training, subjects were better able to identify both the training stimuli and an untrained set of natural consonant-vowel exemplars produced by 4 different…

Investigated the effects of three aural-advance organizers on student comprehension of second-language (L2) videotaped materials. Subjects were 160 low-intermediate Chinese students of English in Taiwan. Suggests that in preparing advance organizers for English-as-a-Foreign-Language students, teachers should focus on new words rather than on video…

Since listening comprehension presupposes an orderly conversion of running speech into discrete linguistic units, certain restoration processes must apply. An approach is provided to explain the metamorphosis that language undergoes from dynamic speech representations to citation form strings, under listening conditions. Some performance…