Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore potential differences in suprathreshold auditory function among native and nonnative speakers of English as a function of age. Method: Retrospective analyses were performed on three large data sets containing suprathreshold auditory tests completed by 5,572 participants who were self-identified…

Purpose: This study investigated to what extent iconic co-speech gestures help word intelligibility in sentence context in two different linguistic maskers (native vs. foreign). It was hypothesized that sentence recognition improves with the presence of iconic co-speech gestures and with foreign compared to native babble. Method: Thirty-two native…

Purpose: We investigated how age and linguistic status affected listeners' ability to follow and comprehend 3-talker conversations, and the extent to which individual differences in language proficiency predict speech comprehension under difficult listening conditions. Method: Younger and older L1s as well as young L2s listened to 3-talker…

Purpose: The purposes of the current study were to examine the effect of age on Spanish-English bilinguals' speech recognition performance and to identify differences in speech recognition performance between Spanish and English bilinguals' 1st and 2nd languages. Method: Fifteen younger adult Spanish-English bilinguals, 15 older adult…

Purpose: The intelligibility of an accent strongly depends on the specific talker-listener pairing. To explore the causes of this phenomenon, we investigated the relationship between acoustic-phonetic similarity and accent intelligibility across native (1st language) and nonnative (2nd language) talker-listener pairings. We also used online…

Purpose: The study examined the contributions of Spanish and English oral narrative skills to English reading among 95 early elementary dual language learners (DLLs) from Spanish-speaking homes in the United States. This sample of first- and third-grade DLL children attended Spanish-English dual language immersion programs and received language…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the intelligibility of English consonants and vowels produced by Chinese-native (CN), and Korean-native (KN) students enrolled in American universities. Method: 16 English-native (EN), 32 CN, and 32 KN speakers participated in this study. The intelligibility of 16 American English consonants and 16…