Some listeners exhibit higher sensitivity to subphonemic acoustic differences (i.e., higher speech gradiency). Here, we asked whether higher gradiency in a listener's first language (L1) facilitates foreign language learning and explored the possible sources of individual differences in L1 gradiency. To address these questions, we tested 164…

This study compared five research-based intelligibility measures as they were applied to six varieties of English. The objective was to determine which approach to measuring intelligibility would be most reliable for predicting listener comprehension, as measured through a listening comprehension test similar to the Test of English as a Foreign…

The effects of production and listening training on the subsequent comprehension of foreign-accented speech were investigated in a training-test paradigm. During training, German nonnative (L2) and English native (L1) participants listened to a story spoken by a German speaker who replaced all English /?/s with /t/ (e.g., *"teft" for…

Tone languages such as Mandarin use voice pitch to signal lexical contrasts, presenting a challenge for second/foreign language (L2) learners whose native languages do not use pitch in this manner. The present study examined components of an aptitude for mastering L2 lexical tone. Native English speakers with no previous tone language experience…

We present the outcomes of a pronunciation training program conducted in a workplace setting with second language speakers who had lived in an English-speaking environment for an average of 19 years. The research questions concerned whether improvement would occur in the learners' perception of certain segments and prosody; in the…

Many learners of a foreign language (L2) struggle to correctly pronounce newly learned speech sounds, yet many others achieve this with apparent ease. Here we explored how a training study of learning complex consonant clusters at the very onset of L2 acquisition can inform us about L2 learning in general and individual differences in particular.…

In this article, we report the results of a study on the relationship between individual differences in language learning aptitude and the structural connectivity of language pathways in the adult brain, the first of its kind. We measured four components of language aptitude ("vocabulary learning"; "sound recognition"; "sound-symbol…

Visual information from the face is an integral part of speech perception. Additionally, orthography can play a role in disambiguating the speech signal in nonnative speech. This study investigates the effect of audiovisual speech information and orthography on nonnative speech. Particularly, orthographic depth is of interest. Turkish transparent…