The current study longitudinally examined the influence of aptitude on second language (L2) pronunciation development when 40 first-year Japanese university students engaged in practice activities inside and outside English-as-a-Foreign-Language classrooms over one academic year. Spontaneous speech samples were elicited at the beginning, middle,…

Language-analytic ability, or the ability to treat language as an object of analysis and arrive at linguistic generalizations, is at the core of the constructs of language learning aptitude and metalinguistic awareness, which are implicated in our ability to learn explicitly. In the context of child second language (L2) learning, it has been…

Recent studies on the learning of L2 prosody have suggested that pitch gestures can enhance the learning of the L2 lexical tones. Yet it remains unclear whether the use of these gestures can aid the learning of L2 intonation, especially by tonal-language speakers. Sixty-four Mandarin speakers with basic-level Spanish were asked to learn three…