Purpose: This study tested the hypothesis that audiovisual training benefits children more than it does adults and that it improves Japanese-speaking children's English /r/-/l/ perception to a native-like level. Method: Ten sessions of audiovisual English /r/-/l/ identification training were conducted for Japanese-speaking adults and children.…

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to examine inhibition of irrelevant information in younger and older English monolingual and Spanish--English bilingual adults. Method: Sixty-one participants divided into four groups: 15 younger English monolinguals, 16 younger Spanish-English bilinguals, 15 older English monolinguals, and 15 older…

We investigated the potential influence of implicit learning mechanisms on L2 morphosyntactic attainment by examining the relationship between age of onset (AoO), two cognitive abilities hypothesized to underlie implicit learning (phonological short-term memory and implicit statistical learning), and performance on an auditory grammaticality…

Infants as young as 2 months can integrate audio and visual aspects of speech articulation. A shift of attention from the eyes towards the mouth of talking faces occurs around 6 months of age in monolingual infants. However, it is unknown whether this pattern of attention during audiovisual speech processing is influenced by speech and language…

The present article is aimed to investigate whether there are any differences between youngsters and adults in their working and long-term memory functioning. The theory of Depth of Processing (Craik and Lockhart in "J Verbal Learning Verbal Behav" 11:671-684, 1972) discusses the varying degrees of strengths of memory traces as the…

Research has shown that both adults and children will imitate acoustic properties of the speech around them. In fact, studies on adults have shown that this convergence occurs even when the subject simply sees, but does not hear, the interlocutor. Not only does visual speech elicit imitation on its own, but also imitation is greater for…

This paper presents a study on implementing the ASR-based CALL (computer-assisted language learning based upon automatic speech recognition) system embedded with both formative and summative feedback approaches and using implicit and explicit strategies to enhance adult and young learners' English pronunciation. Two groups of learners including 18…

This study investigates the role of perception and sensory motor learning on speech production in L2. Compared to natural language learning, acoustic input in formal adult instruction is deprived of multiple sensory motor cues and lacks the imitation component. Consequently, it is possible that inaccurate pronunciation results from training.…

Identified the acoustic features of the vowels produced by Hebrew speakers differing in age and sex. Ninety speakers were recorded. Vowels were presented in a nonword context that was placed in a meaningful Hebrew sentence. Results are discussed. (Author/VWL)