This study mainly examined the role of the combination of three senses (i.e., auditory, visual, and tactile) and five senses (i.e., auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory) in the correlation between electrophysiological and electrodermal responses underlying second language (L2) sentence comprehension. Forty subjects did two…

Purpose: This study investigated the efficacy of ultrasound biofeedback compared to a traditional acoustic input-only method in the second-language (L2) production training of English tense-lax vowel contrasts (/i-[near-close near-front unrounded vowel]/ and /e-[open-mid front unrounded vowel]/). The relationship between the degrees of production…

The advent of various interactive multimedia networks in the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classroom (Grabe & Grabe, 2007) has led to the emergence of new learning methodologies (Ming-Hung et al., 2017). Accordingly, new ways of learning are present in a multimodal environment , and have caused an effect on students' degree of…

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…

One of the basic goals of second language (L2) speech research is to understand the perception-production link, or the relationship between L2 speech perception and L2 speech production. Although many studies have examined the link, they have done so with strikingly different conceptual foci and methods. Even studies that appear to use similar…

This article proposes a conceptual and measurement framework for postpubertal, L2 speech learning aptitude that is centered around domain-general auditory processing (i.e., representing spectral and temporal characteristics of sounds). To this end, we examine the construct and reliability of a battery of auditory processing tests by presenting the…

Research has suggested that the type and frequency of learning strategies employed by successful listeners is greater than their less successful counterparts. Based on evidence that metacognitive strategies (e.g. listening-for-gist; inferring meaning) are more effective than cognitive ones (e.g. word-for-word translation), this study sought to…

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.…

The present study seeks to determine whether superior musical hearing is correlated with successful production of second language (L2) intonation patterns. Fifty Polish speakers of English at the university level were recorded before and after an extensive two-semester accent training course in English. Participants were asked to read aloud a…

In this paper, I first provide a brief review of how scholars have conceptualized, tested, and elaborated aptitude frameworks relevant to second language (L2) speech learning. Subsequently, I introduce an emerging paradigm that assigns a fundamental role to domain-general auditory processing (i.e., having a good ear) in L1 speech acquisition and…

Purpose: Previous studies have shown that individuals with congenital amusia exhibit deficient pitch processing across music and language domains. This study investigated whether adult Chinese-speaking listeners with amusia were still able to learn Thai lexical tones based on stimulus frequency of statistical distribution via distributional…

As there is a growing population of non-native speakers worldwide, facilitating communication involving native and non-native speakers has become increasingly important. While one way to help communication involving native and non-native speakers is to help non-native speakers improve proficiency in their target language, another way is to help…

The research built on the anthropological approach to text comprehension links philosophical and psycholinguistic perspectives of speech perception. The article analyzes the factors influencing adequate comprehension when perceiving foreign language oral speech, in terms of testees' approximately similar level of language competence and…

This study investigates how Korean students produce and perceive single and double consonant letters in English words. To this end, twenty-eight Korean learners of English participated in the production and perception tests of English consonants /p, b, s, d, k, g/ with single and double letters. The participants were first asked to produce English…

Individuals differ in their ability to perceive and learn unfamiliar speech sounds, but we lack a comprehensive theoretical account that predicts individual differences in this skill. Predominant theories largely attribute difficulties of non-native speech perception to the relationships between non-native speech sounds/contrasts and…