Every sound is made up of pitch, intensity and length (P, I and L). These universal parameters work together to give a sound its sensation. This paper presents a case of using P, I and L, and a hypothetical measure, "S[subscript c]" ("Stress Composite"), to appraise the effect of prosodic training. The main question this paper…

It is yet unclear whether congenitally deaf cochlear implant (CD CI) users' visual and multisensory emotion perception is influenced by their history in sign language acquisition. We hypothesized that early-signing CD CI users, relative to late-signing CD CI users and hearing, non-signing controls, show better facial expression recognition and…

This study investigated the effect of language immersion in an English-speaking environment on the production of intonational features in L2 English sentences. It was hypothesized that the Korean group who had been immersed in the English language as children would have intonation patterns more similar to native English speakers than a nonimmersed…

Research has demonstrated that focused perceptual training facilitates L2 learners' segmental perception and spoken word identification. Hardison (2003) and Motohashi-Saigo and Hardison (2009) found benefits of visual cues in the training for acquisition of L2 contrasts. The present study examined factors affecting perception and production…

Recent psycholinguistic findings showed that (a) a multi-modal phonetic training paradigm that encodes visual, interactive information is more effective in training L2 learners' perception of novel categories, (b) decreasing the acoustic variance of a phonetic dimension allows the learners to more effectively shift the perceptual weight towards…

The authors investigated whether intensive musical experience leads to enhancements in executive processing, as has been shown for bilingualism. Young adults who were bilinguals, musical performers (instrumentalists or vocalists), or neither completed 3 cognitive measures and 2 executive function tasks based on conflict. Both executive function…

It has been proposed that sensitivity to the parameters underlying speech rhythm may be important in setting up well-specified phonological representations in the mental lexicon. However, different acoustic parameters may contribute differentially to rhythm and stress in different languages. Here we contrast sensitivity to one such cue, amplitude…

With research showing the benefits of pronunciation instruction aimed at suprasegmentals (Derwing, Munro, & Wiebe, 1997, 1998; Derwing & Rossiter, 2003; Hahn, 2004; McNerney and Mendelsohn, 1992), more materials are needed to provide learners opportunities for self-directed practice. A 13-week experimental study was performed with 75 ESL learners…

This paper investigates learner response to a novel kind of intonation feedback generated from speech analysis. Instead of displays of pitch curves, our feedback is flashing lights that show how much pitch variation the speaker has produced. The variable used to generate the feedback is the standard deviation of fundamental frequency as measured…