Precise auditory perception at a subcortical level (neural representation and encoding of sound) has been suggested as a form of implicit L2 aptitude in naturalistic settings. Emerging evidence suggests that such implicit aptitude explains some variance in L2 speech perception and production among adult learners with different first language…

Suprasegmental features have received growing attention in the field of oral assessment. In this article we describe a set of computer algorithms that automatically scores the oral proficiency of non-native speakers using unconstrained English speech. The algorithms employ machine learning and 11 suprasegmental measures divided into four groups…

Spoken English has a stress-alternating rhythm that is not marked in its orthography. In two experiments, the authors evaluated whether stylistic alterations to print that marked stress pulses fostered the rendering of rhythm (experiment 1) and stress (experiment 2) during silent reading. In experiment 1, silent readers rated the helpfulness of…

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,…

This exploratory study investigated whether joint attention through eye gaze was predictive of second language (L2) speakers' responses to recasts. L2 English learners (N = 20) carried out communicative tasks with research assistants who provided feedback in response to non-targetlike (non-TL) forms. Their interaction was audio-recorded and their…

This study discusses the construct of oral reading fluency and examines its relationship to reading comprehension among adult English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learners of four first language (L1) backgrounds. One hundred and forty-nine adult learners of English with Arabic, Japanese, Spanish and Chinese language backgrounds participated in this…

This paper introduces a corpus-driven measure as a method to assess EFL learners' knowledge of semantic prosody. Semantic prosody here is defined as the tendency of some words to occur in a certain semantic environment. For example, the verb "cause" is associated with unpleasant things--death, problem and the like. Subjects were 60…

This study reports an exploratory analysis of the age of arrival (AoA) effect on the production of second language (L2) prosody. Three groups of Mandarin-speaking immigrants (N = 10 in each group) with varying AoA in the United States and ten native speakers of English as controls participated in the study. All participants read a paragraph of…