This study examined putative benefits of testing and production for learning new languages. Undergraduates (N = 156) were exposed to Turkish spoken dialogues under varying learning conditions (retrieval practice, comprehension, verbal repetition) in a computer-assisted language learning session. Participants completed pre- and posttests of number-…

The current study investigated the effects of repetition on the learning of second language (L2) spoken word forms. Japanese university students learning L2 English were randomly assigned to one of three treatment conditions (one, three, and six exposures) and learned 40 words while hearing them and viewing their corresponding pictures. A…

Scholars have extensively investigated the effectiveness of high variability phonetic training (HVPT), that is, identification and discrimination of second language speech sounds produced by multiple speakers followed by trial-by-trial feedback. Building on the notion of incidental and multimodal learning in cognitive psychology (e.g., Lim &…

To date, a growing number of studies have shown that domain-general auditory processing, which prior work has linked to L1 acquisition, could explain various dimensions of naturalistic L2 speech proficiency. The current study examined the generalizability of this topic to L2 speech learning in classroom settings. The spontaneous speech samples of…

We report on an analysis of spontaneous gesture production in 2-year-old children who come from three countries (Italy, United Kingdom, Australia) and who speak two languages (Italian, English), in an attempt to tease apart the influence of language and culture when comparing children from different cultural and linguistic environments.…

We examined case-marking variation in heritage Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Comparing heritage to homeland Polish and Ukrainian speakers, we found only a few types and a few tokens of systematic distinction between heritage and homeland varieties. A total of 6,291 instances of nouns and pronouns were extracted from transcribed conversations…

Infants in their first year manifest selective patterns of discrimination between languages and between accents of the same language. Prosodic differences are held to be important in whether languages can be discriminated, together with the infant's familiarity with one or both of the accents heard. However, the nature of the prosodic cues that…

Distributional learning is a proposal for how infants might learn early speech sound categories from acoustic input before they know many words. When categories in the input differ greatly in relative frequency and overlap in acoustic space, research in bilingual development suggests that this affects the course of development. In the present…

We investigated the scoring of the Speaking section of the Test of English as a Foreign Language[TM] Internet-based (TOEFL iBT[R]) test by speakers of English and one or more Indian languages. We explored the extent to which raters from India, after being trained and certified, were able to score the TOEFL examinees with mixed first languages…

The current study investigated the impact of recasts together with form-focused instruction (FFI) on the development of second language speech perception and production of English /?/ by Japanese learners. Forty-five learners were randomly assigned to three groups--FFI recasts, FFI only, and Control--and exposed to four hours of communicatively…

Presents a study of methodological validation in speech act research. Discourse-Completion tests (DCTs) and multiple-choice questionnaires (MCQs) designed to elicit requests were administered to two groups of Japanese female undergraduates. Significant differences were found in most situations, with those students completing the MCQ choosing to…