Purpose: The language processing of Mandarin-accented English (MAE) by older hearing-impaired (OHI), older normally hearing (NH), and younger NH listeners was explored. We examined whether OHI adults have more difficulty than NH listeners in recognizing and adapting to MAE speech productions after receiving brief training with the accent. Method:…

Popular opinion has long assumed that learning a foreign language requires not only traditional classroom instruction but also immersion among native speakers of the language. This opinion is so strongly held that students who study through immersion are believed to become more proficient than those who do not. "Study Abroad Contexts for…

This study examined whether high-variability auditory training on natural speech can benefit experienced second-language English speakers who already are exposed to natural variability in their daily use of English. The subjects were native French speakers who had learned English in school; experienced listeners were tested in England and the less…

A perceptual fading technique was used to teach unilingual adult Canadian francophones to identify the voiceless and voiced linguadental fricatives of English. After just 90 minutes of training, subjects were better able to identify both the training stimuli and an untrained set of natural consonant-vowel exemplars produced by 4 different…

Investigated the effects of three aural-advance organizers on student comprehension of second-language (L2) videotaped materials. Subjects were 160 low-intermediate Chinese students of English in Taiwan. Suggests that in preparing advance organizers for English-as-a-Foreign-Language students, teachers should focus on new words rather than on video…

This paper describes the various barriers to comprehension that learners may encounter when viewing feature films in a second language. Two clusters of interfacing factors that may contribute to comprehension hot spots emerged from a quantitative analysis of problems noted in student logbooks. One cluster had a strong acoustic basis, whereas the…