The current study investigated how recasts can promote the L2 pronunciation development of word-initial /?/ by Japanese learners of English in relation to two developmental stages of English /?/ acquisition (i.e. change in second formant [F2] ? change in third formant [F3]) as well as four affecting variables (i.e. the amount of recasts and…

A high variability phonetic training technique was employed to train 26 Mandarin speakers to better perceive ten English vowels. In eight short training sessions, learners identified 200 English vowel tokens, produced in a post bilabial stop context by 20 native speakers. Learners' ability to identify English vowels significantly improved in the…

The McGurk effect paradigm was used to examine the developmental onset of inter-language differences between Japanese and English in auditory-visual speech perception. Participants were asked to identify syllables in audiovisual (with congruent or discrepant auditory and visual components), audio-only, and video-only presentations at various…

This paper reports on a small-scale pilot study further investigating the perceptual development in the acquisition of durational contrasts by different levels of adult English-speakers of Japanese. Four kinds of naturally spoken word-tokens were edited by a synthesizer to generate word-stimuli varying the duration of a certain consonant/vowel…