This controlled experimental study investigated the interaction of variables associated with rating the pronunciation component of high-stakes English-language-speaking tests such as IELTS and TOEFL iBT. One hundred experienced raters who were all either familiar or unfamiliar with Brazilian-accented English or Papua New Guinean Tok Pisin-accented…

Purpose: Research has shown that observing hand gestures mimicking pitch movements or rhythmic patterns can improve the learning of second language (L2) suprasegmental features. However, less is known about the effects of hand gestures on the learning of novel phonemic contrasts. This study examines (a) whether hand gestures mimicking phonetic…

This study investigates the perception and production of a specific type of metaphoric gesture that mimics melody in speech, also called "pitch gesture," in the learning of L2 suprasegmental features. In a between-subjects design, a total of 106 participants with no previous knowledge of Chinese were asked to observe (Experiment 1) and…

At about 7 months of age, infants listen longer to sentences containing familiar words--but not deviant pronunciations of familiar words (Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995). This finding suggests that infants are able to segment familiar words from fluent speech and that they store words in sufficient phonological detail to recognize deviations from a…

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…

We investigated the second language (L2) acquisition of pragmatic categories that are not as consistently and frequently encoded in the L2 than in the first language (L1). Experiment 1 showed that Italian speakers linguistically highlighted affirmative polarity contrast (e.g. "The child ate the candies" following after "The child…