Language learners need to map a continuous, multidimensional acoustic signal to discrete abstract speech categories. The complexity of this mapping poses a difficult learning problem, particularly for second language learners who struggle to acquire the speech sounds of a non-native language, and almost never reach native-like ability. A common…

This study revisited L2 morpheme development order among Korean young learners of English. Taking into account the spirit of the current English curriculum in South Korea, the current study examined L2 morpheme development from two different perspectives: accuracy and fluency aspects. In the field of second language development, many studies have…

Infants are sensitive to statistical regularities (i.e., transitional probabilities, or TPs) relevant to segmenting words in fluent speech. However, there is debate about whether tracking TPs results in representations of possible words. Infants show preferential learning of sequences with high TPs (HTPs) as object labels relative to those with…

Age of acquisition (AoA) refers to the age at which people learn a particular item and the AoA effect refers to the phenomenon that early-acquired items are processed more quickly and accurately than those acquired later. Over several decades, the AoA effect has been investigated using neuroscientific, behavioral, corpus and computational…

The present research examines whether adults who learn a second language (L2) mainly in a classroom setting can develop linguistic representations that are qualitatively similar to those of native speakers for linguistic content that is not explicitly taught in the classroom. It does so by focusing on the domains of speech processing and speech…

This study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine whether we employ the same normalisation mechanisms when processing words spoken with a regional accent or foreign accent. Our results showed that the Phonological Mapping Negativity (PMN) following the onset of the final word of sentences spoken with an unfamiliar regional accent was…

Phonetic variation has been considered a barrier that listeners must overcome in speech perception, but has been proved beneficial in category learning. In this paper, I show that listeners use within-speaker variation to accommodate gross categorical variation. Within the perceptual learning paradigm, listeners are exposed to p-initial words in…