Background: Children with phonological impairment present with pattern-based errors in their speech production. While some children have difficulties with speech perception and/or the establishment of robust underlying phonological representations, the nature of phonological impairment in children is still not well understood. Given that…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate how general, implicit instructions with auditory-perceptual emphasis; specific, explicit instructions with biomechanical focus; or both affect learning of oral-nasal balance control in speech. Method: Thirty healthy, vocally untrained participants were assigned to one of three instructional…

This study investigates the perception of the three Mandarin high vowels /i, u, y/ after dental, retroflex, and palatal fricatives and affricates (/s/-/[voiceless alveolar affricate]/-/[voiceless alveolar affricate][superscript voiceless glottal fricative]/; /[voiceless retroflex sibilant fricative]/-/[voiceless alveolar affricate]/-/[voiceless…

This qualitative case study examined the impact of listening to Global Englishes on the development of listening comprehension in pre-intermediate English students at Universidad Nacional, Costa Rica. Using questionnaires, focus groups, and observations, the research explored students' perceptions of various English speakers from different…

Decoding training is an approach to teaching listening skills to help learners develop the ability to recognize individual words from speech. Although it has been historically underemphasized, recent empirical studies have pointed to its potential value in listening education. However, instructors and students generally face certain challenges…

Purpose: Robust improvements in intelligibility following familiarization, a listener-targeted perceptual training paradigm, have been revealed for talkers diagnosed with spastic, ataxic, and hypokinetic dysarthria but not for talkers with hyperkinetic dysarthria. While the theoretical explanation for the lack of intelligibility improvement…

The prominent role of allophonic cues in English speech segmentation has widely been recognized by phonologists and psycholinguists. However, very meager inquiry was devoted to analysing the perception of these noncontrastive allophonic cues by Arab EFL learners. Accordingly, the present study is an attempt to examine the exploitation of…

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…

Arabic emphasis refers to the production of consonants resulting from a primary constriction in the dental or alveolar region and a secondary constriction in the back of the vocal tract, recognized as 'Emphatic.' These have contrastive consonants produced in the dental or alveolar region, recognized as 'Plain.' The existing research on emphasis in…

Purpose: High-variability phonetic training (HVPT) has been found to be effective on adult second language (L2) learning, but results are mixed in regards to the benefit of multiple talkers over single talker. This study provides a systematic review with meta-analysis to investigate the talker variability effect in nonnative phonetic learning and…

Listener background variables have been recognized as potential contributors to language evaluation bias. This continuum of trait-irrelevant factors creates implications from the L2 classroom to integration in the target language community. This study examined how L2 Spanish learners' listener background factors including ethnicity, heritage…

Distributional learning is typically understood as (unattended) tracking of stimulus probabilities. Distributional training with speech yields mixed results and the influencing factors have not yet been fully investigated. This study explored whether prior linguistic experience could have an effect on distributional learning outcomes. Czech and…

Featural approaches to second language phonetic acquisition posit that the development of new phonetic norms relies on sub-phonemic features, expressed through a constellation of articulatory gestures and their corresponding acoustic cues, which may be shared across multiple phonemes. Within featural approaches, largely supported by research in…

With the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic and increasing popularity of videoconferencing software such as Zoom, the move to online and /or hybrid teaching has never been more rapid. With this change, however, maintaining presence in the classroom has become a great challenge simply because of the nature of online teaching. Presence is a teaching…

This article reviews research findings involving visual input in speech processing in the form of facial cues and co-speech gestures for second-language (L2) learners, and provides pedagogical implications for the teaching of listening and speaking. It traces the foundations of auditory-visual speech research and explores the role of a speaker's…