This dissertation examines whether and how psycholinguistic priming, and social knowledge are integrated in the identification of sociolinguistic variants. Using the English variable (ING), the alternation between -ing and -in' (e.g. thinking vs. thinkin') as a testing ground, this dissertation probes whether and how individuals utilize…

Purpose: We examined how consonant perception is affected by a preceding speech carrier simulated in the same or a different room, for different classes of consonants. Carrier room, carrier length, and carrier length/target room uncertainty were manipulated. A phonetic feature analysis tested which phonetic categories are influenced by the…

This study reports syllable position effects on second language (L2) Portuguese speech perception, revealing that L2 segmental learning may be prone to an influence from the suprasegmental level. The results show that first language (L1) Mandarin learners had diminished performance on the discrimination between the target Portuguese liquids (/l/…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate how speech naturalness relates to masculinity-femininity and gender identification (accuracy and reaction time) for cisgender male and female speakers as well as transmasculine and transfeminine speakers. Method: Stimuli included spontaneous speech samples from 20 speakers who are transgender…

Purpose: Depicting the development pattern of vowel perception for children with normal hearing (NH) and cochlear implants (CIs) would be useful for clinicians and school teachers to monitor children's auditory rehabilitation. The study was to investigate the development of Mandarin Chinese vowel perception for Mandarin Chinese native-speaking…

Research on native Arabic speakers' perception of non-native English phonemic contrasts has manifested various conclusions. Some studies have revealed that native Arabic speakers experience difficulty in the perception of non-native English phonemic contrasts, where others have concluded that they largely do not experience such difficulty. Due to…

Purpose: The aim of the study was to examine the precision of forced-choice (closed-set) and open-ended (open-set) word recognition (WR) tasks for identifying a change in hearing. Method: WR performance for closed-set (4 and 6 choices) and open-set tasks was obtained from 70 listeners with normal hearing. Speech recognition was degraded by…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the listening effort made by young children in real classrooms during a prolonged speech reception task in the presence of background noise. Method: The experiment was proposed to 117 typically developing kindergarten and primary school pupils, aged 5-7 years old. An ecological experimental approach was…

Purpose: Age-related sensorineural hearing loss can dramatically affect speech recognition performance due to reduced audibility and suprathreshold distortion of spectrotemporal information. Normal aging produces changes within the central auditory system that impose further distortions. The goal of this study was to characterize the effects of…

Purpose: Sarcasm is a specialized speech act in daily vocal communication usually characterized by unique prosodic features, but the role of voice quality in expressing sarcasm has not been explored much. The goal of this study is to explore the voice quality features of Mandarin sarcastic speech in comparison to sincere speech. Method: Fifteen…

Research has demonstrated that pronunciation teaching can be effective, but there have been very few classroom-based studies that have focused on the perception aspect of pronunciation. This article explains the theory and practical application of a conceptual approach and reports on its impact on perception of English word stress. The…

Purpose: We aim to identify the possible sources for age-related differences in the perception of emotion in speech, focusing on the distinct roles of semantics (words) and prosody (tone of speech) and their interaction. Method: We implement the Test for Rating of Emotions in Speech (Ben-David, Multani, Shakuf, Rudzicz, & van Lieshout, 2016).…

This study investigates how second language (L2) listeners' perception is affected by two factors: the listeners' experience with the target dialect -- North American English (NAE) vs. Standard Southern British English (SSBE) -- and talkers' language background: native vs. non-native talkers; i.e. interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit…

Perceptual assimilation is a well-known task; however, there is no study on the assimilation pattern of the English monophthongs by L2 Thai learners. The aims of this study are to explore the perceptual assimilation patterns of the British English monophthongs to Thai monophthongs by L2 Thai learners and to examine the effect of L2 experience on…

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…