The current study investigates the effects of more explicit versus more implicit corrective feedback on beginner Mandarin learners' perception and production of Mandarin tones. The effects of oral corrective feedback have been extensively investigated for various domains of second language acquisition (see Mackey & Goo, 2007). For phonological…

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…

Recent studies on the learning of L2 prosody have suggested that pitch gestures can enhance the learning of the L2 lexical tones. Yet it remains unclear whether the use of these gestures can aid the learning of L2 intonation, especially by tonal-language speakers. Sixty-four Mandarin speakers with basic-level Spanish were asked to learn three…

The present study investigates the prosody/pragmatics interface in TBLT by extending the traditional morphological focus-on-form to a focus on intonational forms, with Spanish declaratives and imperatives. Twenty-eight intermediate L2 Spanish learners were assigned to one of two conditions that differed in the type of focus-on-form present during…

Although previous research has demonstrated the efficacy of recasts on second language (L2) morphology and lexis (e.g., Li, 2010; Mackey & Goo, 2007), few studies have examined their effect on learners' phonological development (although see Saito, 2015; Saito & Lyster, 2012). The current study investigates the impact of recasts on the…

The current study longitudinally examined the influence of aptitude on second language (L2) pronunciation development when 40 first-year Japanese university students engaged in practice activities inside and outside English-as-a-Foreign-Language classrooms over one academic year. Spontaneous speech samples were elicited at the beginning, middle,…

The current study examined how form-focused instruction (FFI) with and without corrective feedback (CF) as output enhancement facilitated second language (L2) perception of Mandarin tones at both the phonetic and phonological levels by 41 Cantonese learners of Mandarin. Two experimental groups, FFI only and FFI-CF, received a 90-min FFI treatment…