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…

The question of whether second languages (L2s) are best learned implicitly or explicitly has been a topic of much empirical discourse, with the majority of studies pointing to the benefits of explicit instruction when learning L2 grammar rules. However, given the focus on grammar, it is unclear how generalizable these findings are to other…

This study focuses on the development of L2 prosody and, in particular, whether different aspects can affect each other. Finnish-speaking learners of Swedish took part in a pronunciation and oral skills course and were recorded for various speaking tasks before and after the experimental intervention. Read-aloud declarative sentences (statements)…

The research reported in this article investigated how students learning Japanese or Russian as a third language (L3) perceived and produced word-initial stops in their respective target language and the link between perception and production. The participants in the study were 39 Chinese university students who spoke Mandarin Chinese as their…

Successful listening in a second language (L2) involves learning to identify the relevant acoustic-phonetic dimensions that differentiate between words in the L2, and then use these cues to access lexical representations during real-time comprehension. This is a particularly challenging goal to achieve when the relevant acoustic-phonetic…

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…

Context is what makes mathematical modeling tasks different from more traditional textbook word problems. Math problems are sometimes stripped of context as they are worked on. For modeling problems, however, context is important for making sense of the mathematics. The task should be brought back to its real-world context as often as possible. In…

Previous research has shown that learners of English-as-a-second-language (ESL) have difficulties in understanding connected speech spoken by native English speakers. Extending from past research limited to quiet listening condition, this study examined the perception of English connected speech presented under five adverse conditions, namely…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine and characterize the training-induced changes in speech-in-noise perception in children with congenital deafness who have cochlear implants (CIs). Method: Twenty-seven children with congenital deafness who have CIs were studied. Eleven children with CIs were trained on a speech-in-noise task,…

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…

This study investigates the effects of Acoustic Spectrographic Instruction on the production of the English phonological contrast /i/ and / I /. Acoustic Spectrographic Instruction is based on the assumption that physical representations of speech sounds and spectrography allow learners to objectively see and modify those non-accurate features in…