This paper investigates the perception of phonotactics by Saudi English majors, beginners and advanced. Due to the significance of pronunciation of consonant clusters, which are almost absent from Arabic, this work attempts to find the extent to which beginner and advanced English majors accept or reject permissible and impermissible sounds…

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 examined language-specific links among auditory processing, linguistic prosody awareness, and Mandarin (L1) and English (L2) word reading in 61 Mandarin-speaking, English-learning children. Three auditory discrimination abilities were measured: pitch contour, pitch interval, and rise time (rate of intensity change at tone onset).…

Audiovisual media are part of children's daily life. They build and/or replace a part of the reality that is sometimes preceded. This paper is interested in one of the elements of the audiovisual binomial, the soundtrack, in order to analyse its meaning and sense from the children's point of view. The objectives are: to determine if the…

Purpose: International evidence suggests youth offenders have greater difficulties with oral language than their nonoffending peers. This study examined the hearing, auditory processing, and language skills of male youth offenders and remandees (YORs) in New Zealand. Method: Thirty-three male YORs, aged 14-17 years, were recruited from 2 youth…

Human-centered design requires thorough understanding of people (e.g. customers, designers, engineers) in order to better satisfy the needs and expectations of all stakeholders in the design process. Designers are able to create better products by incorporating customers' subjective evaluations on products. Engineers can also build better tools…

Purpose: A new literature has suggested that speech rate can influence the parsing of words quite strongly in speech. The purpose of this study was to investigate differences between younger adults and older adults in the use of context speech rate in word segmentation, given that older adults perceive timing information differently from younger…

Purpose: Open-plan classroom styles are increasingly being adopted in Australia despite evidence that their high intrusive noise levels adversely affect learning. The aim of this study was to develop a new Australian speech perception task (the Mealings, Demuth, Dillon, and Buchholz Classroom Speech Perception Test) and use it in an open-plan…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of hearing loss and age on subjective ratings of emotional valence and arousal in response to nonspeech sounds. Method: Three groups of adults participated: 20 younger listeners with normal hearing (M = 24.8 years), 20 older listeners with normal hearing (M = 55.8 years), and 20 older…

Infants perceive intonation contrasts early in development in contrast to lexical stress but similarly to lexical pitch accent. Previous studies have mostly focused on pitch height/direction contrasts; however, languages use a variety of pitch features to signal meaning, including differences in pitch timing. In this study, we investigate infants'…

Successful communication in everyday life crucially involves the processing of auditory and visual components of speech. Viewing our interlocutor and processing visual components of speech facilitates speech processing by triggering auditory processing. Auditory phoneme processing, analyzed by event-related brain potentials (ERP), has been shown…

Purpose: Five experiments probed auditory-visual (AV) understanding of sentences by users of cochlear implants (CIs). Method: Sentence material was presented in auditory (A), visual (V), and AV test conditions to listeners with normal hearing and CI users. Results: (a) Most CI users report that most of the time, they have access to both A and V…

The goal of this study is to provide a better understanding of the influence from first language (L1) phonology and morphosyntax on second language (L2) production and perception of English regular past tense morphology. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.) [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC.…

Listening is widely regarded as an important skill that is difficult and necessary to teach in L2 classrooms. Listening requires both top-down and bottom-up processing, yet pedagogical techniques for the latter are often lacking. This study explores the efficacy of pronunciation instruction (PI) for improving learners' bottom-up processing. The…

It is also hypothesized that proficiency level may have a voice with respect to learning styles. Therefore, to throw light on this issue, the present investigation targeted the relationship between Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' learning styles and their levels of proficiency at Golestan University, Gorgan, Iran. To this…