Recent developmental studies have found evidence of learning mechanisms that may give infants an early start in acquiring language. One such early-emerging mechanism for extracting generalizations (‘algebraic’ rules) about ordered sequences of discrete elements is hypothesized to play a role in the especially difficult task of acquiring natural language grammars. As early as 7 months, infants e...

Mispronunciation is still among the frailties of language learners the world over. The present study reports an all-out investigation into pronunciation training for the Persian-speaking EFL learners at the intermediate level of language proficiency. More specifically, the present study investigated (a) the underlying causes of mispronunciation at the level of segmental features, (b) the crucia...

from a long time ago, religious scholars have been competing to best determine the very miracles of the holy quran. from among these scholars some have tended to its language, style and structure while some other have been absorbed by its scientific miracles. the present study is an attempt to analyze one of these miracles, i.e. miracle of sound. quran was first revealed unto muhammad (pbuh) in...

Typical U.S. children use their knowledge of letters' names to help learn the letters' sounds. They perform better on letter sound tests with letters that have their sounds at the beginnings of their names, such as v, than with letters that have their sounds at the ends of their names, such as m, and letters that do not have their sounds in their names, such as h. We found this same pattern amo...

Human infants show a preference for listening to speech, but little is known about how infants listen to other naturally occurring sounds. Here, we test infants’ listening bias for speech against a range of naturally occurring sounds that share properties of speech to varying extents and we aim to better characterize the speech properties that attract infant attention. We compared 3-month-olds’...