We examined infants’ sensitivity to articulatory organ congruency between audio-only and silent-video consonants (lip vs. tongue tip closure) to evaluate three theoretical accounts of audio-visual perceptual development for speech: 1) learned audio-visual associations; 2) intersensory perceptual narrowing; 3) amodal perception of articulatory gestures. Effects of language experience were invest...

Language teachers usually face issues regarding the most effective methods of teaching. Teaching language to nonnative speakers of English involves certain problems and challenges at all levels of instruction. Due to the unsatisfactory results of focus on forms and focus on meaning instructions and their inevitable inadequacies, focus on form instruction along with its multiple techniques are r...

In this paper, we propose to use speech modulation features for robust nonnative accent detection. Modulation spectrum carries long term temporal information of speech and may discriminate accents of native and nonnative speakers. For each speech segment to be tested, we extract a 10 dimension feature vector from modulation spectrum and use it for model training and testing. The proposed modula...

Parroting exercises in a foreign language are designed to make a student’s speech more native-like through imitation of specific native speech templates. In this paper we describe novel template-based methods for automatically estimating subjective scores for both intonation and rhythm in nonnative English. In terms of accuracy when automatically classifying a parroting speaker as a native or a...

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate changes in brain activity related to phonetic learning. Ten monolingual English-speaking subjects were scanned while performing an identification task both before and after five sessions of training with a Hindi dental-retroflex nonnative contrast. Behaviorally, training resulted in an improvement in the ability to identify th...