The current project aimed to investigate the potentially different linguistic correlates of comprehensibility (i.e., ease of understanding) and accentedness (i.e., linguistic nativelikeness) in adult second language (L2) learners’ extemporaneous speech production. Timed picture descriptions from 120 beginner, intermediate, and advanced Japanese learners of English were analyzed using native spe...

Brain imaging studies of voice perception often contrast activation from vocal and verbal tasks to identify regions uniquely involved in processing voice. However, such a strategy precludes detection of the functional relationship between speech and voice perception. In a pair of experiments involving identifying voices from native and foreign language speech we show that, even after repeated e...

This short, introductory paper presents an up-to-date account of Works within the field of Applied Linguistics which have been influenced by a Conversation Analytic paradigm. The article reviews recent studies in classroom interaction, materials development, proficiency assessment and language teacher education. We believe that the publication of such a special journal issue is timely, since Co...

This research examines the relative influences of native language and recent linguistic exposure on listeners’ use of prosodic cues in artificial-language speech segmentation. We tested listeners’ use of fundamental-frequency (F0) rise as cue to word-final boundaries. Participants included French listeners who had spent various amounts of time in the US since their last stay in France, high-pro...

The article reports research investigating the way bilingualism affects cognitive and linguistic performance across the lifespan. In general, bilingualism appears to have both benefits and costs. Regarding costs, bilinguals typically have lower formal language proficiency than monolinguals do; for example, they have smaller vocabularies and weaker access to lexical items. The benefits, however,...

Foreign language tutors have some conversation strategies to help learners to successfully finish a learning session. But these strategies are generally described by vague linguistic terms so that they cannot be easily transformed to a computational model. Therefore, this study presents a fuzzy logic-based method that considers learner's proficiency level and difficulty of system responses toge...

Adult non-native perception is subject to influence from a variety of factors, including native language experience. The present research examines the effect of linguistic experience on non-native tone perception and tone word learning. Native Thai and English-speaking participants completed seven sessions of lexical identification training on words distinguished by Cantonese tones. A tone iden...

The listener’s gazing activities during utterances were analyzed in a face-to-face three-party conversation setting. The function of each utterance was categorized according to the Grounding Acts defined by Traum (Traum, 1994) so that gazes during utterances could be analyzed from the viewpoint of grounding in communication (Clark, 1996). Quantitative analysis showed that the listeners were gaz...