The development of speech perception during the 1st year reflects increasing attunement to native language features, but the mechanisms underlying this development are not completely understood. One previous study linked reductions in nonnative speech discrimination to performance on nonlinguistic tasks, whereas other studies have shown associations between speech perception and vocabulary grow...

The e-rater system 1 , an automated essay scoring system, developed at Educational Testing Service (ETS), is currently being used to score essay responses on the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT). The average agreement between human readers, and between independent human readers and e-rater is approximately 92%. There is much interest in the larger writing community in examining the sy...

The language environment modifies the speech perception abilities found in early development. In particular, adults have difficulty perceiving many nonnative contrasts that young infants discriminate. The underlying perceptual reorganization apparently occurs by 10-12 months. According to one view, it depends on experiential effects on psychoacoustic mechanisms. Alternatively, phonological deve...

Human infants become native-language listeners through a process of perceptual narrowing. Monolingual infants are initially sensitive to a wide range of language-relevant contrasts. However, as they mature and gain native-language experience, their sensitivity to nonnative contrasts declines. Here, we consider the case of infants growing up bilingual as a window into how increased variation aff...

The present study investigated the possible difference between EFL teachers’ beliefs and their actual classroom practices. To this end, 210 Iranian EFL teachers (103 teachers from high schools and 107 from language institutes) participated in the study. The 45-item Likert-scale Beliefs About Language Learning Inventory (BALLI) developed originally by Horwitz, (1985) and validated by Kasraee Nej...

Nonnative sounds and sequences are systematically adapted in both perception and production. For example, American English speakers often modify illegal word-initial clusters by inserting a vocalic transition between the two consonants (e.g., (/bdagu/? [bdagu]). Previous work on such modifications has for the most part focused on relatively abstract properties of the nonnative structures, such ...

Despite the abundance of research on ELT teachers, little is known about teacher language awareness (TLA) with focus on its impact on pedagogical practice in the EFL context. To fill this gap, an in-depth study was conducted to examine the procedural dimension of TLA among eight EFL teachers with different teaching experiences (novice versus experienced) related to teaching grammar at Iranian l...