Patterns of developmental change in phonetic perception are critical to theory development. Many previous studies document a decline in nonnative phonetic perception between 6 and 12 months of age. However, much less experimental attention has been paid to developmental change in native-language phonetic perception over the same time period. We hypothesized that language experience in the first...

1 Introduction It has long been observed that adult speakers have considerable difficulty recognizing nonnative allophones which correspond to a single phoneme or phonetic category in their own languages (as first reported by Lado 1957, followed up experimentally by Eckman et al. 2003). In support of these findings, event-related brain potential (ERP) studies exhibited different mismatch negati...

Accent bias is a consequence of ethnocentrism. No studies have examined accent bias across educational levels in the U.S., much less across students and professionals in speech language pathology (SLP), a field that requires multicultural sensitivity training. This study examines nonnative accent perception among three groups—high schoolers, SLP students, and SLP professionals. One-hundred-and-...

Nonnative fishes and flow alteration are primary threats to native fish persistence in lotic systems. We used several flow regime attributes and fish sampling data obtained from the San Juan River, New Mexico and Utah, during 1993–2010 to evaluate the potential use of flow manipulations to increase recruitment of native fishes that must cope with nonnative species. During this period, discharge...

Today’s classrooms are linguistically diverse. Nonetheless, English language teaching still uses a separatist model in which other languages and identities reduced subalternized. This evident separation of has forced many speakers to identify with the non-native label, prevented them from using linguistic resources they have previously acquired communicate learn given settings, made different w...

Language experience systematically constrains perception of speech contrasts that deviate phonologically and/or phonetically from those of the listener’s native language. These effects are most dramatic in adults, but begin to emerge in infancy and undergo further development through at least early childhood. The central question addressed here is: How do nonnative speech perception findings be...

The symbiosis between marine bioluminescent Vibrio bacteria and the sepiolid squid Euprymna is a model for studying animal-bacterial Interactions. Vibrio symbionts native to particular Euprymna species are competitively dominant, capable of outcompeting foreign Vibrio strains from other Euprymna host species. Despite competitive dominance, secondary colonization events by invading nonnative Vib...

With the increasing use of technology in classrooms, computer assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) is becoming a vital tool in language learning. In this paper, we present a system that takes advantage of data from learners of a specific L1 to better model phonological errors at various levels in the system. At the lexical level, a statistical machine translation approach is used to model com...