The present study investigated the extent to which accent sensitivity provides the foundation for lexical knowledge and listening comprehension for Japanese university students learning English as a foreign language (EFL). On an English accent correctness (i.e., YES/NO response) decision task, 63 participants showed considerably high accuracy and speed in identifying correctly-accented nouns (8...

BACKGROUND The literature suggests that a complex relationship exists between the three main skills involved in reading comprehension (decoding, listening comprehension and vocabulary) and that this relationship depends on at least three other factors orthographic transparency, children's grade level and socioeconomic status (SES). This study investigated the relative contribution of the predic...

this article reports on the findings of a study that investigated the impact of manipulating task performance conditions on listening task performance by learners of english as a foreign language (efl). the study was designed to explore the effects of changing complexity dimensions on listening task performance and to achieve two aims: to see how listening comprehension task performance was aff...

In order to comprehend speech, listeners have to combine low-level phonetic information about the incoming auditory signal with higher-order contextual information to make a lexical selection. This requires stable phonological categories and unambiguous representations of words in the mental lexicon. Unlike native speakers, second language (L2) speakers, who perceive nonnative sounds through th...

Listening conditions affect bilinguals’ speech perception, but relatively little is known about the effect of the combination of several degrading listening conditions. We studied the combined effect of speech rate and background noise on bilinguals’ speech perception in their L1 and L2. Speech perception of twenty Israeli university students, native speakers of Arabic (L1), with Hebrew as L2, ...

PURPOSE To investigate parameters related to fluency, reading comprehension and phonological processing (operational and short-term memory) and identify potential correlation between the variables in Dyslexia and in the absence of reading difficulties. METHOD One hundred and fifteen students from the third to eighth grade of elementary school were grouped into a Control Group (CG) and Group w...

The current study was designed to investigate the role played by verbal memory in the advantage shown by individuals with Down syndrome in reading over listening text comprehension (Roch & Levorato, 2009). Two different aspects of verbal memory were analyzed: processing load and coding modality. Participants were 20 individuals with Down syndrome, aged between 11 and 26 years who were matched f...

The purpose of this study was to explore the effect of applying task-based activities on students’ listening comprehension improvement. It also aimed at providing evidence to show how shifting from a traditional language teaching approach into the TBLT approach can positively affect the process of learning listening skill. To do this, 80 participants were selected from three English language in...

Abstract Armed with technological development, the present study aimed at gauging the effectiveness of exposure to news and movies as two types of audiovisual programs in improving language learners’ listening comprehension at the intermediate level. To this end, a listening comprehension test was administered to 108 language learners and finally 60 language learners were selected as intermedia...

Abstract Armed with technological development, the present study aimed at gauging the effectiveness of exposure to news and movies as two types of audiovisual programs in improving language learners’ listening comprehension at the intermediate level. To this end, a listening comprehension test was administered to 108 language learners and finally 60 language learners were selected as intermedia...