The study investigates the effect of stress on English word recognition by speakers of lexical tone and lexical pitch accent languages. Two on-line tasks that involved Taiwan Mandarin and Japanese speakers as test subjects and English natives as controls were conducted: (i) a uni-modal lexical decision task and (ii) a cross-modal priming and lexical decision task. It was found that Mandarin and...

It has been demonstrated repeatedly that durational characteristics of consonantal (C) and vocalic (V) intervals are robust acoustic correlates of rhythm class (stress-timed, syllable-timed, moratimed). Here, we investigate how such rhythm measurements change during the acquisition of a second language. In a longitudinal study, 9 native speakers of Spanish were recorded reading a text in Englis...

To a large extent, island phenomena are cross-linguistically invariable, but English and Korean present some striking differences in this domain. English has wh-movement and Korean does not, and while both languages show sensitivity to wh-islands, only English has island effects for adjunct clauses. Given this complex set of differences, one might expect Korean/English bilinguals, and especiall...

tsimpli and dimitrakopoulou (2007) observed that uninterpretable features are unavailable in second language (l2) acquisition after the critical period. in this paper, we verify this claim by providing evidence from persian speaking learners of english as an l2 on the status of resumptive pronouns (rps) as uniterpretable features. unlike english which does not allow rps, persian shows various b...

This study investigates pitch interplay in non-native (L2) speech. Specifically, experiments were conducted to examine how native English speakers perceive and produce Mandarin statements and unmarked questions. Results from the perceptual experiment showed English listeners did not resolve the simultaneous pitch cues from intonation and tone the same way as native Mandarin speakers. They had l...

Experiments investigating phonetic convergence in conversation often focus on interlocutors with similar phonetic inventories. Extending these experiments to those with dissimilar inventories requires understanding the capacity of speakers to imitate native and non-native phones. In the present study, we tested native Spanish and native English speakers to determine whether imitation of non-nat...

Previous research has shown that speakers of gendered languages think about and categorize nouns in accordance with the noun’s grammatical gender. Past studies have often used languages that do not mark grammatical gender as “genderless” control languages. We examine whether this characterization of non-gendered languages is in fact correct, by examining whether native speakers attribute gender...

The role of visual cues in native listeners' perception of speech produced by nonnative speakers has not been extensively studied. Native perception of English sentences produced by native English and Korean speakers in audio-only and audiovisual conditions was examined. Korean speakers were rated as more accented in audiovisual than in the audio-only condition. Visual cues enhanced word intell...