This study investigated how English learners of Korean weigh multiple acoustic cues, namely VOT and f0, in perceiving the Korean stop laryngeal contrast. This question is of interest because VOT is more central to this contrast in English relative to Korean. Our goal was to examine whether L2 cueweighting strategies were influenced by individual differences in cue-weighting strategies in L1 and...

PURPOSE To assess the influence of second language (L2) proficiency on production characteristics of rhythmic sequences in the L1 (Bengali) and L2 (English), with emphasis on linguistic transfer. One goal was to examine, using kinematic evidence, how L2 proficiency influences the production of iambic and trochaic words, focusing on temporal and spatial aspects of prosody. A second goal was to a...

This study examined whether processing ambiguous sentences containing relative clauses (RCs) following a complex determiner phrase (DP) by Persian-speaking learners of L2 English with different proficiency and working memory capacities (WMCs) is affected by semantic priming. The semantic relationship studied was one between the subject/verb of the main clause and one of the DPs in the complex D...

This paper examines the reading strategies that four Chinese adult readers use in reading both Chinese and English texts. Their strategies they used are analyzed into two broad categories: the text-initiated strategies and the reader-initiated strategies. All participants demonstrated more strategy use in reading the English texts than in reading the Chinese text. In general, participants were ...

1.1 Disfluencies in L2 speech For most of us, speaking a second language (L2) is a challenging task. Even if we call ourselves ‘fluent’ in the L2, we may at times find ourselves unsure about the grammar or at a loss for the right words. In fact, we are often not so fluent at all. The most obvious reason for this lack of fluency is a lack of proficiency, that is, a speaker has insufficient knowl...

We used fMRI to investigate neural activation in reading aloud in bilinguals differing in age of acquisition. Three groups were compared: French-English bilinguals who acquired two languages from birth (simultaneous), French-English bilinguals who learned their L2 after the age of 5 years (sequential), and English-speaking monolinguals. While the bilingual groups contrasted in age of acquisitio...

the present study intended to investigate the processing behavior of 2 groups of l2 learners of english (high and mid in proficiency) and a group of english native speakers on english active and passive reduced relative clauses. three sets of tasks, an offline task, and 2 online tasks were conducted. results revealed that the high-proficiency group’s performance was the same as that of the nati...

The present study intended to investigate the processing behavior of 2 groups of L2 learners of English (high and mid in proficiency) and a group of English native speakers on English active and passive reduced relative clauses. Three sets of tasks, an offline task, and 2 online tasks were conducted. Results revealed that the high-proficiency group’s performance was the same as that of the nati...

Speaking assessment is still construed as a complicated, under-researched process from the vantage point of tasks and rater characteristics. The present study aimed at investigating if and how English Major and none English Major teachers differ in their perception of the construct of oral proficiency while assessing learners’ L2 oral proficiency.  To this end, 38 male and female non-native EFL...