Certain sounds are difficult for children to produce, even if the sounds are in their native language. For example, Japanese /r/ can be difficult for Japanese children to learn. Second language learners can also have difficulty acquiring certain sounds. For example, Japanese speakers learning English often have difficulty with English /r/ and /l/. To address this problem, we have developed two ...

One of the basic questions of bilingual research is to what extent the bilingual’s two phonetic systems influence each other, a question that has occupied a prominent place in bilingual research almost from the outset of the field (see, for example, Weinreich, 1953). Recent studies in bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA) demonstrate that, at least in simultaneous bilingual acquisition, i...

Speech comprehension involves recovering a speaker’s intended meaning from the speech sounds that they produce. While sensory-driven components of this process have been widely investigated, impact content (i.e., linguistic information) on sensory processing is much less understood. Here we summarize growing body research demonstrating neural influenced by morpheme- and word-level statistical p...

Does tuning to one's native language explain the "sensitive period" for language learning? We explore the idea that tuning to (or becoming more selective for) the properties of one's native-language could result in being less open (or plastic) for tuning to the properties of a new language. To explore how this might lead to the sensitive period for grammar learning, we ask if tuning to an earli...

Listening skills are language that affect the development of learning, especially for second learners. In learning process listening skills, mistakes often occur. This can happen because influence first on process. study aims to describe sound errors by observing beginner BIPA learners from China who do not use alphabet in their language. research is a text analysis which analyzes students' wri...

The study indicates the interferences occurred by Kaurnese and Rejangnese students in pronouncing English sounds factors that affect pronunciation interference of sounds. respondents were ten Education Study Program. They are five whose L1 is Rejangnese. researcher applied a qualitative approach conducted case design. instruments used to collect data observation reading list words interviews ab...

We present evidence that the geographic context in which a language is spoken may directly impact its phonological form. We examined the geographic coordinates and elevations of 567 language locations represented in a worldwide phonetic database. Languages with phonemic ejective consonants were found to occur closer to inhabitable regions of high elevation, when contrasted to languages without ...

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in conjunction with a voxel-based approach to lesion symptom mapping to quantitatively evaluate the similarities and differences between brain areas involved in language and environmental sound comprehension. In general, we found that language and environmental sounds recruit highly overlapping cortical regions, with cross-domain differences ...

Languages make different distinctions regarding what constitutes a meaningful difference in sound, yet children quickly learn to distinguish between these sounds in their native language. A major question in the field of language acquisition regards what strategies children use to acquire knowledge of their language from linguistic input. Empirical research shows that children are able to track...

Language is uniquely human, but its acquisition may involve cognitive capacities shared with other species. During development, language experience alters speech sound (phoneme) categorization. Newborn infants distinguish the phonemes in all languages but by 10 months show adult-like greater sensitivity to native language phonemic contrasts than non-native contrasts. Distributional theories acc...