This study tested whether successful learners of an artificial tone language exhibit sensitivity to varying degrees of tonal informativeness, which has previously been shown to effect spoken word recognition in native Mandarin speakers. Twenty naïve listeners, whose L1 is American English, learned an artificial language in which each visual nonce symbol was arbitrarily associated with a Mandari...

The Tactical Language and Culture Training System is interactive environment for learning foreign language and culture, designed to help people quickly acquire spoken communication skills. It is a serious game, combining interactive game experiences as well as interactive lessons. As part of our research, we wish to understand what individual learner characteristics predict successful learning ...

Much Second Language Acquisition research focuses on young learners in the conventional classroom. Instructed adult learners, and in particular those who are learning at a distance, have attracted less attention. This group is substantial and growing: the Open University, the largest higher education language provider in the UK, alone recruits some 8,000 language students a year. The present la...

The human brain possesses a remarkable capacity to interpret and recall novel sounds as spoken language. These linguistic abilities arise from complex processing spanning a widely distributed cortical network and are characterized by marked individual variation. Recently, graph theoretical analysis has facilitated the exploration of how such aspects of large-scale brain functional organization ...

Adults are notoriously poor second-language (L2) learners. A context that enables successful L2 acquisition is language immersion. In this study, we investigated the effects of immersion learning for a group of university students studying abroad in Spain. Our interest was in the effect of immersion on the native language (L1), English. We tested the hypothesis that immersion benefits L2 learni...

This paper reports a qualitative study on the Chinese language learning trajectories of non-native Chinese instructors as successful Chinese language learners. While some literature has been found on studying good learners of English and other languages, there is a lack of research on studying good learners of the Chinese language, especially on their life-long Chinese learning process. Six act...

in recent years, language-learning research has been more concerned with factors that may affect the choice of learning strategies among learners. in studies conducted by cohen (1990), ehrman and oxford (1995), macintyre and gardner (1989) and reid (1987), these factors have been identified as motivation, gender, learning style, previous experience, and personality type. this study attempts to ...