There is a common belief that children arc better able than adults to leam a foreign language. This belief may be an illusion if children living in a foreign country leam the new language through phy activity while their parents try to leam independently of physical behavior. Using Russian, this study compared the listening comprehension of 8-, 10and 14-year-old children, and college adults whe...

We report brain electrophysiological responses from 10- to 13-month-old Mexican infants while listening to native and foreign CV-syllable contrasts differing in Voice Onset Time (VOT). All infants showed normal auditory event-related potential (ERP) components. Our analyses showed ERP evidence that Mexican infants are capable of discriminating their native sounds as well as the acoustically sal...

This study introduces the educational assistant robots that we developed for foreign language learning and explores the effectiveness of robot-assisted language learning (RALL). To achieve this purpose, a course was designed in which students have meaningful interactions with intelligent robots in an immersive environment. A total of 24 elementary students, ranging in age from 9 to 13, were enr...

When listening to speech from one's native language, words seem to be well separated from one another, like beads on a string. When listening to a foreign language, in contrast, words seem almost impossible to extract, as if there was only one bead on the same string. This contrast reveals that there are language-specific cues to segmentation. The puzzle, however, is that infants must be endowe...

Films at the cinema, at home or on the computer screen are a fundamental part of today’s entertainment culture. The careful listening and watching of foreign films with or without subtitles is often used as an aid for the learning of foreign languages. This paper presents the ongoing development of an entertainment/learning computer based DVD subsystem for the home environment that has been ext...

Employing a survey design, this study aims to examine learners’ metacognitive listening strategies, their anxiety and whether there is relationship between these two research matters in English as foreign language (EFL) classrooms. The participants included 112 freshman students at university context they were taking comprehension course during the study. Two scales used collect data for study;...

The present study investigated the effect of single and multiple genre movies on listening comprehension of upper intermediate language learners. To this end, a language proficiency test was administered to 40 male and female postgraduates of different majors attending International English Language Testing System (IELTS) classes and ultimately 25 upper intermediate language learners were selec...

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...