37,511,754 papers found

The goal of this study was to determine how noise affects listeners' subjective judgments of foreign-accented speech and how those judgments relate to the intelligibility of foreign-accented talkers. Fifty native English listeners heard native Mandarin speakers and native English speakers producing English sentences in…

Although language has long been regarded as a primarily arbitrary system, sound symbolism, or non-arbitrary correspondences between the sound of a word and its meaning, also exists in natural language. Previous research suggests that listeners are sensitive to sound symbolism. However, little is known about the specifi…

This article presents the results of a survey conducted on Speech-Language Therapists (SLTs) regarding current practices in the assessment of English Additional Language (EAL) speakers in South Africa. It forms part of the rationale for a broader (PhD) study that critiques the use of assessment instruments on EAL speak…

Children in bilingual societies often simultaneously acquire reading skills in distinct writing systems that vary in consistency of sound-letter mapping or orthographic depth. To investigate its effect on cortical reading networks in children, we performed functional imaging on 34 simultaneous Hindi-English biliterate…

This mini-review focuses on the question of how the grammatical number system of a child's language may help the child learn the meanings of cardinal number words (e.g., "one" and "two"). Evidence from young children learning English, Russian, Japanese, Mandarin, Slovenian, or Saudi Arabic suggests that trajectories of…

Monolingual English-speaking children in the United States express social preferences for speakers of their native language with a native accent. Here we explore the nature of children's language-based social preferences through research with children in South Africa, a multilingual nation. Like children in the United…

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…

This study investigated effects of cross-language similarity on within- and between-language Stroop interference and facilitation in three groups of trilinguals. Trilinguals were either proficient in three languages that use the same-script (alphabetic in German-English-Dutch trilinguals), two similar scripts and one d…

This study examined the perceptual specialization for native-language speech sounds, by comparing native Hindi and English speakers in their perception of a graded set of English /w/-/v/ stimuli that varied in similarity to natural speech. The results demonstrated that language experience does not affect general audito…

This article examines the process by which the London physician Thomas Sydenham (1624-89) rose to fame as the English Hippocrates in the late seventeenth century. It provides a survey of the evidence for the establishment of Sydenham's reputation from his own writings, his professional relations, and the writings of hi…

We tracked the developmental influences of exposure to French on developing English phonological awareness, decoding and reading comprehension of English-speaking at-risk readers from Grade 1 to Grade 3. Teacher-nominated at-risk readers were matched with not-at-risk readers in French immersion and English language pro…

Bilingual and monolingual children's (mean age=4;10) elicited production of the past tense in both English and French was examined in order to test predictions from Usage-Based theory regarding the sensitivity of children's acquisition rates to input factors such as variation in exposure time and the type/token frequen…

Previous research has demonstrated task-dependent vocal responses to pitch perturbations during speech production. The present study investigated the effect of voice fundamental frequency (F(0)) on the modulation of vocal responses during English speech. Randomized pitch shifts of +/-100 or 200 cents during speaking we…

In a sample of 207 eighth grade students, we examined similarities between students and their friends in achievement motivation and whether friendship support moderated these associations. Academic self-competence and intrinsic value for math and English were assessed using both perceptions of friends and actual friend…

Identifying the variables which contribute to second and foreign language (L2) listening ability can provide a better understanding of the listening construct. This study explored the degree to which first language (L1) listening ability, L2 proficiency, motivation and metacognition contribute to L2 listening comprehen…

A lexical decision experiment with Dutch-English bilinguals compared the effect of word frequency on visual word recognition in the first language with that in the second language. Bilinguals showed a considerably larger frequency effect in their second language, even though corpus frequency was matched across language…

The use of function words in 135 essays written by deaf college underclassmen in developmental and credit-bearing English composition classes is described and compared with Standard English (SE) versions of teh same essay. If student and SE version were the same, this was considered mastery; if the student omitted a wo…

After immersion in a foreign language, speakers often have difficulty retrieving native-language words--a phenomenon known as first-language attrition. We propose that first-language attrition arises in part from the suppression of native-language phonology during second-language use, and thus is a case of phonological…

This study examined variation in mother-infant interactions, father engagement, and infant cognition as a function of country of origin, socioeconomic status, and English language proficiency in a national sample of Latino infants (age 9 months) born in the United States and living with both biological parents (N=1,099…

For over 15 years, masked phonological priming effects have been offered as evidence that phonology plays a leading role in visual word recognition. The existence of these effects-along with their theoretical implications-has, however, been disputed. The authors present three sources of evidence relevant to an assessme…