Tone languages such as Mandarin use voice pitch to signal lexical contrasts, presenting a
challenge for second/foreign language (L2) learners whose native languages do not use …

An early achievement in language is carving a variable acoustic space into categories. The
canonical story is that infants accomplish this by the second year, when only unsupervised …

Second Language Processing: An Introduction is the first textbook to offer a thorough
introduction to the field of second language processing (SLP). The study of SLP seeks to …

Early foreign language (FL) programmes have grown rapidly worldwide in the past two
decades, resting on the assumption that 'earlier is better'for learning a FL. However, the …

Whether native speakers of non-tonal languages can acquire categorical representations of
lexical tones remains controversial. This study investigates the acquisition of lexical tone …

Background High talker variability (ie, multiple voices in the input) has been found effective
in training nonnative phonetic contrasts in adults. A small number of studies suggest that …

This study examines brain responses to boundary effects with respect to Mandarin lexical
tone continua for three groups of adult listeners:(1) native English speakers who took …

Younger learners are better at acquiring second-language (L2) phoneme contrasts than are
older learners, but this general correlation between age and learning ability is often …

Children hear new words from many different talkers; to learn words most efficiently, they
should be able to represent them independently of talker-specific pronunciation detail …

Purpose Children and early adolescents seem to have an advantage over adults in
acquiring nonnative speech sounds, supported by evidence showing that earlier age of …