Allophonic and Phonemic Contrasts in Infants' Learning of Sound Patterns

Allophonic and Phonemic Contrasts in Infants' Learning of Sound Patterns

Acoustic correlates of allophonic versus phonemic dimensions in monolingual and bilingual infants' input

Allophones are diverse phonetic instantiations of a single underlying sound category. As such, they pose a peculiar problem for infant language learners: These variants occur in the ambient language, but they are not used to encode lexical contrasts. Infants' sensitivity to sounds varying along allophonic dimensions declines by 11 months of age, suggesting that there must be information to phon...

Enhancement of gamma oscillations indicates preferential processing of native over foreign phonemic contrasts in infants.

Young infants discriminate phonetically relevant speech contrasts in a universal manner, that is, similarly across languages. This ability fades by 12 months of age as the brain builds language-specific phonemic maps and increasingly responds preferentially to the infant's native language. However, the neural mechanisms that underlie the development of infant preference for native over non-nati...

patterns and variations in native and non-native interlanguage pragmatic rating: effects of rater training, intercultural proficiency, and self-assessment

although there are studies on pragmatic assessment, to date, literature has been almost silent about native and non-native english raters’ criteria for the assessment of efl learners’ pragmatic performance. focusing on this topic, this study pursued four purposes. the first one was to find criteria for rating the speech acts of apology and refusal in l2 by native and non-native english teachers...

Perception and Production in the Acquisition of L2 Phonemic Contrasts

This paper reports data from a pilot project that is part of an ongoing study investigating the second-language (L2) acquisition of phonemic contrasts. Our focus will be on the acquisition of the English /s/ /š/ contrast by native speakers of Japanese and Korean. These native language backgrounds were chosen because Japanese and Korean employ the sounds in question as allophones of the same pho...