Learning foreign speech contrasts involves creating new representations of sound categories in memory. This formation of new memory representations is likely to involve changes in neural networks as reflected by oscillatory brain activity. To explore this, we conducted time-frequency analyses of electro-encephalography (EEG) data recorded in a passive auditory oddball paradigm using Thai langua...

There is ample evidence that native speakers anticipate upcoming information at various levels during sentence comprehension. In contrast, some studies on late second-language (L2) learners support the view that L2 learners do not anticipate information during processing, or at least, not to the same extent as native speakers do. In the current paper, I propose that native and L2 speakers are u...

We investigated articulatory movements of native Japanese speakers’ productions of non-native consonant clusters, using the WAVE system (NDI Corp.). Four Japanese male speakers pronounced “blat”, “bnat”, “btat”, and “pnat” 10 times each in a carrier sentence. Tongue tip displacement from the first to the second consonant varied greatly among the speakers. An ANOVA with two factors, Speaker and ...

Three experiments investigated 5- to 6-year-old monolingual English-speaking American children's sociolinguistic evaluations of others based on their accent (native, foreign) and social actions (nice, mean, neutral). In Experiment 1, children expressed social preferences for native-accented English speakers over foreign-accented speakers, and they judged the native-accented speakers to be "Amer...