Listening is referred to by many scholars as the most important as well as the most complicated skill in the language, which can cause mental fatigue in the learners. This study was an attempt to investigate the relationship between L2 listening comprehension and listening fatigue among Iranian EFL learners. For this purpose, 86 intermediate and upper-intermediate Iranian EFL learners randomly ...

This paper reports on the development and piloting of an adaptive, online placement exam that will be administered to L2 and heritage learners of Spanish at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Particular attention is given to the structure of the exam and the linguistic strategies employed to distinguish heritage speakers from L2 learners. Results obtained from three pilot phases are present...

interlanguage pragmatics (ilp) has witnessed a growing body of research in the past two decades. one of the under-explored domains of l2 pragmatics is the role of learning strategies specifically tailored for the development of ilp knowledge. therefore, this investigation aimed to determine the significant interlanguage pragmatic learning strategies (ipls) used by high vs. low l2 pragmatic achi...

This study investigated how English learners of Korean weigh multiple acoustic cues, namely VOT and f0, in perceiving the Korean stop laryngeal contrast. This question is of interest because VOT is more central to this contrast in English relative to Korean. Our goal was to examine whether L2 cueweighting strategies were influenced by individual differences in cue-weighting strategies in L1 and...

This study investigates whether working memory capacity (WMC) varies across languages and in the course of L2 speech proficiency levels. Following suggestions in Finardi and Weissheimer (2009) and Prebianca (2010), who found that WMC varied as a function of L2 speech proficiency, the present study assessed three proficiency levels (elementary, intermediate and advanced) and two languages (L1-Po...

It is unclear what roles native language (L1) and second language (L2) play in the perception of lexical tones in a third language (L3). Listeners with different language backgrounds use different F0 cues in tonal perception. While English listeners use F0 height, Mandarin listeners rely more on F0 direction. The present study addresses whether knowledge of Mandarin as an L2 results in listener...

Second language (L2) instruction programs often ask learners to repeat aloud words spoken by a native speaker. However, recent research on retrieval practice has suggested that imitating native pronunciation might be less effective than drill instruction, wherein the learner is required to produce the L2 words from memory (and given feedback). We contrasted the effectiveness of imitation and re...

Speech tempo including articulation rate is often considered as a good predictor in the diagnosis of foreign language proficiency and its comprehension. In this study we investigate various sources of variation of articulation rate such as the L2 proficiency level, individual tempo habits in L1 and L2, and more extensive exposure to native speech. In addition, we also discuss the difficulty of ...

This study investigates the degree to which native-English speaking learners of Spanish can generate expectations for information likely to occur in upcoming portions of an unfolding linguistic signal. We examine Spanish Clitic Left Dislocation, a long-distance dependency between a topicalized object and an agreeing clitic, whose felicity depends on the discourse. Using a self-paced reading tas...

Most spoken texts that are used in second language (L2) listening classroom activities are scripted texts, where the text is written, revised, polished, and then read aloud with artificially clear enunciation and slow rate of speech. This article explores the field’s overreliance on these scripted texts, at the expense of including unscripted spoken texts that have very different textual and ph...