Speech perception in a second language: Hearing is believing-seeing is not.

This study examined the effects of the speaker's face and accent on second language (L2) speech perception. Forty-two Chinese speakers of English immersed in the L2 environment were instructed to perform a cross-modal semantic judgement task. They saw an Asian or Caucasian face on the screen and heard word pairs in L2 in a native English accent or a Chinese accent, and were asked to judge whether the word pairs were related to each other in meaning or not.

Chinese Learners of English See Chinese Words When Reading English Words.

The present study examines when second language (L2) learners read words in the L2, whether the orthography and/or phonology of the translation words in the first language (L1) is activated and whether the patterns would be modulated by the proficiency in the L2. In two experiments, two groups of Chinese learners of English immersed in the L1 environment, one less proficient and the other more proficient in English, performed a translation recognition task. In this task, participants judged whether pairs of words, with an L2 word preceding an L1 word, were translation words or not.