Susanne M Reiterer

University of Vienna | UniWien · Institut für Sprachwissenschaft

The last few years have witnessed exponential growth in research output within the field of language aptitude. With contributions from an international team of leading experts, this volume provides the most comprehensive, authoritative and up-to-date overview of developments in language aptitude theory and practice. It addresses central and newly e...

The last few years have witnessed exponential growth in research output within the field of language aptitude. With contributions from an international team of leading experts, this volume provides the most comprehensive , authoritative and up-to-date overview of developments in language aptitude theory and practice. It addresses central and newly...

Introduction Previous aesthetic research has set its main focus on visual and auditory, primarily music, stimuli with only a handful of studies exploring the aesthetic potential of linguistic stimuli. In the present study, we investigate for the first time the effects of personality traits on phonaesthetic language ratings. Methods Twenty-three un...

The present study aimed at investigating whether language pragmatics aptitude is a separate component of the construct of language aptitude distinct from the already conceived components. To do so, the Second Language Pragmatics Aptitude Test and the LLAMA test were administered to 200 native English-speaking adults, within the age range of 18 to 3...

Studies over the past two decades have provided relevant data on the relationship between music and reading abilities although they fundamentally refer to aspects of the first language reading process of young children. The foreign language reading acquisition process of adult learners has, in this sense, been less explored. Research in this area r...

A common practice in the cognitive neurosciences is to investigate population-typical phenomena, treating individuals as equal except for a few outliers that are usually discarded from analyses or disappear on group-level patterns. Only few studies to date have captured the heterogeneity of language processing across individuals as so-called indivi...

Music and language are highly intertwined auditory phenomena that largely overlap on behavioral and neural levels. While the link between the two has been widely explored on a general level, comparably few studies have addressed the relationship between musical skills and language aptitude, defined as an individual's (partly innate) capacity for le...

Abstract Music and language are highly intertwined auditory phenomena that largely overlap on behavioral and neural levels. While the link between the two has been widely explored on a general level, comparably few studies have addressed the relationship between musical skills and language aptitude, defined as an individual's (partly innate) capac...

This paper concerns sound aesthetic preferences for European foreign languages. We investigated the phonetic-acoustic dimension of the linguistic aesthetic pleasure to describe the “music” found in European languages. The Romance languages, French, Italian, and Spanish, take a lead when people talk about melodious language – the music-like effects...

An increasing number of people (e.g., polyglots) report studying foreign languages out of pure pleasure derived from sound or melody. The Romance languages, particularly French, Italian, and Spanish, take the lead when people talk about attractive or sexy-sounding languages/accents (Burchette, 2014), while languages like German and Arabic are often...

Working memory capacity, an essential prerequisite for language learning and the development of arithmetic skills, has been reported as deficient in children with reading disorder (RD) and attention deficit (hyperactivity) disorder (AD(H)D). However, few studies to date have explored potential associations of working memory impairments and foreign...

The present study aimed at developing a second language pragmatic aptitude test. To do so, the relevant literature was consulted, different components contributing to pragmatics aptitude were identified and tabulated and test items were developed for each component. The outcome was a test comprising four sections, i.e., memory for pragmatic rule le...

In two recent studies, we identified neuroanatomical and neurofunctional markers of musical aptitude, attention deficit (hyperactivity) disorder and dyslexia in the auditory cortex (AC) of children. In a subsequent study with adults, we found evidence for neuroanatomical correlates of speech imitation ability in right Heschl‘s gyrus (HG), a structu...

Reviews (Michael Long) "Language aptitudes are reliable predictors of rate of classroom foreign language learning and of level of ultimate attainment in naturalistic SLA. Aptitude is a central interest in the field, therefore, as reflected both in increasingly detailed analyses of the construct itself and in the development of several new aptitude...

The focus of this research is on explaining phonetic/speech imitation aptitude, but apart from biological (brain) markers (individual differences in speech imitation reflected by brain structure or function), we found markers in other psycho-cognitive domains. Higher speech imitation aptitude was accompanied by higher singing abilities, but also hi...

Studies involving direct language imitation tasks have shown that pronunciation ability is related to musical competence and working memory capacities. However, this type of task may measure individual differences in many different linguistic dimensions, other than just phonetic ones. The present study uses an indirect imitation task by asking part...

This book presents original, empirical data from quantitative and qualitative research studies in the field of language learning aptitude, ability, and individual differences. It does so from the perspectives of Second Language Acquisition, psychology, neuroscience and sociolinguistics. All studies included in the book use a similar and uniform lay...

Only little research regarding the phonology of Persian native speakers’ English has been conducted. In the present study, we compared different individual cognitive factors which result in ESL Iranian English pronunciation, such as cognitive ability and short-term memory (working memory and Llama_D), language aptitude (MLAT III, IV and V; Llama_D)...

In this chapter language aptitude will be looked at from a neuroscientific perspective and it will be discussed to which extent foreign language aptitude, i.e., foreign language learning potential or ability, is influenced by brain morphology, working memory and musical ability. The first part hence serves as a theoretical introduction and brief na...

Musical aptitude and language talent are highly intertwined when it comes to phonetic language ability. Research on pre-school children’s musical abilities and foreign language abilities are rare but give further insights into the relationship between language and musical aptitude. We tested pre-school children’s abilities to imitate unknown langua...

Musical expertise and working memory (WM) have been isolated as being the most important predictors of phonetic aptitude – meaning the ability to imitate unfamiliar speech material. Although the link between language functions and musical expertise has been subject to many investigations, specific languages and their individual link to musical expe...

Recent research has shown that the morphology of certain brain regions may indeed correlate with a number of cognitive skills such as musicality or language ability. The main aim of the present study was to explore the extent to which foreign language aptitude, in particular phonetic coding ability, is influenced by the morphology of Heschl’s gyrus...

Speech imitation is crucial for language acquisition and second-language learning. Interestingly, large individual differences regarding the ability in imitating foreign-language sounds have been observed. The origin of this inter–individual diversity remains unknown, although it might be partially explained by structural predispositions. Here we c...

Notwithstanding a surge of novel insights into the male/female variable on human behaviour and cognitive functions, the gender factor is still far from being well understood. Pursuing an interdisciplinary approach, informed by neuroscientific research, this study used linguistic and psychological measures to investigate gender differences in the re...

Unlabelled: Recent findings have shown that people with higher musical aptitude were also better in oral language imitation tasks. However, whether singing capacity and instrument playing contribute differently to the imitation of speech has been ignored so far. Research has just recently started to understand that instrumentalists develop quite d...

In previous research on speech imitation, musicality, and an ability to sing were isolated as the strongest indicators of good pronunciation skills in foreign languages. We, therefore, wanted to take a closer look at the nature of the ability to sing, which shares a common ground with the ability to imitate speech. This study focuses on whether goo...

We investigated individual differences in speech imitation ability in late bilinguals using a neuro-acoustic approach. One hundred and thirty-eight German-English bilinguals matched on various behavioral measures were tested for "speech imitation ability" in a foreign language, Hindi, and categorized into "high" and "low ability" groups. Brain acti...

It is known that the left hemisphere of the human brain is critical in understanding and producing spoken language, but it remains a topic of great interest determining the cerebral lateralization of multiple languages. The aim of this study is to examine the effects of similarity between languages on hemispheric asymmetry of bilingual brains. The...

Recent research has shown that extensive training in and exposure to a second language can modify the language organization in the brain by causing both structural and functional changes. However it is not yet known how these changes are manifested by the dynamic brain oscillations and synchronization patterns subserving the language networks. In s...

We analyze the topography of nonlinear functional connectivity in the EEG of two groups of German-native speakers, divided according to their English proficiency level (high or low), when listening to one text in German and one in English. Global interdependence was assessed in full-band EEG by means of an index of multivariate correlation derived...

An unanswered question in adult language learning or late bi and multilingualism is why individuals show marked differences in their ability to imitate foreign accents. While recent research acknowledges that more adults than previously assumed can still acquire a "native" foreign accent, very little is known about the neuro-cognitive correlates of...

Fast and accurate segmentation of deep gray matter regions in the brain is important for clinical applications such as surgical planning for the placement of deep brain stimulation implants. Mapping anatomy from stereotactic atlases to patient data is problematic because of individual differences in subject anatomy that are not accounted for by com...

There are an increasing number of studies on the localization of personality using voxel-based morphometry. Due to the complex analytic challenge in volumetric studies, the specification and treatment of the nuisance covariate (such as age, gender, and global measures) is currently not consistent. Here, we present a study in which we conducted voxe...

Fast and accurate segmentation of deep gray matter structures is important for clinical applications such as for example surgery planning for the placement of deep brain stimulation implants. We implemented a segmentation method that is solely based on local diffusion information and did evaluate it on a group of 53 healthy volunteers to investigat...

Aims and Scope This comprehensive project has the objective of describing and assessing pronunciation talent with special focus on its psychological and neural correlates. The first part of this undertaking describes the extensive tests necessary to measure phonetic talent in its various dimensions, such as production and perception, the segmental...

An extensive project that aims to assess innate phonetic talent is introduced. It investigates language performance of 103 native speakers of German in their native language, in English and (to a limited degree) in Hindi. The project's original priority is to establish a talent score that serves as the basis for a neurolinguistic study which attemp...

This article examines the question of whether university-based high-level foreign language and linguistic training can influence brain activation and whether different L2 proficiency groups have different brain activation in terms of lateralization and hemispheric involvement. The traditional and prevailing theory of hemispheric involvement in bili...

Abstract Sound timbre and sound volume processing are basic auditory discrimination processes relevant for human language abilities. Regarding lateralization effects, the prevailing hypotheses ascribe timbre processing to the right hemisphere (RH). Recent experiments also point to a role of the RH for volume discrimination. We investigated the rele...

In this paper we introduce a large-scale project that aims to provide a comprehensive examination of talent in pronunciation, especially of a second language. The project investigates this ability with respect to its multiple phonetic/linguistic manifestations, but also considering psychological and behavioral influences on pronunciation performanc...

This paper gives an overview of an ongoing Ph.D. pr oject in cooperation with the DFG supported project "Language talent and brain activity" at the Universities of Stuttgart and Tübingen. Considering the socio-psych ological background of communication accommodation theory and the previous research on convergent behavior, done predominantly in ling...

This paper introduces a comprehensive project with the objective of finding the neural correlates of pronunciation talent. It concentrates on the first part of this undertaking, describing the extensive tests necessary to measure phonetic talent in its various dimensions such as production and perception, the segmental and suprasegmental levels of...

Emotional information can be conveyed by various means of communication, such as propositional content, speech intonation, facial expression, and gestures. Prior studies have demonstrated that inputs from one modality can alter perception in another modality. To evaluate the impact of emotional intonation on ratings of emotional faces, a behavioral...

An EEG coherence study was performed with a twofold objective: first, to scrutinize the theoretical concept of "cortical efficiency" in connection with second language (L2) acquisition and, second, to detect cooperations between cortical areas in specific frequency bands indicative for highly proficient L2 processing. Two groups differing only in t...

To investigate the influence of proficiency level on the cortical organization of foreign language processing, two groups of German speaking students, differing only in their proficiency in English as a second language, were subjected to EEG coherence analysis during foreign and native language processing (news reports, alpha1 frequency band). In t...

To investigate lateralization of duration and pitch discrimination processing with emphasis on the influences of task difficulty, we used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging. Seventeen healthy volunteers performed paired auditory discrimination tasks at varying levels of difficulty. Analysis of lateralization effects revealed leftwa...

In this paper several multivariate tests are presented, in particular permutation tests, which can be used in multiple endpoint problems as for example in comparisons of high-dimensional vectors of EEG data. We have investigated the power of these tests using artificial data in simulations and real EEG data. It is obvious that no one multivariate t...