Introduction to the Special Issue: Learning to Listen from Sounds to Words

The eight articles in this special issue 'Learning to listen from sounds to words' were presented at the conference Sound to Word in Bilingual and Second Language Speech Perception held at the University of Iowa in spring 2016. The selected contributions focus on how second language speech perception interacts with orthography, how phonology interacts with speech perception and how listeners use the cues in the input to segment and create the word forms for lexical processing. This collection of papers expands the field of speech perception and production by granting a central role to the lexicon and exploring how listeners and speakers activate representations, from sounds to words.