This study explores the question of whether native and nonnative listeners, some familiar with the language and some not, differ in their accent ratings of native speakers (NSs) and nonnative speakers (NNSs). Although a few studies have employed native and nonnative judges to evaluate native and nonnative speech, the present study is perhaps the…

It is widely believed that listeners understand some dialects more easily than others, although there is very little research that has rigorously measured the effects. This study investigated whether listeners experience more difficulty with regional, ethnic, and international dialects of English than with Standard American English. The results…

This paper provides an Optimality Theoretic account of how Hungarian learners of English acquire /[epsilon]/ and /[ash]/. It is hypothesized that as the learners' pronunciation becomes more nativelike, L1 transfer substitutions will diminish; non-transfer substitutions will be especially prevalent in the intermediate stages, and that all learners…

This study is a detailed analysis of the phonological development of Sylvia, a bilingual child, in her acquisition of American English and Brazilian Portuguese from the age of 1 year, 7 months to 3 years, 8 months. The study is divided into four stages: ages 1.7 - 1.9; 1.9 - 2.1; 2.1 - 2.3; and 2.3 - 2.8. Up to the age of 1.9, the same…