To expand our understanding of script-general and script-specific principles in the learning of letter names, we examined how three characteristics of alphabet letters -- their frequency in printed materials, order in the alphabet, and visual similarity to other letters -- relate to children's letter-name knowledge in four languages with three…

Building up on Munro and Derwing, the current study set out to re-examine and generalize the Functional Load (FL) principle (Brown, 1988) as a tool to identify a set of relatively crucial segmental features for successful understanding in L2 communication. In Experiment 1, 40 Japanese learners of English in English-as-Foreign-Language settings…

ELT materials tend to use prestige variety speakers as models, an underlying assumption being that this is needed in order to acquire the phonology necessary to parse English speech (Rose & Galloway, 2019). Global Englishes Language Teaching (GELT) (Galloway & Rose, 2018) provides the potential for movement away from such 'native speaker'…

This study aimed at investigating EFL pre-service teachers' attitudes towards pronunciation and pronunciation teaching. Another purpose was to explore the outcomes of pronunciation instruction of EFL pre-service teachers' phonological development and, based on the findings, to provide suggestions taking learners' pedagogical needs into…

High frequency words have been suggested to benefit both speech segmentation and grammatical categorization of the words around them. Despite utilizing similar information, these tasks are usually investigated separately in studies examining learning. We determined whether including high frequency words in continuous speech could support…

This study investigates the phonotactics of English obstruent clusters in the word-final position from a markedness theory perspective among Iraqi EFL College Students whose native language, Arabic, prefers only two-member word-final obstruent cluster as a maximum. The markedness of clusters is measured depending on Iraqi EFL College Students'…

Research attempting to understand the intermediate stages of first-language acquisition and disordered speech has led to the discovery of covert contrast. A covert contrast is a statistically reliable difference between phonemes that is produced by a language learner, but in a way that cannot be heard readily by a listener of the target language.…

Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in "esport" for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. "spi" instead of "espi" was related to accurate perceptual discrimination of this…

This is the first paper that provides correlational evidence about how interacting with an online allophonic transcription tool helps learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) to improve their phonological awareness. The study investigates 55 advanced ESL learners at a Polish university enrolled in a course in English phonetics and phonology.…

This paper investigates the difficulties adult second language (L2) users of English encounter with plosive consonants in the L2. It presents the results of a task examining the acquisition of plosive voicing contrasts by college students with Cypriot Greek (CG) linguistic background. The task focused on the types of errors involving plosive…

Matching phonemes (speech sounds) to graphemes (letters and letter combinations) is an important aspect of decoding (translating print to speech) and encoding (translating speech to print). Yet, many teacher candidates do not receive explicit training in phoneme-grapheme correspondence. Difficulty with accurate phoneme production and/or lack of…

Background: The use of standardized tests specifically designed for and normed on bilingual groups is crucial for the accurate diagnosis and language profiling of bilingual speakers with aphasia. Currently, there is a dearth of norms and supporting psychometric data for the few available bilingual aphasia assessments. The only available aphasia…

Despite English being a core and compulsory part of the curriculum for Chinese English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners, it is nevertheless often highly challenging for them. This is partly due to the discrepancies between English's citation and spoken form and the lack of recognition this pronunciation receives within ESL classrooms. With this…

Reading efficiently in a second language (L2) is a crucial skill, but it is not universally achieved. Here we ask whether L2 reading efficiency is better captured as a language specific skill or whether it is mostly shared across L1 and L2, relying on general language abilities. To this end, we examined word frequency and predictability effects in…

Share (1995) proposed "phonological recoding" (the translation of letters into sounds) as a self-teaching mechanism through which readers establish complete lexical representations. More recently, McKague et al. (2008) proposed a similar role for "orthographic recoding", that is, feedback from sounds to letters, in building and…