In young adults and adolescents, dyslexia typically is characterized by slow or laborious reading. These reading difficulties are underpinned at least partly by a phonological deficit that disrupts cognitive connections between spoken and written language. Prosodic stress is a phonological property of spoken language reflecting differences in…

Word stress instruction has increasingly become a focus among EFL teachers. Owing to the phonological differences between the learner's first language and English, EFL learners of different nationalities encounter varying degrees of difficulty when pronouncing English polysyllabic words. The majority of EFL students studying medicine tend to find…

This controlled experimental study investigated the interaction of variables associated with rating the pronunciation component of high-stakes English-language-speaking tests such as IELTS and TOEFL iBT. One hundred experienced raters who were all either familiar or unfamiliar with Brazilian-accented English or Papua New Guinean Tok Pisin-accented…

Purpose: The current study investigated English prosodic focus marking by autistic and typically developing (TD) Cantonese trilingual children, and examined the potential differences in this regard compared to native English-speaking children. Method: Forty-eight participants were recruited with 16 speakers for each of the three groups…

People often experience difficulties when they first hear a novel accent. Prior research has shown that relatively fast natural accent accommodation can occur. However, there has been little investigation of the underlying perceptual mechanism that drives the learning. The current study examines whether phonemic boundary changes play a central…

The study assessed the clinical utility of an invented spelling tool and determined whether invented spelling with linguistic manipulation at segmental and supra-segmental levels can be used to better identify reading difficulties. We conducted linguistic manipulation by using real and nonreal words, incorporating word stress, alternating the…

This study explores collaborative and individual computer-assisted prosody training (CAPT) through a quasi-experimental design. Eighteen adult Algerian EFL learners were recruited and randomly assigned into a control group receiving no treatment and two experimental groups, a collaborative CAPT group where the participants practiced in pairs, and…

This study explored the affective, behavioral, and cognitive engagement of 18 Iranian EFL learners with oral corrective feedback on lexical stress errors. The data were collected using questionnaires, pretests, posttests, and interviews. The questionnaire responses showed that the participants held various perceptions about direct feedback.…

Pronunciation is challenging for many international students, but particularly important for those going onto college and university level studies where they need to do professional presentations. According to the Institute of International Education [IIE] (2020), California hosted 160,592 students in 2019/2020, and is one of the top destinations…

This dissertation documents a collection of sociolinguistic and sociophonetic studies of the speech of bilingual Korean Americans in California. Korean Americans are an ethnic minority in the United States whose speech patterns in Korean and English remain understudied. The goal of the studies is to begin sketching out the acoustic traits that…

Prosody is evaluated as an important factor in fluent reading, and in literature it is expressed as a significant reading skill that affects comprehension. Prosody--described as a fluent reading ability of a reader with suitable sentences and expressions--includes stress, intonation, duration (time passed on voicing a word) and pausing properties…

Prosody communicates pragmatic meaning far beyond that which is evident at the surface level of an utterance and can pose challenges to learners' pragmatic comprehension. The current study investigated how second language (L2) English learners made decisions about speaker intent when communicated through prosody. Seventeen English L2 learners took…

Though research has shown that rhythmic training is beneficial for phonological speech processing, little empirical work has been carried out to assess whether rhythmic training in the classroom can help to improve pronunciation in a second language. This study tests the potential benefits of hand-clapping to the rhythm of newly learned French…

This study explores the most perceivable phonological features of Hong Kong (HK) L2 English speakers and how they affect the perception of HK L2 English speech from the perspective of both native and non-native English listeners. Conversational interviews were conducted to collect speech data from 20 HK speakers of English and 10 native speakers…

Purpose: Research has shown that observing hand gestures mimicking pitch movements or rhythmic patterns can improve the learning of second language (L2) suprasegmental features. However, less is known about the effects of hand gestures on the learning of novel phonemic contrasts. This study examines (a) whether hand gestures mimicking phonetic…