Background: Bilingual speech production studies have highlighted that level of proficiency influences the acoustic-phonetic representation of phonemes in both languages (MacKay, Flege, Piske, & Schirru 2001; Zarate-Sandez, 2015). The results for bilingual speech production reveals that proficient/early bilinguals produce distinct acoustic…

This dissertation investigates the occurrence of an intermediate stage, termed a covert contrast, in the acquisition of Mandarin Tone 2 (T2) and Tone 3 (T3) by adult speakers of American English. A covert contrast is a statistically reliable distinction produced by language learners that is not perceived by native speakers of the target language…

Heritage language (HL) is a linguistic system that arises in the context of early childhood bilingualism, both sequential and simultaneous, when one of the languages is not fully acquired. The performance of speech acts in HLs is yet to be understood, and this dissertation is a first step in this direction. The study investigates the pragmatic…

The [voice] distinction between homorganic stops and fricatives is made by a number of acoustic correlates including voicing, segment duration, and preceding vowel duration. The present work looks at [voice] from a number of multidimensional perspectives. This dissertation's focus is a corpus study of the phonetic realization of [voice] in two…

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between spiritual growth and the development of intercultural competence through the experiences of followers of Christ working in least developed countries. To address this purpose, a qualitative study using narrative inquiry and in-depth semi structured interviews were employed to…

It has been widely shown that infants and adults are capable of using only prosodic information to discriminate between languages. However, it remains unclear which aspects of prosody, either rhythm or intonation, listeners attend to for language discrimination. Previous researchers have suggested that rhythm, the duration and timing of speech…

This dissertation evaluates the relationship between African American English and White Vernacular English as spoken in a small rural town in western North Carolina for consistencies in vowel production by group membership and for participation in the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS), a vowel rotation currently occurring in the Southern United States. A…

Many factors that contribute towards the perception of second language (L2) sounds and the subsequent establishment of L2 phonetic categories have been the focus of past research. However, learning a third language, unlike SLA, may be influenced by additional factors attributed to the presence of two language systems in a bilingual instead of one…