Dialects vary in their allophonic patterns, which can affect listeners' phonological and lexical representations. I explore how different exposure to dialect-specific allophonic patterns for two vowels in American English, /ae ai/, affects listeners' lexical processing behaviors across three perception tasks: perceptual similarity, priming, and…

This study investigates the effects of native language experience and phonetic properties on the discrimination of labial-velar versus labial and velar contrasts, as well as voicing contrasts in labials, velars, and labial-velars. Research indicates that phonological perceptions are influenced by native language experience and the specific…

Listeners selectively tune in to the most relevant cues for contrasting sounds, and this process impacts their perceptual sensitivity to these cues (Nosofsky, 1986; Pisoni, 1991). For bilingual listeners, recent work suggests a shared L1/L2 phonology system with the phonetic properties of each sound established in a language-specific way…

With the increasing prevalence of autism diagnoses globally, the overall aim of this dissertation is to improve our understanding of the linguistic aptitude of autistic individuals. Given that the autism diagnosis is a spectrum, we rely on the Autism Quotient (AQ) test, which measures the quantity of autistic-like traits an individual possesses,…

This study investigated English phonological awareness in adult native speakers of English (L1) and in relation to their phonological awareness skills and proficiency in their German (L2). Most research in L1 phonological awareness focuses on younger children, their phonological awareness development, the relationship between reading and…

Arabic emphasis refers to the production of consonants resulting from a primary constriction in the dental or alveolar region and a secondary constriction in the back of the vocal tract, recognized as 'Emphatic.' These have contrastive consonants produced in the dental or alveolar region, recognized as 'Plain.' The existing research on emphasis in…

The present dissertation explores the effect of exposure to non-native speech via foreign film on non-native speech production and perception. In order to explore potential effects, two main experiments were developed, which examined French production and perception by monolingual native speakers of English before and after exposure to French…

Phonotactic patterns are generalizations that govern the order of consonants and vowels, within words and syllables. Certain second-order phonotactic patterns--those that relate multiple sounds within a syllable, such as "if the vowel is [near-close near-front unrounded vowel], then [s] can only appear at the end of the…

Within the field of linguistics, whether considering language contact situations (Weinreich, 1979) or foreign language education (Lado, 1957), the topic of language transfer, especially as it relates to pronunciation, has always been an item of particular interest. While research on such transfer has mostly focused on various phenomena of the L1…

Nawat, the highly endangered indigenous language of El Salvador, is undergoing a revitalization process. This dissertation, conceived within this context, focuses on the second-language (L2) acquisition of features of Nawat pronunciation by learners who have Salvadoran Spanish as their first language (L1). Specifically, I assess the acquisition of…

The acquisition of a sound system is an integral component of second language (L2) communication, yet it is one of the most difficult skills to teach and is therefore largely ignored in L2 classrooms (Derwing, 2010). In laboratory settings, phonetic training studies have typically examined syllables, rather than words, with no referential meaning.…

Some contrasts in the second language (L2) impose difficulty in processing for learners, especially when these contrasts are not used phonemically in a learner's first language (L1). This thesis is to examine how American English speakers learning Japanese discriminate and store information regarding the L2 contrasts as a part of their lexicon…

This study aimed to investigate the effect of written cues on the second- language (L2) language perception, processing, and word learning, especially when the person's first language (L1) belongs to a different rhythmic type of language than L2. The first objective was to examine whether late bilinguals as L2 learners can benefit more from…

This dissertation investigated the speech productions of the implosive -r consonant by U.S.-born Puerto Rican and Dominican Heritage Language Spanish speakers in New York. The following main research questions were addressed: 1) Do heritage language Caribbean Spanish speakers evidence the same variation with the /?/ consonant in the implosive…

Accurate and rapid word recognition requires highly-specified phonological, orthographic, and semantic word-specific representations. It has been established that children acquire these representations through phonological decoding in a process known as orthographic learning. Studies examining orthographic learning and its predictors have thus far…