Korean learners of English are known to repair consonant clusters, which are not allowed in their native language, with an epenthetic vowel [close central unrounded vowel]. The purpose of the present study is to examine whether the perception-production link of such an illusory vowel in a second language (L2) is only within and not across…

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…

Feature-based approaches to acquisition principally focus on second language (L2) learners' ability to perceive non-native consonants when the features required are either contrastively present or entirely absent from the first language (L1) grammar. As features may function contrastively or allophonically in the consonant and/or vowel systems of…

Although extensive research has focused on the perceptual abilities of second language (L2) learners, a significant gap persists in understanding how cognitive functions like phonological short-term memory (PSTM) and nonverbal intelligence (IQ) impact L2 speech perception. This study sets out to investigate the discrimination of L2 English…

Purpose: Children with hearing loss (HL), including those with hearing aids (HAs) and cochlear implants (CIs), often have difficulties contrasting words like "beach" versus "peach" and "dog" versus "dock" due to challenges producing systematic voicing contrasts. Even when acoustic contrasts are present,…

Adult learners acquire second language (L2) allophones with experience. We examine two mechanisms which may support the acquisition of allophonic variants in second language acquisition. One of the mechanisms is based on the distribution of phones with respect to their phonological context (i.e. phonological distribution). The other is based on…

The Hindi consonant inventory, which includes the cross-linguistically rare retroflex place of articulation and four-way laryngeal contrasts, is known to pose difficulties for native English speakers. Hindi language textbooks address this challenge, in part, by providing various articulatory and acoustic descriptions of Hindi consonants, typically…

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…

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…

This dissertation examines the development of the internal structure of the Korean syllable by adult Korean learners whose native language is English. Prior research has identified the prominence of the body constituent in Korean and the rime constituent in English. The current study focuses on the acquisition of the body unit by English speakers…

Featural approaches to second language phonetic acquisition posit that the development of new phonetic norms relies on sub-phonemic features, expressed through a constellation of articulatory gestures and their corresponding acoustic cues, which may be shared across multiple phonemes. Within featural approaches, largely supported by research in…

We investigate bilingual children's perception of assimilations, i.e. phonological rules by which a consonant at a word edge adopts a phonological feature of a neighboring consonant. For instance, English has place assimilation (e.g., "green" is pronounced with a final [m] in "green pen"), while French has voicing assimilation…

Previous studies have yielded contradictory results on the relationship between perception and production in second language (L2) phonological processing. We re-examine the relationship between the two modalities both within and across processing levels, addressing several issues regarding methodology and statistical analyses. We focus on the…

Purpose: This study aimed to examine whether abstract knowledge of word-level linguistic prosody is independent of or integrated with phonetic knowledge. Method: Event-related potential (ERP) responses were measured from 18 adult listeners while they listened to native and nonnative word-level prosody in speech and in nonspeech. The prosodic…

This study examined how intervention dose frequency affects phonological acquisition and generalization in preschool children with speech sound disorders (SSD). Using a multiple-baseline, single-participants experimental design, eight English-speaking children with SSD (4;0 to 5;6) were split into two dose frequency conditions (4…