This paper presents the results of an acoustic analysis of English diphthongs produced by three L1 speakers of Hindi and four L1 speakers of Punjabi. Formant trajectories of rising and falling diphthongs (i.e., vowels where there is a clear rising or falling trajectory through the F1/F2 vowel space) were analysed in a corpus of citation-form…

Compared to monolinguals, multilingual learners possess a larger repertoire of phonetic-phonological parameters, have a higher degree of language and meta-linguistic awareness, and have developed increased phonological knowledge. This, combined with the increased cognitive flexibility that accompanies experienced learners, supports their…

This study describes the language proficiency and early literacy skills of Cantonese-speaking English language learners (ELLs) in kindergarten. A total of 113 Cantonese-speaking kindergarteners in Canada and the United States, composed of three subsamples from three different locations participated in this study. Results showed that on average,…

This study investigates the production of the English interdental fricative [theta] by Chinese learners of English, using a variationist framework. Twenty-seven Chinese participants were asked to evaluate the acceptability of four possible substitutes for the variable (th) and to perform four oral production tasks. The results indicated that…

The conventional way of using letter-to-sound approach to acquire English pronunciation competence is limited to simple and regular English words in elementary level. This limitation signifies the potentialities of phonetic symbols that are applicable to the pronunciation of all the words of human languages. The researchers are exploring the…

Is the bilingual language production system a dynamic system that can operate in different language activation states? Three experiments investigated to what extent cross-language phonological co-activation effects in language production are sensitive to the composition of the stimulus list. L1 Dutch-L2 English bilinguals decided whether or not a…

This paper reports on an instructed second language acquisition study that investigated the effects of explicit phonetic instruction on second language pronunciation by adopting two different outcome measurements (i.e. a rubric of accentedness as well as comprehensibility). Twenty native Japanese learners of English in ESL (English as a second…

This dissertation measured the acoustic properties of the English fricatives and affricates produced by native and Chinese L2 speakers of English to identify the phonetic basis and sources of a foreign accent and to explore the mechanism involved in L2 speech production and L2 phonological acquisition at the segmental level. Based on a Network…

Previous cross-language research has focused on L1 phonological processing and its relation to L2 reading. Less extensive is the research on the effect that L1 orthographic processing skill has on L2 reading and spelling. This study was designed to investigate how reading and spelling acquisition in English (L2) is influenced by phonological and…

Developing morphological awareness (MA) is an essential component of vocabulary growth, given that it can contribute to enhanced depth of vocabulary knowledge and provides a pathway to deeper associations with more members of a word family. Despite the considerable body of vocabulary research, specific relationships between different aspects of MA…

This article provides a comprehensive quantitative analysis of misspellings in the writing of fluent Spanish heritage language (SHL) learners enrolled in a university-level Spanish course. The corpus consisted of a total of 21,322 words and 2492 misspellings, which were divided into four main categories and several subcategories. This paper…

Lexical access was examined in English-Spanish bilinguals by monitoring eye fixations on target and lexical competitors as participants followed spoken instructions in English to click on one of the objects presented on a computer (e.g., "Click on the beans"). Within-language lexical competitors had a phoneme onset in English that was shared with…

Purpose: This study was conducted to determine if phonological production proficiency in bilingual Spanish-English preschoolers could be predicted by their language environment, language ability, and phonological production proficiency in their other language. Method: Participants were 199 Latino children and their families. Children ranged in age…

This paper presents an effectiveness study of a computer-based English reading program, the Waterford Early Reading Program (WERP), among first and second grade students in Israel. Students who used the program were compared to a control group only receiving English as a foreign language (EFL) instruction as part of the school curriculum. First…

This article examines the extent of differences between second language (L2) learners in their abilities to identify L2 consonants and provides evidence for linguistic generalization from one consonant to other consonants. It distinguishes among different sorts of models of the relationship between segments: (a) "segmentally specific models" in…