This study analyses the production of French /y/ and /u/ by 42 native English learners of French (ELoF) at the start and end of a Residence Abroad (RA) in a French-speaking country. As an approximation of both phonological and phonetic development, categorical change is teased apart from gradient change using k-medoid clustering of acoustic data…

Purpose: This article compares acoustic data of normally developing children from two dominant and one nondominant variety of English in order to determine phonetic proximity. Method: The study focuses on one variety of American English (AE), one British English (BE) variety, and one Jamaican English (JE) variety owing to the historical and…

We consider how the existence of different signifiers for mathematical objects in different languages manifests in discourse about those objects. Based on the observation that there is a common signifier "derivative" in English used for both the derivative at a point and the derivative function and two phonetically and semantically…

This study investigates the use of a popular online expression 'skr' by Chinese micro-blogging users on Weibo. Used originally as a hip-hop term for the sound of cars drifting tires, 'skr' was exploited by Chinese micro-blogging users for other meanings and functions. Data were collected from Weibo users' postings over a month. Using the Search…

Mandarin speakers tend to adapt intervocalic nasals as either an onset of the following syllable (e.g. Bruno [right arrow] "bù.lu.nuò"), as a nasal geminate (e.g. Daniel [right arrow] "dan.ní.er"), or as one of the above forms (e.g. Tiffany [right arrow] "dì.fú.ní" or "dì.fen.ní"). Huang and Lin (2013, 2016)…

This paper examines the usage frequency of phonetically reduced modals (i.e. "gonna," "wanna," "gotta") in Present-day English. It is assumed that in distinct sociolinguistic and discourse contexts, the use of reduced modals is dynamic. To collect the data, there are five corpora used in this study, "Corpus of…

The speech of second language learners is often influenced by phonetic patterns of their first language. This can make them difficult to understand, but sometimes for listeners of the same first language to a lesser extent than for native listeners. The present study investigates listeners' awareness of the accent by asking whether accented speech…

The time frame for infants' acquisition of language constancy was probed, using the phonetic variation in a rarely heard accent (South African English) or a frequently heard accent (American English). A total of 156 Australian infants were tested. Six-month-olds looked longer to Australian English than less commonly heard South African accent, but…

When speaking to infants, adults typically alter the acoustic properties of their speech in a variety of ways compared with how they speak to other adults; for example, they use higher pitch, increased pitch range, more pitch variability, and slower speech rate. Research shows that these vocal changes happen similarly across industrialized…

The teaching of native-like accents has been the aim of many EFL educationists long ago; however, this concept is heading towards a major change. Hence, the idea of this paper is based on Jenkins' (2000 & 2002) theory of English as an International Language (EIL). Jenkins' theory analyses the use of English by non-natives speakers (NNS) where…

Newfoundland English has long been considered autonomous within the North American context. Sociolinguistic studies conducted over the past three decades, however, typically suggest cross-generational change in phonetic feature use, motivated by greater alignment with mainland Canadian English norms. The present study uses data spanning the past…

Acoustic properties of 980 tokens of sibilants /s, z, [approximately]/ produced by 17 Canadian English-speaking female and male tongue cancer patients were studied. The patients had undergone tongue resection and tongue reconstruction with a radial forearm free flap (RFFF). The spectral moments (mean, skewness) and frication duration were analysed…

In her interesting article, Stoel-Gammon (this issue) reviews studies concerning the interactions between lexical and phonological development. While the focus of the review is on vocabulary production from children acquiring American English, she also suggests that cross-linguistic research be undertaken to examine how universal and…

This study examines the role of abstractness during the activation of a lexical representation. Abstractness and conflict are directly modeled in our approach by invoking lexical representations in terms of contrastive phonological features. In two priming experiments with English nouns differing only in vowel height of their stem vowels (e.g.,…

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…