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…

The Global Englishes Language Teaching (GELT) approach plays an essential role in English as a lingua franca. Previous GELT studies only examined the influence of Global English exposure on learners' attitudes in the Inner, Outer, and Expanding Circles. This study added explicit instruction on phonological features in addition to a variety of…

The extent to which exposure to new phonemic contrasts (i.e. contrasts that are present in the L2 but not in the L1) will lead to the creation of a new phonemic category in L2 speakers, as well as the phonological nature of these categories, remains an open question insofar as there is no consensus on whether acquiring a new contrast would result…

The global prevalence of English as a lingua franca (ELF) across diverse linguacultural communities within the three circles invites an in-depth analysis of its phonological and lexicogrammatical features, especially among non-native English speakers. This qualitative study investigated these features among 30 Thai students from English and…

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)…

When it comes to paying attention to the suprasegmental features of their speech, most learners of English seem to be unaware that such phenomena as stress, pitch, duration, and pausing can be of great importance regarding mutual intelligibility. Since they carry a considerable weight of establishing an intelligible conversation, it is argued that…

Recent language attitude research has attended to the processes involved in identifying and evaluating spoken language varieties. This article investigates the ability of second-language learners of English in Spain (N = 71) to identify Received Pronunciation (RP) and General American (GenAm) speech and their perceptions of linguistic variation…

Despite English being a core and compulsory part of the curriculum for Chinese English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners, it is nevertheless often highly challenging for them. This is partly due to the discrepancies between English's citation and spoken form and the lack of recognition this pronunciation receives within ESL classrooms. With this…

This study examines relative weighting of two acoustic cues, vowel duration and spectra, in the perception of high front vowels by Japanese learners of English. Studies found that Japanese speakers rely heavily on duration to distinguish /i?/ and [character omitted] in American English (AmE) as influenced by phonemic length in Japanese /ii/ and…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the intelligibility and attitude towards four English varieties to Korean-speaking learners (KSLs) of English, who have been exposed mainly to General American (or Korean-accented English) in their English language learning classrooms throughout the primary and secondary schools. A total of 105 Korean…

Studies of the role of phonological representations in learning to read have almost exclusively focused on speech perception. In the current study, we examined links between sensorimotor control of speech, reading, and reading-related abilities. We studied two languages, English and Dutch, which vary in the regularity of their spelling-to-sound…

The current study is on second language acquisition (SLA), and the focus is on the process of visual word recognition in English by Arab learners of English as a second language (ESL). Arab ESL learners have poor performance in their visual word recognition in English, which has been explicated in terms of their poor spelling knowledge of English…

The current study examined the extent to which native speakers of North American and Singapore English differentially perceive the comprehensibility (ease of understanding) of second language (L2) speech. Spontaneous speech samples elicited from 50 Japanese learners of English with various proficiency levels were first rated by 10 Canadian and 10…

The current study examined how two groups of native speakers--monolingual Canadians and multilingual Singaporeans--differentially perceive foreign accentedness in spontaneous second language (L2) speech. The Singaporean raters, who had exposure to various models of English and also spoke multiple L2s on a daily basis, demonstrated more lenient…

American Sign Language (ASL) is the natural and preferred language of the Deaf community in both the United States and Canada. Woodward (1978) estimated that approximately 60% of the ASL lexicon is derived from early 19th century French Sign Language, which is known as "langue des signes francaise" (LSF). The lexicon of LSF and ASL may…