Phonetic characteristics of English spoken by Japanese university students were analyzed and classified, and the degree of intelligibility of nonnative speech presented to native English speakers was measured. It was found that the degree of intelligibility was closely related to the level of context presented. (33 references) (JL)

Addresses the difficulty of article acquisition by examining the perception of noun countability by native speakers of English and Japanese speakers of English, testing whether native and nonnative speakers have different perceptions of countability. Results suggest a possible link between the indefinite versus zero article suppliance by Japanese…

A study found that, when temporal characteristics of stops in a Spanish utterance by a native English-speaker were computer-manipulated, native Spanish-speakers' perceptions of the foreignness of the speech were affected. Results imply that Spanish language instruction should include instruction to shorten stops to more Spanish-like values,…

This article examines recent research in the areas of contrastive analysis (CA) and error analysis (EA) as they apply to second-language learning, focusing on redefinitions and modifications of the concepts of language "transfer,""error," and "native speaker." It argues that both CA and EA remain vital components of applied linguistics and…