Purpose: This study aims at investigating the phonological development of the six guttural consonants of Jordanian Arabic, /[chi]/, /[voiced uvular fricative]/, /[voiceless pharyngeal fricative]/, /[voiced pharyngeal fricative]/, /[glottal stop]/, and /h/. Method: An articulation test is designed to involve two tasks: picture naming and…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between speech perception, speech production, and vocabulary abilities in children with and without speech sound disorders (SSDs), analyzing the data both by group and continuously. Method: Sixty-one Australian English--speaking children aged 48-69 months participated in this…

The Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) (Best, 1995) claims listeners directly perceive articulatory gestures of the vocal tract rather than acoustic/auditory signals. Accordingly, the articulatory similarities and discrepancies between native and non-native sounds determine the perceptual assimilation patterns of non-native sounds. This study…

Phonetic imitation is a ubiquitous process in speech production. Speakers have a strong tendency to imitate their interlocutors both in a native and a non-native language. It is especially important in acquiring non-native speech, because it allows forming new sound categories. In the current study we investigated whether and to what extent Polish…

While phonetic training in laboratory settings has been shown to be helpful for second language (L2) sounds learning in prior studies , it is still open to debate whether a perception- or a production-based approach can better help adults learn L2 sounds in classroom settings. This study aimed to fill this knowledge gap. The participants were…

This study investigates acoustically one of long-term debated phonetic characteristics, the so-called Arabic voiced pharyngeal fricative /[voiced pharyngeal fricative]/. Most recent studies have found the Arabic pharyngeal to be approximant, while others have categorized it as a stop in careful speech, and still others have suggested it is a…

This study examined distributional statistical learning of positional, phonetic, and semantic regularities of an artificial orthography in Chinese children aged 8-10 years: 29 with dyslexia, 29 age-matched controls, and 30 reading-level matched controls. Despite having positional regularity learning performance comparable to the controls, the…

This study examined how Korean EFL learners in different proficiency levels attest contrasts of L2 phonology. To this end, twenty Korean EFL learners in high and low levels of English proficiency produced words with word-final contrasts of /[esh]/ vs. /[esh]i/, /t[esh]/ vs. /t[esh]i/, and /d[ezh]/ vs. /d[ezh]i/. Acoustic analyses of lexical vs.…

Pronouncing English clusters may be challenging for Arab English learners. Technology-based strategies can be used to improve their pronunciation of English consonant clusters. This study examined how high variability phonetic training (HVPT) can be used to improve the pronunciation of consonant clusters among English as a foreign language (EFL)…

Dutch and German employ voicing contrasts, but Dutch lacks the 'voiced' dorsal plosive /g/. We exploited this accidental phonological gap, measuring the presence of prevoicing and voice onset time durations during speech production to determine (1) whether preliterate bilingual Dutch-German and monolingual Dutch-speaking children aged 3;6-6;0…

Persuasiveness in oral communication in English can be expressed with various vocal phonetic cues that may not be readily accessible to English second language (L2) learners whose native language may employ a different set of cues. With a goal to increase L2 learners' perceived spoken confidence and persuasiveness, and obtain empirical evidence…

Classic typologies within prosody tend to treat 'tone' languages as being diametrically opposed to 'stress' languages. However, Hyman (2006) highlights several languages that can have both, including Seneca, Fasu, and Copala Trique. As language documentation advances and our acoustic methodologies in the field are further refined, we have seen…

This article revisits Lee and Mok (2018) and examines how the Cantonese learners in the study produced second language (L2) Japanese short vs. long consonants which are absent in their first language (L1). Specifically, our goal is to find out whether these learners were substituting real geminates (i.e. long consonants) with the improvised…

This study aims to investigate the improvement of EFL students' English pronunciation skills by using English phonetic alphabet drills. The samples of this study were 35 first-year students of English for International Communication major, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Rajamangala University of Technology Tawan-ok. They all registered…

With the increasing prevalence of autism diagnoses globally, the overall aim of this dissertation is to improve our understanding of the linguistic aptitude of autistic individuals. Given that the autism diagnosis is a spectrum, we rely on the Autism Quotient (AQ) test, which measures the quantity of autistic-like traits an individual possesses,…