The acquisition of Italian stop consonants by Mandarin Chinese-speaking learners has hardly been investigated. This study was designed to fill this gap. To investigate Chinese learners' acquisition patterns of Italian voiced and voiceless stops, a perception experiment and a production experiment were conducted. Twenty Mandarin Chinese-speaking…

Korean learners of English are known to repair consonant clusters, which are not allowed in their native language, with an epenthetic vowel [close central unrounded vowel]. The purpose of the present study is to examine whether the perception-production link of such an illusory vowel in a second language (L2) is only within and not across…

Two acoustic studies of voice onset time (VOT) in sibilant-stop (ST) consonant clusters, produced by first language (L1) speakers of Polish, are presented. In the first, a baseline study of L1 Polish comparing ST clusters with initial singleton stops, a small degree of VOT shortening after /s/ was found for /p/, but not /t/. The second study…

Adult learners acquire second language (L2) allophones with experience. We examine two mechanisms which may support the acquisition of allophonic variants in second language acquisition. One of the mechanisms is based on the distribution of phones with respect to their phonological context (i.e. phonological distribution). The other is based on…

This study investigates sources of phonological cross-linguistic influence (CLI) at the initial stages of third language (L3) acquisition in light of the predictions of the second language (L2) Status Factor Model, the Typological Primacy Model, the Cumulative Enhancement Model, the Linguistic Proximity Model and the Scalpel Model. The productions…

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…

This study reports syllable position effects on second language (L2) Portuguese speech perception, revealing that L2 segmental learning may be prone to an influence from the suprasegmental level. The results show that first language (L1) Mandarin learners had diminished performance on the discrimination between the target Portuguese liquids (/l/…

Previous studies have yielded contradictory results on the relationship between perception and production in second language (L2) phonological processing. We re-examine the relationship between the two modalities both within and across processing levels, addressing several issues regarding methodology and statistical analyses. We focus on the…

This study investigated the role of cross-linguistic similarity in the acquisition of Russian initial stop contrasts by Chinese learners, addressing two specific research questions: (1) How similar are Russian voiced stops to Mandarin stops for Chinese learners?; and (2) How can the speech learning model (SLM) be applied to account for the…

Word-initial stops in Mandarin and English show a distinctive phonological categorization but a similar phonetic realization along the VOT (Voice Onset Time) continuum. Previous research reported that native Mandarin adults produce measurably longer long-lag VOTs than native English adults. The present study examined whether and how the difference…

This article reports a study examining whether foreign language (FL) word learning can be improved with reduction in cognitive load. Cognitive load theory has received substantial supports in various fields of learning but never in FL word learning. Due to the defined poverty in exposure to the FL, hence deprived cognitive pre-requisites for…

This study investigates the role of orthography in German vowel production by Polish native speakers (L1) with German as a second language (L2). Eighteen intermediate to advanced Polish L2 German learners and 20 German native speakers were recorded during a picture-naming task in which half of the experimental items were explicitly marked in their…

Recent studies in the acquisition of a second language (L2) phonology have revealed that orthography can influence the way in which L2 learners come to establish target-like lexical representations (Escudero et al., 2008, 2014; Escudero and Wanrooij, 2010; Showalter, 2012; Showalter and Hayes-Harb, 2013). Most of these studies, however, involve…

Recent research indicates that knowledge of words' spellings can influence knowledge of the phonological forms of second language (L2) words when the first and second languages use the same orthographic symbols. It is yet unknown whether learners can make similar use of unfamiliar orthographic symbols. In this study we investigate whether native…

How well can non-native length contrasts for vowels and for consonants be perceived and is one type more difficult than the other? Three listener groups (native Italian and German as well as advanced German learners of Italian) performed a speeded same-different task involving vocalic and consonantal length contrasts as well as segmental contrasts…