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…

High rates of error and variability in early word production may signal speech sound disorder. However, there is little consensus regarding the degree of error and variability that may be expected in the typical range. Relatedly, while variables including child age, word frequency and word phonological neighbourhood density are associated with…

In learning language, children must discover how to interpret the linguistic significance of phonetic variation. On some accounts, receptive phonology is grounded in perceptual learning of phonetic categories from phonetic distributions drawn over the infant's sample of speech. On other accounts, receptive phonology is instead based on phonetic…

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…

Although Spanish and Italian voiced stops are similar in articulatory (place of articulation) and acoustic (prevoicing) terms, there are important contrasts associated with these sounds in each language that may affect second language (L2) learners' acquisition. Spanish maintains an allophonic alternation between word-initial voiced stops and…

Research attempting to understand the intermediate stages of first-language acquisition and disordered speech has led to the discovery of covert contrast. A covert contrast is a statistically reliable difference between phonemes that is produced by a language learner, but in a way that cannot be heard readily by a listener of the target language.…

In conversational speech, it is very common for words' segments to be reduced or deleted. However, previous research has consistently shown that during spoken word recognition, listeners prefer words' canonical pronunciation over their reduced pronunciations (e.g., pretty pronounced [word omitted] vs. [word omitted]), even when the latter are far…

Second language (L2) phonological acquisition involves learning novel target-language sounds, variable forms of sounds that arise in different phonological contexts, and any phonotactic constraints that govern their appearance. Interlanguage (IL) grammars must adapt to represent sounds and constraints that are novel to the native language (L1)…

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…

The traditional Philadelphia allophonic /ae/ system (henceforth: PHL shown in (1) below) is characterized by a set of complicated conditioning factors and a dramatic acoustic distinction between the two allophones. In recent years, some Philadelphians have begun to exhibit a new allophonic system (NAS, shown in (2) below). Like PHL, NAS is…

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 study of short-"a" (e.g., the vowel in words such as "bat," "bad," "bang," "ban") in New York City English (NYCE) has a long history, and with many different descriptions of this complex system (e.g., Babbitt 1896; Trager 1930; Labov 1966/2006; Cohen 1970; Labov 2007). It is complex due to the…

Child language data are notoriously noisy. Children may produce several phonetic variants for a given word or use the same forms for several different words. As such, child data are characterized by little apparent systematicity. Competing theories have arisen to account for a range of problematic phenomena, but each has struggled to relate child…

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…

Purpose: The purpose of this clinical focus piece is to increase familiarity with Philippine English (PE) and highlight clinical implications for working with nonmainstream dialect speakers. Method: The clinical focus draws on descriptive case study data from 2 Filipino kindergarten boys who live in the United States. Multiple ethnographic data…