Growing evidence suggests that auditory processing ability may be a crucial determinant of language learning, including adult second language (L2) speech learning. The current study tested 47 Chinese English-as-a-Foreign-Language students to examine the extent to which two types of auditory processing, i.e., perceptual acuity and audio-motor…

This paper provides an experimental study of interlanguage phonological characteristics of Chinese students learning Thai as a foreign language and the accentedness perceived by native Thai speakers. Both production and perception experiments were designed to see how Chinese students acoustically produced Thai final nasal consonants and how Thai…

This study examines how Korean learners of Chinese perceive Chinese native speakerism, especially in relation to Choseonjok, or Korean-Chinese people. In-depth individual interviews were conducted with 47 Korean learners of Chinese who attended private Chinese language institutes or in-company Chinese programmes. The transcribed interviews were…

Listeners interpret cues in speech processing immediately rather than waiting until the end of a sentence. In particular, prosodic cues in auditory speech processing can aid listeners in building information structure and contrast sets. Native speakers even use this information in combination with syntactic and semantic information to build mental…

Oral input has long been recognised as a key factor influencing second language acquisition in early childhood. Children rely heavily on oral input to learn new words and develop phonological awareness of a language. However, in the context of English teaching in Hong Kong kindergartens -- which feature diversity in language use in the classroom…

Previous research has shown that learners of English as a second language have difficulties in understanding connected speech spoken by native English speakers. This study examines the role of the perception of reduced forms (e.g., contraction, elision, assimilation) of English words in connected speech comprehension and the phonological skills…

Chinese tones are associated with a syllable to convey meaning, English pitch accents are prominence markers associated with stressed syllables. As both are created by pitch modulation, their pitch contours can be quite similar. The experiment reported here examines whether native speakers of Chinese produce, when speaking English, the Chinese…

This paper includes two interrelated studies. The first production study investigates the timing patterns of English as spoken by Chinese learners with different dialect backgrounds. The second comprehension study explores native and non-native speakers' assessments of the intelligibility of Chinese-accented English, and examines the effects of…

Rater variation in performance assessment can impact test-takers' scores and compromise assessments' fairness and validity (Crooks, Kane, & Cohen, 1996). Rater variation can also undermine a test's validity and fairness; therefore, it is important to investigate raters' scoring patterns in order to inform rater training. Substantial work has…

This study examined intelligibility of twelve American English vowels produced by English, Chinese, and Korean native speakers in quiet and speech-shaped noise in which vowels were presented at six sensation levels from 0 dB to 10 dB. The slopes of vowel intelligibility functions and the processing time for listeners to identify vowels were…

The project aimed to examine the effect of raters' familiarity with accents on their judgments of non-native speech. Participants included three groups of raters who were either from Spanish Heritage, Spanish Non-Heritage, or Chinese Heritage backgrounds (n = 16 in each group) using Winke & Gass's (2013) definition of a heritage learner as…

To fully acquire a language, especially its phonology, children need linguistic input from native speakers early on. When interaction with native speakers is not always possible--e.g. for children learning a second language that is not the societal language--audios are commonly used as an affordable substitute. But does such non-interactive input…

The present paper examines negotiation of meaning and language-related episodes in Chinese-German eTandem interaction, focusing on Chinese as target language. Against the background of the interactionist approach to language learning and drawing upon Swain and Lapkin's (1998, Interaction and second language learning: Two adolescent French…

This study explores Chinese learners' metacognition in EFL pronunciation learning as well as the effectiveness of helping the learners to improve their English pronunciation by metacognitive instructions. By means of preliminary interviews and a questionnaire survey carried out in seven universities across mainland China, six factors of…

The Acquisition of L2 Phonology is a wide-ranging new collection which focuses on various aspects of the acquisition of an L2 phonological system. The authors are researchers and practitioners from five different countries. The volume has been divided into three major sections. Phonetic Analysis presents five studies of language learners in both…