This sociophonetic study examines affricate variation through a continuous lens using diachronic data from Caracas Spanish. We investigate the relationship between frication and occlusion period duration in affricate segments across two steps. First, we present a phonetic characterization of the dependent variable and its variants. Second, we…

This study addresses the issue of automatic pronunciation assessment (APA) and its contribution to the teaching of second language (L2) pronunciation. Several attempts have been made at designing such systems, and some have proven operationally successful. However, the automatic assessment of the pronunciation of short words in segmental…

Dialects vary in their allophonic patterns, which can affect listeners' phonological and lexical representations. I explore how different exposure to dialect-specific allophonic patterns for two vowels in American English, /ae ai/, affects listeners' lexical processing behaviors across three perception tasks: perceptual similarity, priming, and…

Rhythm metrics can detect second language development of target-like speech rhythm but interpretation of the results from metrics in learners' speech is problematic because the mapping of metrics to underpinning phonological features is indirect. We investigate speech rhythm in first language (L1) Arabic / second language (L2) English, which…

During spoken word processing, native (L1) listeners use allophonic variation to predictively rule out word competitors and speed up word recognition. There is some evidence that second language (L2) learners develop an awareness of allophonic distributions in their L2, but whether they use their knowledge to facilitate word recognition online,…

The study describes a pedagogic adaptation of the matched guise technique with the aim to raise linguistic self-awareness of L2 accentedness stereotyping effects among Swedish pre-service teachers. In the experiment, 290 students attending teacher training programs were exposed to one of two matched guises, representing either L1 accented Swedish,…

Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in the language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has demonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature…

Purpose: This article compares acoustic data of normally developing children from two dominant and one nondominant variety of English in order to determine phonetic proximity. Method: The study focuses on one variety of American English (AE), one British English (BE) variety, and one Jamaican English (JE) variety owing to the historical and…

Spoken word recognition depends on variations in fine-grained phonetics as listeners decode speech. However, many models of second language (L2) speech perception focus on units such as isolated syllables, and not on words. In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated how fine-grained phonetic details (i.e. duration of nasalization on…

Purpose: This study presents the results of acoustic and kinematic analyses of word-initial semivowels (/[voiced alveolar approximant], l, w/) produced by second-language (L2) speakers of English whose native language is Korean. In addition, the relationship of acoustic and kinematic measures to the ratings of foreign accent was examined by…

This article reports on the second language (L2) perception of contrasts among British English monophthongs. This study has two aims: 1) to explore the discriminability of contrasts in L2 British English monophthongs; and 2) to test the perceptual assimilation model-L2 (PAM-L2) towards the ability to discriminate British English contrasts. The…

Mandarin speakers tend to adapt intervocalic nasals as either an onset of the following syllable (e.g. Bruno [right arrow] "bù.lu.nuò"), as a nasal geminate (e.g. Daniel [right arrow] "dan.ní.er"), or as one of the above forms (e.g. Tiffany [right arrow] "dì.fú.ní" or "dì.fen.ní"). Huang and Lin (2013, 2016)…

This article presents an acoustic study of the acquisition of vowel formant dynamics in L2 (Southern British) English by Polish learners at two levels of proficiency, along with baseline data from L1 English and L1 Polish. Results from our experiment suggest that the acquisition of English vowels by Polish learners entails a temporal…

Within a language, there is considerable variation in the pronunciations of words owing to social factors like age, gender, nationality, and race. In the present study, we investigate whether toddlers link social and linguistic variation during word learning. In Experiment 1, 24- to 26-month-old toddlers were exposed to two talkers whose front…

Interlanguage is the most fruitful issue in the field of second language acquisition. In the interlanguage phase, Indonesian learners of English tend to alternate between two forms of language features to express the same language function where a variation of language forms will be exhibited to mark the variable of linguistic function.…