This study investigated how Japanese-speaking learners of English pronounce the three point vowels /i/, /u/, and /a/ appearing in the first and second monosyllabic words of English noun phrases, and the schwa /[image omitted]/ appearing in English disyllabic words. First and second formant (F1 and F2) values were measured for four Japanese…

The purpose of this study was to determine possible differences in voice onset time (VOT) between speakers of standard American English (AE) and Indian English (IE) in a continuous speech context. The participants were 20 AE speakers, who were native to the Northeastern Pennsylvania region, and 20 IE speakers from the Indian subcontinent who had…

A methodological shortcoming in previous second language (L2) acquisition studies has been that researchers have assumed an overly homogenous first language (L1) ignoring dialect differences. In the current study English and German vowel production data were collected from 72 English-speaking learners of German from three distinct North American…

The eastern half of New York State is a dialectologically diverse region around which several dialect regions converge--the Inland North, New York City, Western New England, and Canada. These regions differ with respect to major parameters of North American English phonological variation; and therefore the interface between them is of interest…

Past research has established that listeners can accommodate a wide range of talkers in understanding language. How this adjustment operates, however, is a matter of debate. Here, listeners were exposed to spoken words from a speaker of an American English dialect in which the vowel /ae/ is raised before /g/, but not before /k/. Results from two…

Imitations are sophisticated performances displaying regular patterns. The study of imitation allows linguists to understand speakers' perceptions of sociolinguistic variation. In this dissertation, I analyze imitations of non-native accents in order to answer two questions: what can imitation reveal about perception, and how are "folk linguistic…

This study examines the role of abstractness during the activation of a lexical representation. Abstractness and conflict are directly modeled in our approach by invoking lexical representations in terms of contrastive phonological features. In two priming experiments with English nouns differing only in vowel height of their stem vowels (e.g.,…

Systematic differences among regional U.S. English speech are recognizable to native speakers to varying degrees. This has been demonstrated by researchers in perceptual dialectology who ask listeners to match a speaker to his or her dialect region. Machines have also been able to identify the regional origin of a speaker to some degree, although…

This study investigated the effects of first language prosodic transfer on the perception and production of English lexical stress and the relation between stress perception and production by second language learners. To test the effect of Thai tonal distribution rules and stress patterns on native Thai speakers' perception and production of…

This case study aims to reveal how conceptualization of native speakership was constructed and reinforced in a South Korean university classroom of English as a foreign language (EFL). In addition, it examines how this conceptualization positions native speakers, a non-native EFL teacher, and learners, and what learning opportunities were provided…

This article describes the use of African American English (AAE) in the written and oral language of African American adolescents who struggle with writing. Written and oral language samples of 22 African American 10th-grade students were transcribed, analyzed, and coded for AAE, grammatical errors, spelling errors, and punctuation errors. Four…

Two experiments investigated the mechanism by which listeners adjust their interpretation of accented speech that is similar to a regional dialect of American English. Only a subset of the vowels of English (the front vowels) were shifted during adaptation, which consisted of listening to a 20-min segment of the "Wizard of Oz." Compared…

This study examined Japanese speakers' learning of American English during their first years of immersion in the United States (U.S.). Native Japanese-speaking (NJ) children (n=16) and adults (n=16) were tested on two occasions, averaging 0.5 (T1) and 1.6 years (T2) after arrival in the U.S. Age-matched groups of native English-speaking children…

The purpose of this research was to investigate the nature of listeners' attitudes toward foreign-accented speech and the manner in which those attitudes are formed. This study measured 165 participants' implicit and explicit attitudes toward US- and foreign-accented audio stimuli. Implicit attitudes were measured with an audio Implicit…

Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is a rare disorder characterized by the emergence of a perceived foreign accent following brain damage. The symptomotology, functional bases, and neural substrates of this disorder are still being elucidated. In this case study, acoustic analyses were performed on the speech of a 46-year old monolingual female who…