The study investigates the relationship between lexical encoding and production in order to establish whether learners are able to produce a difficult contrast in words that they merged in their mental lexicon. Forty American English learners of Russian were tested on their production and lexical encoding of familiar and highly-frequent words with…

This dissertation presents three studies that examined issues related to the production and the perception of pitch in a tone language. The first study examined linguistic contexts that may modulate consonant-induced pitch perturbations (CF0) in a tone language. Previous studies have produced mixed findings regarding the role of linguistic…

This study tests the theoretical predictions regarding effects of increasing task complexity (Robinson, 2001a, 2001b, 2007, 2010; Robinson & Gilabert, 2007) for second language (L2) pronunciation. Specifically, we examine whether more complex tasks (a) lead to greater incidence of pronunciation-focused language-related episodes (LREs) and (b)…

This paper creates a novel link between research on linguistics and education by discussing what we know about the sound system of heritage language users of Spanish and how these findings can inform practices implemented in heritage Spanish courses in the USA. First, we provide an overview of terminology associated with heritage language…

A great deal of the research on cross-linguistic phonetic influence demonstrates that a speaker's knowledge of their first language (L1) significantly affects their ability to perceive and produce sounds in any other language. While current studies show that cross-linguistic transfer occurs at the L3 level, some research suggests that properties…

Armenian as a separate language has been thought as an I-E Language, but what language/s are the closest to Armenian? We made an attempt to compare Armenian words with Ukrainian, Slavic and European Languages contrasting the stems to some Iranian Languages, like Tajik, Dari and Persian, to see how relative Armenian could be to them. Our main goal…

This dissertation presents the results of a tripartite exploration of English use by Latinxs in post-Katrina New Orleans, defined here as an ethnolinguistic repertoire that I call New Orleans Latinx English (NOLAE). The project considers how contemporary English use differs from that found in a pre-Katrina sample, how social network geometry…

The present article reports on the findings of a cross-sectional acoustic study of the production of the Spanish /e/-/ei/ contrast, as in "pena-peina" and "reno-reino," by native-English intermediate and advanced learners of Spanish. The acoustic parameter that distinguishes Spanish /e/ from /ei/ is formant change--/e/ is a…

This study investigated the phonological representations of vowels in children's native and non-native lexicons. Two experiments were mispronunciation tasks (i.e., a vowel in words was substituted by another vowel from the same language). These were carried out by Dutch-speaking 9-12-year-old children and Dutch-speaking adults, in their…

When both members of a phonemic contrast in L2 (second language) are perceptually mapped to a single phoneme in one's L1 (first language), L2 words containing a member of that contrast can spuriously activate L2 words in spoken-word recognition. For example, upon hearing cattle, Dutch speakers of English are reported to experience activation…

The Phonological Permeability Hypothesis (PPH, Cabrelli Amaro & Rothman, 2010) attempts to reconcile evidence suggesting some L2 learners, however rare, attain native-like L2 phonological systems with the observation that most do not. Considering existing L2 phonology research, it is not clear that phonological differences between early and…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the acquisition of non-contrastive phonetic details of a second language. Reduced vowels in English are realized as a schwa or barred- i depending on their phonological contexts, but Korean has no reduced vowels. Two groups of Korean learners of English who differed according to the experience of residence…

It is well known that adult US-English-speaking learners of French experience difficulties acquiring high /y/-/u/ and mid /oe/-/[openo]/ front vs. back rounded vowel contrasts in French. This study examines the acquisition of these French vowel contrasts at two levels: phonetic categorization and lexical representations. An ABX categorization task…

The identification of stressed syllables by adult second-language (L2) Spanish learners was examined for evidence of influence of an allophonic alternation driven by word position and stress. The Spanish voiced stop-approximant alternation, whereby stops occur in stressed-syllable and word onsets, was utilized. If L2 learners track the…

Intonation is the melody and soul of speech, and plays an important role in oral communication. Nevertheless, the acquisition of English intonation by Chinese EFL learners is far from being satisfactory. It is found by empirical study that the main problems existing in acquiring English rising tone are improper placement of nucleus stress, failure…