This study investigates the production of Arabic intervocalic geminate obstruents as produced by American L2 learners of Arabic. The participants of the study were 24 Arabic learners (12 advanced, 12 beginners) at North Georgia University and 12 native speakers of Jordanian Arabic (the control group). An examination of the results reveals that…

Graphotactic as well as phonological factors influence native English speakers' decisions about consonant doubling in the spelling of nonwords, e.g., "zimen" versus "zimmen." This study examined the extent to which such influences apply to non-native speakers of English, who presumably have less knowledge of English…

As there is no vowel length contrast in Chinese, Chinese learners of Thai (CLTs) often have difficulty distinguishing between short and long vowels, especially when the same vowel grapheme in Thai orthography can be pronounced as both a short and a long vowel. This study examined the importance of metalinguistic knowledge (MLK) used by CLTs before…

Intelligibility is a critically important aspect for effective oral communication. This study explored salient (important) pronunciation errors and their relative roles in the intelligibility of nonnative speech based on listener judgments. Speech samples, collected from speakers with a Turkish as a native language (L1) background, were presented…

In our pronunciation courses, segmental level in English pronunciation plays a very important role in perception and teaching of English pronunciation. This research aims to investigate into the most salient pronunciation problems at segmental level by fresh college students from Mainland China through an experimental study, and it is found that…

We investigated how university students select between alternative spellings of phonemes in written production by asking them to spell nonwords whose final consonants have extended spellings (e.g., ‹ff› for /f/) and simpler spellings (e.g., ‹f› for /f/). Participants' choices of spellings for the final consonant were influenced by whether they…

The extent to which exposure to new phonemic contrasts (i.e. contrasts that are present in the L2 but not in the L1) will lead to the creation of a new phonemic category in L2 speakers, as well as the phonological nature of these categories, remains an open question insofar as there is no consensus on whether acquiring a new contrast would result…

Every language has unique phonotactics, general rules about how phonemes combine to make syllables. We know that people can implicitly learn new phonotactic rules in the laboratory, and these rules then affect their speech errors. Some types of rules, however, require a consolidation period before they influence speech errors. Two experiments are…

Although studies on English sound learning by L2 Thai learners have been widely examined, there have been no studies on the production of the English [ch] and [sh] sounds in the initial position by L2 Thai learners with consideration of vowel contexts, the experience of L2 learners and target sounds. The aim of this study is to examine the…

English as an International Language (EIL) is grounded in the concept of multiplicity. Such proliferation of non-native varieties of English leads to several controversies including the intelligibility of its speakers to listeners from various language backgrounds. Although this concern has been continuously addressed in EIL research, the focus…

Millions engage in learning a Second Language (L2) using their mobile devices with a wide range of success. Concomitantly, there exists a growing interest in research on the effects of mobile-assisted language learning and predictors of learner outcomes (e.g., Loewen et al., 2020; Sudina & Plonsky, 2023). However, few of these apps and studies…

Immediate serial recall of verbal material is highly sensitive to impairment attributable to phonological similarity. Although this has traditionally been interpreted as a within-sequence similarity effect, Engle (2007) proposed an interpretation based on interference from prior sequences, a phenomenon analogous to that found in the Peterson…

In sound symbolism, a word's sound induces expectations about the nature of a salient aspect of the word's referent. P. Walker (2016a) proposed that cross-sensory correspondences can be the source of these expectations, and the present study assessed three implications flowing from this proposal. First, sound symbolism will embrace a wide range of…

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.…

This article aims to analyze whether formal instruction influences Brazilian speakers' perception of the English high back vowels contrast. There have been a few L2 pieces of research that focused on the instruction of specific vowel contrasts. Previous studies indicate that a single L1 category seems to be a source of difficulty to L2 vowel…