This study tested the effects of hand-clapping to the rhythm of newly learned French words on the pronunciation of these words by 7- to 8-year-old Catalan children. In a short training experiment with a pre- and posttest design, 28 children either repeated cognate words in French (e.g. French "aspirateur," Catalan "aspirador"…

Classroom time is limited, so the priority question in teaching pronunciation is to find an effective sequence of presentation. This article recounts one teacher's path to learning about different approaches to teaching English rhythm and why it is important. For many years, a common way of distinguishing languages has been based on the assumption…

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…

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…

An ability for a speaker to unite (link) words or to separate (break, juncture) them with a pause in his utterance gives him a special advantage to convey his intended meaning to his audience. If he knows where to unite his words and where to pause between them in speech he is better able to communicate with his listeners, and his words are…

A remarkable example of Spanish-Italian contact is the Spanish variety spoken in Buenos Aires (Porteño), which is said to be prosodically "Italianized" due to migration-induced contact. The change in Porteño prosody has been interpreted as a result of transfer from the first language (L1) that occurred when Italian immigrants learned…

The greatest difficulty in reading Arabic script for nonnatives has long been considered as the absence of short vowels, however there is more to be dealt with. While the correlation of 28 Arabic consonants pose no great difficulty in deciphering the script, the six vowel phonemes voiced only by three letters even with help of some relevant…

Every language has its own rhythm. Unlike many other languages in the world, English depends on the correct pronunciation of stressed and unstressed or weakened syllables recurring in the same phrase or sentence. Mastering the rhythm of English makes speaking more effective. Experiments have shown that we tend to hear speech as more rhythmical…

A common feature of public speech in Catalan is the placement of prominence on lexically unstressed syllables ("emphatic stress"). This paper presents an acoustic study of radio speech data. Instances of emphatic stress were perceptually identified. Within-word comparison between vowels with emphatic stress and vowels with primary lexical stress…

Increasingly, Chinese students are pursuing their studies abroad in English-speaking countries, such as the USA, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Despite the fact that they have studied English as a compulsory subject for a number of years and have passed multiple English proficiency tests, many still find it is difficult to communicate well in…

This paper investigates whether the rhythmic properties of varieties of English found in each of the concentric circles of Kachru's model can, in any way, be elucidated by the "Three Circles" model. A measurement and comparison of the rhythm of three varieties of English: British English (from the Inner Circle), Singapore English (from…

Purpose: This study describes a post hoc analysis of segmental, stress, and syllabification errors in third graders' productions of derived English words with the stress-changing suffixes "-ity" and "-ic." We investigated whether (a) derived word frequency influences error patterns, (b) stress and syllabification errors always co-occur, and (c)…

There is a growing literature demonstrating that speech rhythm sensitivity is related to children's reading development, independent of phonological awareness. However, the precise nature of this relationship is less well understood, and further research is warranted to investigate whether speech rhythm sensitivity predicts the different…

This preliminary study explored changes in prosodic variability during choral reading and investigated whether these changes are affected by the method of eliciting choral reading. Ten typical adult talkers recorded three reading materials (poetry, fiction and textbook) in three reading conditions: solo (reading aloud alone), track (reading aloud…

A study examined final vowel qualities in the speech of seven English speakers from the urban Tyneside area of England. It focused on variations in the pronunciation of the final "y" (e.g., city, happy, tiny) and their explanation by way of (1) the resonance characteristics associated with the articulatory gesture, (2) the…