Fifteen-month-olds have difficulty detecting differences between novel words differing in a single vowel. Previous work showed that Australian English (AusE) infants habituated to the word-object pair DEET detected an auditory switch to DIT and DOOT in Canadian English (CanE) but not in their native AusE (Escudero et al., 2014). The authors…

This paper examines the usage frequency of phonetically reduced modals (i.e. "gonna," "wanna," "gotta") in Present-day English. It is assumed that in distinct sociolinguistic and discourse contexts, the use of reduced modals is dynamic. To collect the data, there are five corpora used in this study, "Corpus of…

Variability in the form of article (i.e., a and the) omissions and stressing has been attributed to a mismatch between first (L1) and second language (L2) prosodic and syntactic structures. An overlap between the L1 and L2 systems, on the other hand, is expected to contribute to native-like article productions. This case study aims to explore the…

It came as a surprise to me, after an extensive Google search and reading of numerous policies, that English, and more specifically Standard Australian English, is not the official language of Australia (ACARA, 2016c; Lo Bianco, 1987). There are examples cited by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) (1999) that state, 'English is regarded as…

The time frame for infants' acquisition of language constancy was probed, using the phonetic variation in a rarely heard accent (South African English) or a frequently heard accent (American English). A total of 156 Australian infants were tested. Six-month-olds looked longer to Australian English than less commonly heard South African accent, but…

Texts in Aboriginal English (AE) and creole varieties have been created by Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers for a range of purposes. In this paper, we focus on materials created in and for five educational contexts, and investigate the orthographic or spelling systems developed in each setting. Choices about orthography are guided by…

It has been widely shown that infants and adults are capable of using only prosodic information to discriminate between languages. However, it remains unclear which aspects of prosody, either rhythm or intonation, listeners attend to for language discrimination. Previous researchers have suggested that rhythm, the duration and timing of speech…

Adult second-language (L2) learners' perception of L2 phonetic segments is influenced by first-language phonological and phonetic properties. It was recently proposed that L2 vocabulary size in adult learners is related to changes in L2 perception (perceptual assimilation model), analogous to the emergence of first-language phonological function…

It is probable that the majority of the 455 000 strong Aboriginal population of Australia speak some form of Australian Aboriginal English (AAE) at least some of the time and that it is the first (and only) language of many Aboriginal children. This means their language is somewhere on a continuum ranging from something very close to Standard…

Cape Barren English is clearly the most aberrant dialect of English spoken in Australia. Descended from English sealers, whalers and ex-convicts and their Aboriginal wives, the inhabitants of Cape Barren Island, Tasmania, have lived in relative isolation for the last 150 years or more. Their dialect is not a creolized pidgin; it has a number of…