This study reports an exploratory analysis of the age of arrival (AoA) effect on the production of second language (L2) prosody. Three groups of Mandarin-speaking immigrants (N = 10 in each group) with varying AoA in the United States and ten native speakers of English as controls participated in the study. All participants read a paragraph of…

L1-Spanish learners of English have been reported to distinguish English /i/ and /I/ on the basis of duration cues, whereas L1-English listeners primarily use spectral cues. Morrison (2008a) hypothesized that duration-based perception is a secondary developmental stage that emerges from an initial stage of multidimensional-category-goodness…

We present the results from an experiment that tests the perception of English consonantal sequences by Korean speakers and we confirm that perceptual epenthesis in a second language (L2) arises from syllable structure restrictions of the first language (L1), rather than linear co-occurrence restrictions. Our study replicates and extends Dupoux,…

Addresses the issue of using a continuous speech recognition tool to obtain phonetic or phonological representations of speech. Two experiments were carried out in which the performance of a continuous speech recognizer was compared to the performance of expert listeners in a task of judging whether a number of prespecified phones had been…

Finds no differences in the degree to which adults and seven-year-old children generalized Spanish stress patterns, although the children showed less interference from English stress patterns than the adults. (Author/RL)

Describes an investigation of the phonetic characteristics of children's second language acquisition, focusing on acoustical correlates of the voicing contrast for stop consonants, as produced by young native speakers of Arabic who were learning English as a second language. Neither age nor experience with English could predict phonetic…

Examines predictors of accent transfer from L1 to L2 in a group whose acquisition of English as a second language had begun at ages ranging from 6 to 15 plus. Discusses effects of age on L2 acquisition, adding that the only other strong factor was whether L2 was used in the home. (Author/MES)

Identified the acoustic features of the vowels produced by Hebrew speakers differing in age and sex. Ninety speakers were recorded. Vowels were presented in a nonword context that was placed in a meaningful Hebrew sentence. Results are discussed. (Author/VWL)

This study tested the issue of whether extended length of residence (LOR) in adulthood can provide sufficient input to overcome age effects. The study replicates Flege, Takagi, and Mann (1995), which found that 10 out of 12 Japanese learners of English with extensive residence (12 years or more) produced liquids as accurately as native speakers of…