Within the field of linguistics, whether considering language contact situations (Weinreich, 1979) or foreign language education (Lado, 1957), the topic of language transfer, especially as it relates to pronunciation, has always been an item of particular interest. While research on such transfer has mostly focused on various phenomena of the L1…

Adult second language (L2) learners often experience difficulty with novel L2 phonological contrasts, limiting their ability to establish contrastive lexical representations of L2 words. It has been demonstrated that the availability of orthographic input (OI), and variables interacting with OI, can shape the inferences learners make about L2…

Learning to read in English is difficult for adult English language learners due to their diverse background, their level of experience with literacy in their first language, and their reason and desire for wanting to learn to read in English. Teachers of adult language learners must consider the educational and language experiences of adults…

The current study is on second language acquisition (SLA), and the focus is on the process of visual word recognition in English by Arab learners of English as a second language (ESL). Arab ESL learners have poor performance in their visual word recognition in English, which has been explicated in terms of their poor spelling knowledge of English…

This dissertation examines the influence of L2 orthographic representation on the phonological development of American English speakers learning Korean, addressing specifically the syllabification and resyllabification of Korean intervocalic obstruents and the intervocalic liquid phoneme. Although Korean and English both employ alphabetic writing…