The speech of second language learners is often influenced by phonetic patterns of their first language. This can make them difficult to understand, but sometimes for listeners of the same first language to a lesser extent than for native listeners. The present study investigates listeners' awareness of the accent by asking whether accented speech…

Recent studies on the learning of L2 prosody have suggested that pitch gestures can enhance the learning of the L2 lexical tones. Yet it remains unclear whether the use of these gestures can aid the learning of L2 intonation, especially by tonal-language speakers. Sixty-four Mandarin speakers with basic-level Spanish were asked to learn three…

We present findings of an investigation into the acquisition of the English /s/-/esh/ contrast by native speakers of Korean and Japanese. Both of these languages have the phones [s] and [esh], and both languages exhibit a pattern--or motivate a rule--whereby /s/ is realized as [esh] before the vowel [i] and the glide [j]--that is, high front…

The effects of age of acquisition and native language prosody on the acquisition of English stress patterns were investigated with early and late Korean-English bilinguals (n = 20). Distributional patterns of stress placement based on syllabic structure, distributional patterns of stress placement based on lexical class, and stress patterns of…

Analyzes data from natural settings and controlled experiments in order to describe native speakers' responses to questions asked by nonnatives and discusses what variables of a nonnative's speech might elicit these responses. (EKN)