This article discusses the implications of phonological representation for the study of L2 speech acquisition. It is argued, on the basis of empirical findings from diverse phenomena in L2 phonology, that refined representations in which 'segments' have internal prosodic structure offer a more insightful view of cross-linguistic phonetic…

Purpose: The objectives of this study were to identify acoustic characteristics of connected speech that differentiate children with dysarthria secondary to cerebral palsy (CP) from typically developing children and to identify acoustic measures that best detect dysarthria in children with CP. Method: Twenty 5-year-old children with dysarthria…

Automated alignment of transcriptions to audio files expedites the process of preparing data for acoustic analysis. Unfortunately, the benefits of auto-alignment have generally been available only to researchers studying majority languages, for which large corpora exist and for which acoustic models have been created by large-scale research…

This dissertation explores a purportedly unusual word type known as the "sesquisyllable," which has long been considered characteristic of mainland Southeast Asian languages. Sesquisyllables are traditionally defined as "one and a half" syllables, or as one "major" syllable preceded by one "minor" syllable,…

The present study reports on the findings of a cross-sectional acoustic study of the production of Spanish vowels by three different groups of speakers: 1) native Spanish speakers; 2) native English intermediate learners of Spanish; and 3) native English advanced learners of Spanish. In particular, we examined the production of the five Spanish…

This paper evaluates two classes of hypotheses about how people prosodically segment utterances: (1) meaning-based proposals, with a focus on Watson and Gibson's (2004) proposal, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries before and after long constituents; and (2) balancing proposals, according to which speakers tend to produce…

This study investigated the effects of first language prosodic transfer on the perception and production of English lexical stress and the relation between stress perception and production by second language learners. To test the effect of Thai tonal distribution rules and stress patterns on native Thai speakers' perception and production of…

Speech utterances are more than the linear concatenation of individual phonemes or words. They are organized by prosodic structures comprising phonological units of different sizes (e.g., syllable, foot, word, and phrase) and the prominence relations among them. As the linguistic structure of spoken languages, prosody serves an important function…