A research project was undertaken to investigate the acquisition of the English sound system by kindergarten children of various first language backgrounds. Sixteen children were selected from three kindergartens in Prince Rupert, British Columbia according to the following criteria: (1) no English was spoken by parents; (2) the child scored 3 or…

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…

Discusses problems and issues in naturalistic (non-school) acquisition of the phonology of a second language (L2). The data come from a longitudinal study of four German-speaking siblings learning English as a second language within an English-speaking community without classroom instruction. (KM)

The evaluation of 'deviant articulation' (that of young children, speech defective persons, aphasics, second-language learners) has usually consisted of two activities: transcription of the speech being evaluated, and comparison of the transcription against some 'standard' set of 'target' sounds. Any transcription is a description of a speaker's…