This paper examines possible psycholinguistic mechanisms governing stem vowel changes of irregular verbs in intermediate English learners of German as a foreign language (GFL). In Experiment 1, nonce-infinitives embedded in an authentic fictional text had to be inflected for German preterite, thus testing possible analogy-driven pattern…

Adult second language (L2) learners often experience difficulty producing and perceiving non-native phonological contrasts. Even highly proficient bilinguals, who have been exposed to an L2 for long periods of time, struggle with difficult contrasts, such as /r/-/l/ for Japanese learners of English. To account for the relative ease or difficulty…

This study examined the effect of native language background on listeners' perception of native and non-native vowels spoken by native (Hong Kong Cantonese) and non-native (Mandarin and Australian English) speakers. They completed discrimination and an identification task with and without visual cues in clear and noisy conditions. Results…

A modified matched guise technique was used with 57 subjects to evaluate 14 recorded voices in 3 accent categories (broad, mild, hypercorrect). Some differences were found between native speakers and nonnative speakers, and the results pose questions in terms of the two distinct judgmental dimensions of solidarity and status. (60 references) (LB)

A study of vowel substitution in Finnish learners of English as a second language looked at the quantitative characteristics of qualitatively similar vowels under different tempo conditions. Specifically, it compared the effects of rate of speech and vowel duration on the eleven stressed monophthongal English vowels and their Finnish counterparts.…

Five papers on linguistics contained in this issue include the following: "Tones for Profoundly Deaf Tone-Language Speakers" (Teresa Y. C. Ching), a study using a simplified speech pattern approach to enhance perception of tonal contrasts in Cantonese; "Word Formation and the Limits of Analytic Equivalence" (Peter Crisp), a…