We report on three experiments that aim at measuring the role of prosody in the acceptability and interpretation of discourse relations between utterances connected by two French discourse markers, viz. "et" "and" and "alors" "then/well." These two discourse markers are highly polyfunctional: "et"…

Recent ERP research with adults has shown that the online processing of subject-verb (S-V) agreement violations is mediated by the relative perceptual salience of the violation (Dube et al. 2016). These findings corroborate infant perception research, which has also shown that perceptual salience influences infants' sensitivity to grammatical…

A great deal of the research on cross-linguistic phonetic influence demonstrates that a speaker's knowledge of their first language (L1) significantly affects their ability to perceive and produce sounds in any other language. While current studies show that cross-linguistic transfer occurs at the L3 level, some research suggests that properties…

This study reports on the acquisition of quantity contrasts in Guina-ang Bontok, an indigenous language spoken in the Philippines. Four-year-old and 5-year-old children's perception and production of quantity contrasts were examined using a pair of names that contrast in the quantity of the medial nasal. Frequencies of the quantity contrast were…

To account for the full range of language use in contemporary multilingual urban contexts, the notion of target language (TL) needs to be reconsidered. In studies of second language acquisition and language variation, taking TL for granted implies that people agree on what constitutes "good" language, or the standard norm. The TL of…

This dissertation studies the realization of the rhythm of Taiwan Mandarin and focuses on the quality of its unstressed (neutral-tone) syllables. Taiwan Mandarin (TM) is often described as more syllable-timed than Standard Mandarin (SM). In TM, the unstressed syllables occur less frequently. The quality of the unstressed (neutral-tone) syllables…

This dissertation investigates how the Taiwanese Tone Sandhi Groups are perceived, and the acoustic/phonetics correlates of listeners' judgments. A series of perception experiments have been conducted to scrutinize the following topics--Taiwanese tone neutralization, Tone Sandhi Group (TSG) as a prosodic domain, perceived boundary strength in…

The present investigation examines English speakers' ability to identify and discriminate non-native consonant length contrast. Three groups (L1 English No-Instruction, L1 English Instruction, and L1 Finnish control) performed a speeded forced-choice identification task and a speeded AX discrimination task on Finnish non-words (e.g.…

This dissertation investigates the linguistic and social constraints on the occurrence of creaky voice quality (creak) in Beijing Mandarin (BM), as well as the effect of linguistic and prosodic context on creak's social meanings for Mandarin listeners. It is a two-phase study, composed of 1) a production study of the distribution of creak in the…

In this paper we explore English pronunciation teaching within an English as an International Language (EIL) framework, arguing that teaching learners how to produce English phonemes can lead to an improvement in their aural ability. English as an Additional Language (EAL) learners often have difficulty discriminating between and producing…

One intriguing question in language research concerns the extent to which orthographic information impacts on spoken word processing. Previous research has faced a number of methodological difficulties and has not reached a definitive conclusion. Our research addresses these difficulties by capitalizing on recent developments in the area of word…

Intonation is the melody and soul of speech, and plays an important role in oral communication. Nevertheless, the acquisition of English intonation by Chinese EFL learners is far from being satisfactory. It is found by empirical study that the main problems existing in acquiring English rising tone are improper placement of nucleus stress, failure…

Spivey, Grosjean, and Knoblich (2005) reported smoothly curved reaching movements, via computer-mouse tracking, which suggested a continuously evolving flow of distributed lexical activation patterns into motor movement during a phonological competitor task. For example, when instructed to click the "candy," participants' mouse-cursor trajectories…

The central goal of this dissertation is to explore the relative perceptibility of vowel epenthesis in English onset clusters by second language learners whose native language is averse to onset clusters. The dissertation examines how audible vowel epenthesis in different onset clusters is, whether this perceptibility varies from one cluster to…

This research investigates whether English speakers who learn Mandarin Chinese via a familiar orthography differ from those who learn via a non-familiar orthography in their perception of English-Mandarin sound pairs. Canadian English speakers (n = 32) participated in a series of experimental tasks. The tasks included pre- and posttest perception…