Research in phonetics has established the grammatical status of gradient phonetic patterns in language, suggesting that there is a component of the grammar that governs systematic relationships between discrete phonological representations and gradiently continuous acoustic or articulatory phonetic representations. This dissertation joins several…

This dissertation investigates Voice Onset Time (VOT), which serves as an essential property for differentiating plosive consonants in L1 and L2 Mandarin Chinese. It surveys VOT variations and demonstrates that they are affected by several phonetic and phonological properties, e.g., lexical tone, place of articulation (POA), speech rate,…

This dissertation investigated how a bilingual's experiences can affect how their first language pronunciation can differ from monolingual speakers of their two languages. We used a methodology incorporating quantitative phonetic measurements of voice onset time and vowel formants, grammar and vocabulary tests, and qualitative measures of language…

The traditional Philadelphia allophonic /ae/ system (henceforth: PHL shown in (1) below) is characterized by a set of complicated conditioning factors and a dramatic acoustic distinction between the two allophones. In recent years, some Philadelphians have begun to exhibit a new allophonic system (NAS, shown in (2) below). Like PHL, NAS is…

It came as a surprise to me, after an extensive Google search and reading of numerous policies, that English, and more specifically Standard Australian English, is not the official language of Australia (ACARA, 2016c; Lo Bianco, 1987). There are examples cited by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) (1999) that state, 'English is regarded as…

This paper is meant to illuminate the possibility of how world Englishes within an international setting could become similar to the confusion encountered in the Bible record of the Tower of Babel. Presented here is the trend of world Englishes as a part of an English as an international language paradigm. The discussion then proceeds to address…

The aim of this paper is to offer a critical discussion of the role of native and foreign accents in L2 pronunciation teaching. Several studies concluded that classroom practices of grammar instruction are strongly influenced by teaching cultures. We will examine whether this is also the case for pronunciation teaching. While the CEFR…

Spanish [l] is characterized as clear, and is associated with a high second formant (F2) frequency and a large difference between F2 and the first formant (F1) frequencies. In contrast, English [l] is darker (with a lower F2 and a relatively smaller F2-F1 difference) and also exhibits contextual variation due to an allophonic velarization rule…

This paper discusses the similarities between the Bible record of the Tower of Babel and the resulting confusion of languages and how it relates to modern times and the trend we see of English as an International Language (EIL). This paper then briefly examines the trend of being culturally sensitive in EIL by accepting cultural or "world…

North Kyungsang Korean (NKK) is a pitch accent language in which each word has one of a restricted set of possible tonal patterns, and where the tonal pattern of a given lexical word is not fully predictable. This dissertation reports on a corpus study of accent patterns in existing words and the results of a study in which NKK speakers were asked…

The dissertation study aims to contribute mainly to the field of loanword phonology in general and particularly to Indonesian and its phonology that are rarely studied to date. The study investigates what consonantal and syllabic repair strategies are employed by Indonesian in adapting Arabic and Dutch loanwords, whether these adaptation…

It has been recently argued that the particles in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) constitute a grammatical category that actively draws new members to it. Drawing on distributional and collocational evidence, this paper establishes that CSE has a new particle, "ya". The paper then proceeds to analyse the discourse pragmatic function…

The present article provides an exploration of ultimate attainment in second language (L2) and its limitations. It is argued that the question of maturational constraints can best be investigated when the reference population is bilingual and exposed on a regular basis to varieties of their first language (L1) that show cross-linguistic influence.…

This dissertation is a reference grammar of the Malimiut Coastal dialect of Inupiaq (ISO: ESI, ESK, IPK), an Eskimo-Aleut language of northwestern Alaska spoken by the Inupiat people. It complements existing descriptions of Inupiaq by filling gaps in documentation. With approximately 2000 speakers, mainly above 50 years of age, Inupiaq is…

Berent, Steriade, Lennertz, and Vaknin (2007) [Berent, I., Steriade, D., Lennertz, T., & Vaknin, V. (2007). "What We Know about What We Have Never Heard: Evidence from Perceptual Illusions". Cognition, 104, 591-630] demonstrate that English speakers' perception of onsets that are unattested in their language mirrors their typological markedness.…