Speech is highly variable and systematic, governed by the internal linguistic system and socio-indexical factors. The systematic relationship of socio-indexical factors and variable phonetic forms, referred to here as "socio-indexical structure," has been the cornerstone of sociophonetic research over the last several decades. Research…

Some contrasts in the second language (L2) impose difficulty in processing for learners, especially when these contrasts are not used phonemically in a learner's first language (L1). This thesis is to examine how American English speakers learning Japanese discriminate and store information regarding the L2 contrasts as a part of their lexicon…

Focus on his biography and his performance in the media has long been the basis of interpretation of Bob Dylan's identity. This has resulted in the accepted critical theory of Dylan's identity as mercurial and lacking a central ipseity. However, as Michael Strachan argues, rock biography is an unstable genre because it treats its subjects as…

This study examines the acquisition of target-like patterns of variation by 22 American learners of French during study abroad (SA) in France and correlates such acquisition with the creation of dense, multiplex, exchange-based social networks (Milroy 1980) with native speakers (NSs) during the SA period. In this longitudinal study, naturalistic…

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…