Speech is extremely variable along many different dimensions. One source of variability listeners often encounter is accented speech, in which phonological units can systematically differ from the listener's native categories. This dissertation presents five experiments testing how listeners adapt to accent-based phonological variability,…

This study examined the production of L3 French words by Spanish--English bilinguals who had no prior knowledge of the L3. Using a shadowing task, 39 Spanish L1/English L2 and 18 Spanish monolingual speakers produced 26 tokens of word-initial voiceless plosive consonants in French, Spanish and English (15 Spanish and French tokens for the…

Many studies evidence the flexibility of speech perception in the first language (L1), which allows rapid adaptation to unfamiliar foreign accents. Two influential studies by Bradlow and Bent (2008) and a follow-up study by Baese-Berk et al. (2013) found that increased variability as a function of the number of talkers and accents facilitated the…

Spoken words vary phonetically along a number of dimensions, such as duration, pitch, and vowel quality. Much of this variation is associated with social factors like the dialect, age, or gender of the speaker -- a type of variation termed 'socio-indexical'. Traditional theories of speech perception have seen this socio-indexical variation as a…

Based on Mahboob and Elyas (World Engl 33(1):128-142, 2014), who identified an expanding circle variety of Englishes, known as 'Saudi English', the present paper addresses the consonantal variations between Formal English and a sub-variety of Saudi English, termed as 'Saudi Hijazi English'. The paper presents the specific consonants of Saudi…

While most empirical studies have investigated the improvement of learners' L2 spoken proficiency via speaking-related interventions, the present study examined the same topic through a different modality: listening. Ninety-five first-year tertiary-level students of English as a second language (ESL) in Hong Kong participated in this three-month…

This dissertation is concerned with how elliptical sentences are generated. To be specific, I investigate when and in what module ellipsis occurs, and what is elided as a result of ellipsis. With regard to the first research question, I propose that XP ellipsis occurs as soon as all the featural requirements of the licensor of XP ellipsis are…

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…

This corpus-based diachronic study aims to investigate the change in the use of English relative clauses over a 45-year time span. It does not only focus on change over time but also change between two varieties of English (British and American). The data were taken from the Brown family of corpora. Each corpus in the Brown family corpora consists…

Variability in the form of article (i.e., a and the) omissions and stressing has been attributed to a mismatch between first (L1) and second language (L2) prosodic and syntactic structures. An overlap between the L1 and L2 systems, on the other hand, is expected to contribute to native-like article productions. This case study aims to explore the…

This dissertation investigates the effect of phonetically cued emotional information (i.e., emotional prosody) on spoken word recognition. Even words whose meanings are not emotionally laden (e.g., "pineapple") can be uttered in a way that conveys anger, happiness, or sadness through phonetic modulation, and the current work investigates…

Across the centuries, the question of the origin of language has captivated the human imagination. Many theories have been proposed to address fundamental questions such as: Where do languages come from? How do they evolve? What are the societal drivers of this change? Historically, one of the biggest challenges in addressing these questions has…

The wide use of English has given rise to the World Englishes (WE) paradigm, within which there has been a growing interest in the pedagogical implications of the varieties of English. A frequently documented rationale for the marriage between second language education and WE is that WE users should be aware of the potential problems in WE…

This investigation contributes to the understanding of language attitudes toward consonantal deletion by examining its perception using a matched-guise experiment (Casesnoves and Sankoff 2004; Lambert, Hodgson, Gardner, and Fillenbaum 1960) with fifteen listeners. Two experiments were designed for testing language attitudes, one toward…

The article by Amaral and Roeper (this issue; henceforth A&R) presents many interesting ideas about first and second language acquisition as well as some experimental data convincingly illustrating the difference between production and comprehension. The article extends the concept of Universal Bilingualism proposed in Roeper (1999) to second…