This study investigates the perception of the three Mandarin high vowels /i, u, y/ after dental, retroflex, and palatal fricatives and affricates (/s/-/[voiceless alveolar affricate]/-/[voiceless alveolar affricate][superscript voiceless glottal fricative]/; /[voiceless retroflex sibilant fricative]/-/[voiceless alveolar affricate]/-/[voiceless…

The present study investigates the effect of high variability phonetic training (HVPT) on the discrimination of second language (L2) vowel contrasts by adult speakers who live in a country where the L2 is dominant. The same subjects who participated in a previous discrimination task were trained in the discrimination of four L2 vowel contrasts…

Purpose: We examined how consonant perception is affected by a preceding speech carrier simulated in the same or a different room, for different classes of consonants. Carrier room, carrier length, and carrier length/target room uncertainty were manipulated. A phonetic feature analysis tested which phonetic categories are influenced by the…

The current study investigates the influence of L2 English learners' belief about their interlocutor's English proficiency on phonetic accommodation and explores whether interaction-induced phonetic convergence could improve L2 English learners' vowel pronunciation. Results from two experiments show that when the subjects believed that their…

The present study investigates the time course of acoustic cue integration in the processing of the Korean three-way laryngeal stop contrast by native Korean listeners and English second language (L2) learners of Korean. As such, this study seeks to understand how native listeners and L2 learners weight and integrate fine-grained acoustic…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to characterize the acoustic profile and to evaluate the intelligibility of vowel productions in prelingually deafened, Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs). Method: Twenty-five children with CIs and 20 age-matched children with normal hearing (NH) were recorded producing a list of Mandarin…

Arabic emphasis refers to the production of consonants resulting from a primary constriction in the dental or alveolar region and a secondary constriction in the back of the vocal tract, recognized as 'Emphatic.' These have contrastive consonants produced in the dental or alveolar region, recognized as 'Plain.' The existing research on emphasis in…

The present dissertation explores the effect of exposure to non-native speech via foreign film on non-native speech production and perception. In order to explore potential effects, two main experiments were developed, which examined French production and perception by monolingual native speakers of English before and after exposure to French…

Previous literature has shown that voicing contrast is a difficult feature for Chinese-English emergent bilingual learners of L3 Spanish (Bravo Diaz, 2020; Chen, 2007; Zhang, 2022). The production of voicing contrast in stops has been broadly investigated in second and third language studies (e.g., Zampini, 1998; Llama, 2010; Wrembel, 2014), but…

This dissertation analyzes the production and perception of lexical stress in trilinguals' first, second, and third languages (L1, L2, and L3) to evaluate how the cue-weighting transfer hypothesis applies to L3 acquisition. According to this hypothesis, acoustic cues to stress have different weights across languages, and results from both…

Purpose: The speech motor system uses feedforward and feedback control mechanisms that are both reliant on prediction errors. Here, we developed a state-space model to estimate the error sensitivity of the control systems. We examined (a) whether the model accounts for the error sensitivity of the control systems and (b) whether the two systems…

Purpose: This study presents the results of acoustic and kinematic analyses of word-initial semivowels (/[voiced alveolar approximant], l, w/) produced by second-language (L2) speakers of English whose native language is Korean. In addition, the relationship of acoustic and kinematic measures to the ratings of foreign accent was examined by…

Mandarin speakers tend to adapt intervocalic nasals as either an onset of the following syllable (e.g. Bruno [right arrow] "bù.lu.nuò"), as a nasal geminate (e.g. Daniel [right arrow] "dan.ní.er"), or as one of the above forms (e.g. Tiffany [right arrow] "dì.fú.ní" or "dì.fen.ní"). Huang and Lin (2013, 2016)…

This study examines the effects of asymmetrical mappings of L2 sounds to L1 sounds on real-time processing of L2 phonology. L1-Korean participants completed a self-paced listening (SPL) task paired with a picture verification (PV) task, in which an English sentence was presented word by word along with a picture that matched or mismatched the…

This study tests the theoretical predictions regarding effects of increasing task complexity (Robinson, 2001a, 2001b, 2007, 2010; Robinson & Gilabert, 2007) for second language (L2) pronunciation. Specifically, we examine whether more complex tasks (a) lead to greater incidence of pronunciation-focused language-related episodes (LREs) and (b)…