This study examined how Korean EFL learners in different proficiency levels attest contrasts of L2 phonology. To this end, twenty Korean EFL learners in high and low levels of English proficiency produced words with word-final contrasts of /[esh]/ vs. /[esh]i/, /t[esh]/ vs. /t[esh]i/, and /d[ezh]/ vs. /d[ezh]i/. Acoustic analyses of lexical vs.…

The extent to which exposure to new phonemic contrasts (i.e. contrasts that are present in the L2 but not in the L1) will lead to the creation of a new phonemic category in L2 speakers, as well as the phonological nature of these categories, remains an open question insofar as there is no consensus on whether acquiring a new contrast would result…

Interlanguage is the most fruitful issue in the field of second language acquisition. In the interlanguage phase, Indonesian learners of English tend to alternate between two forms of language features to express the same language function where a variation of language forms will be exhibited to mark the variable of linguistic function.…

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,…

Knowledge of the target specialized language should be of use to English for specific purposes teachers who teach pronunciation. Knowledge of the target learners' first language (L1) should also be useful when these teachers use contrastive analysis, error analysis or interlanguage theory. However, as far as teaching the pronunciation of the…

Adult second language (L2) learners often experience difficulty producing and perceiving non-native phonological contrasts. Even highly proficient bilinguals, who have been exposed to an L2 for long periods of time, struggle with difficult contrasts, such as /r/-/l/ for Japanese learners of English. To account for the relative ease or difficulty…

Examined two phenomena in the acquisition of second-language syllable structure among Japanese students of English as a foreign language: (1) a preference for open syllables, as manifest in paragoge; and (2) a developmental process of final segment apocopation. Results suggest that paragogic epenthesis is conditioned by a syllable structure…

This case study investigated whether patterns obtained from elicited speech also hold for conversational data. A longitudinal corpus of spontaneous/natural speech from an adult first-language Spanish learner of second-language Swedish is studied. (Author/VWL)

This article discusses the strategies used by Cantonese ESL learners to cope with their problems in pronouncing English initial consonant clusters. A small-scale research study was carried out with six secondary and six university students in Hong Kong, who were asked to perform four speech tasks: the reading of a word list, the description of a…

This study examines orthography as one source of non-targetlike phonetic output and focuses on the acquisition by speakers of American English vowel reduction in Russian, a salient feature of the Russian phonetic system that is not reflected in the graphics of the Cyrillic script. The researchers conducted a structured interview and administered…

A study of vowel substitution in Finnish learners of English as a second language looked at the quantitative characteristics of qualitatively similar vowels under different tempo conditions. Specifically, it compared the effects of rate of speech and vowel duration on the eleven stressed monophthongal English vowels and their Finnish counterparts.…

This booklet, part of a course for teaching English to adult Francophones, is designed to assist the student in learning to produce the "h" sound in English and to eliminate the "intrusive h," replacing it with the glottal stop. Sections one and two describe the interlanguage situation for each case, present techniques to guide the student's…

Five papers on linguistics contained in this issue include the following: "Tones for Profoundly Deaf Tone-Language Speakers" (Teresa Y. C. Ching), a study using a simplified speech pattern approach to enhance perception of tonal contrasts in Cantonese; "Word Formation and the Limits of Analytic Equivalence" (Peter Crisp), a…

Tested the interlanguage structural conformity hypothesis by examining how frequently young adult, native Spanish speakers in Mexico modified English two- and three-member onsets. Results indicate that three-member onsets were modified significantly more frequently than were two-member onsets and that epenthesis occurred more frequently after…

An experiment exploring the use of a single phonological variable in standard French by advanced American speakers of French who teach beginning college-level French classes is reported. Seven graduate instructors' use of the variable was examined in directed interviews with a native speaker and in the reading of sentences containing instances of…