This research investigated whether observing beat gesture and hearing contrastive accenting with novel words enhances their learning in early childhood and whether these effects differ by sex in light of sex differences in the pace of language development. Fifty-three 3- to 5-year-old boys and girls learned pairs of novel words with contrasting…

Children are adept at learning their language's speech-sound categories, but just how these categories function in their developing lexicon has not been mapped out in detail. Here, we addressed whether, in a language-guided looking procedure, 2-year-olds would respond to a mispronunciation of the voicing of the initial consonant of a newly learned…

The paper focuses on the vers libre prosody taking into account the auditory aspect of its oral actualisation. The main hypothesis of the study is that vers libre is constituted with a range of definite stable prosodic features that allow referring it to versification and at the same time to something different from a metered text and prose.…

Stress is an integral part of conveying meaning in English at not only the level of the word but also the phrase and rhetoric where it is exploited in English in literature, humor, advertising, and more. Simultaneously, stress marks language variation in regional, generational, and ethnic dialects. Thus, stress bears a great functional load and…

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…

The main purpose of this study is to explore and examine an early bilingual child whose use of English might be different on the account of the context the child uses English. Specifically, it was sought to find out if the child resorted to different phonological varieties as well as different interaction patterns while communicating. The relevant…

This study explores the most perceivable phonological features of Hong Kong (HK) L2 English speakers and how they affect the perception of HK L2 English speech from the perspective of both native and non-native English listeners. Conversational interviews were conducted to collect speech data from 20 HK speakers of English and 10 native speakers…

As a case study of non-linguists' perceptions of accent, this paper investigates how accurately and on what basis Japanese-accented English (JAE) is discernible from other L2 varieties of English in New Zealand (NZ). The paper sheds light on how a feature salient in speech is associated with the perceived sociolinguistic identity of speakers. An…

Infants in their first year manifest selective patterns of discrimination between languages and between accents of the same language. Prosodic differences are held to be important in whether languages can be discriminated, together with the infant's familiarity with one or both of the accents heard. However, the nature of the prosodic cues that…

The current study addresses an aspect of second language (L2) phonological acquisition that has received little attention to date--namely, the acquisition of allophonic variation as a word boundary cue. The role of subphonemic variation in the segmentation of speech by native speakers has been indisputably demonstrated; however, the acquisition of…

While considerable dialectal variation exists, almost all varieties of Spanish exhibit some sort of alternation in terms of the palatal obstruent segments. Typically, the palatal affricate [??] tends to occur in word onset following a pause and in specific linear phonotactic environments. The palatal fricative [?] tends to occur in syllable onset…

This dissertation explores language as a resource for the formation and expression of ethnic identity among the members of an Asian American college sorority. As a community of practice organized around ethnicity, the sorority provides an excellent site to examine the mutually constitutive relationship of language and ethnic identity. Two features…

The present study examines the effect of cross-varietal prosodic characteristics of two German varieties, Northern Standard German (NG) and Swiss German (SG), on the production and perception of foreign accent in L2 Belfast English. The analysis of production data revealed differences in the realisation of nuclear pitch accents in L1 German and L2…

Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is an acquired neurologic disorder in which an individual suddenly and unintentionally speaks with an accent which is perceived as being different from his/her usual accent. This study presents an acoustic-phonetic description of two Quebec French-speaking cases. The first speaker presents a perceived accent shift to…

This paper investigates whether the rhythmic properties of varieties of English found in each of the concentric circles of Kachru's model can, in any way, be elucidated by the "Three Circles" model. A measurement and comparison of the rhythm of three varieties of English: British English (from the Inner Circle), Singapore English (from…