Intonation plays an integral role in comprehending spoken language. Listeners can rapidly integrate intonational information to predictively map a given pitch accent onto the speaker's likely referential intentions. We use mouse tracking to investigate two questions: (a) how listeners draw predictive inferences based on information from…

Compound surnames in Japanese show complex phonological patterns, which pose challenges to current theories of phonology. This dissertation proposes an account of the segmental and prosodic issues in Japanese surnames and discusses their theoretical implications. Like regular compound words, compound surnames may undergo a sound alternation known…

The main cause of pronunciation problems faced by EFL learners is their lack of a suprasegmental background. Most of those having oral comprehension and expression difficulties are unaware that their difficulty comes from their negligence of concepts of stress, pitch, juncture and linkers. While remedying stress problems, students should be taught…

This dissertation explores a purportedly unusual word type known as the "sesquisyllable," which has long been considered characteristic of mainland Southeast Asian languages. Sesquisyllables are traditionally defined as "one and a half" syllables, or as one "major" syllable preceded by one "minor" syllable,…

The present study reports on the findings of a cross-sectional acoustic study of the production of Spanish vowels by three different groups of speakers: 1) native Spanish speakers; 2) native English intermediate learners of Spanish; and 3) native English advanced learners of Spanish. In particular, we examined the production of the five Spanish…

This paper addresses the power of intonation to convey interpersonal or attitudinal meaning. Speakers have been shown to accommodate to each other in the course of conversation, and this convergence may be perceived as a sign of empathy. Accommodation often involves paradigmatic choices--choosing the same words, gestures, regional accent or…

This study investigated English speakers' perception of Mandarin sounds, aiming to answer three major questions. First, does the perceived similarity between Mandarin and English sounds affect learners' acquisition of Mandarin sounds? Second, do the groups with different amounts of Mandarin experience differ in their perception of…

This article aims at absorbing the pronunciation teachers task and how much phonology should teachers know. Teachers and future teachers need a well-rounded concept of the phonology of the language they are going to teach and the native language of learners. Emphasis must be placed on the understanding of language as a system of rules and as a…

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…

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…