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…

Nawat, the highly endangered indigenous language of El Salvador, is undergoing a revitalization process. This dissertation, conceived within this context, focuses on the second-language (L2) acquisition of features of Nawat pronunciation by learners who have Salvadoran Spanish as their first language (L1). Specifically, I assess the acquisition of…

Despite the global spread of English, it seems that voices from nonnative English teachers concerning English as an international language (EIL) are under-represented. To address the issue, this study sought to investigate the nonnative teachers' perceptions of idealized native-speaker linguistic and pragmatic norms in the EIL context.…

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…

The ability to flexibly approach the pronunciation of unknown words, or set "for variability", has been shown to contribute to word recognition skills. However, this is the first study that has attempted to teach students strategies for increasing their set for variability. Beginning readers (N = 15) were instructed to correct oral…

North Kyungsang Korean (NKK) is a pitch accent language in which each word has one of a restricted set of possible tonal patterns, and where the tonal pattern of a given lexical word is not fully predictable. This dissertation reports on a corpus study of accent patterns in existing words and the results of a study in which NKK speakers were asked…

Studies have examined various factors that affect pronunciation including phonetic context, style variation, first language transfer, and experience abroad. A plethora of research has also linked motivation to higher levels of proficiency in the second language. The present study uses native speaker ratings and multiple regression analysis to…

This dissertation presents an instrumental study of variation in fricative voicing in Buenos Aires Spanish (BAS), particularly with respect to the devoicing change of the postalveolar fricative: /y/greater than/[function of]/. It proposes a novel way of determining the completion of this change by comparing the percentage voicing of the…

This study investigated second language (L2) learners' acquisition of English /t, d/ deletion patterns in word-final consonant clusters, (a) focusing on how constraints such as grammatical conditioning and phonological environment affect deletion of /t, d/ in L2 acquisition and (b) determining the extent to which these L2 learners had acquired…

This dissertation compares the phonetic and phonological features of adult non-speakers' productions of words in an endangered Native American language, Oregon Northern Paiute (also known, and hereafter referred to, as Numu), to productions by fluent speakers. The purpose of this comparison is two-fold. The first purpose is to examine the…

Investigated phonetic activation in reading a nonalphabetic script (Chinese) of 16 subjects who read in Cantonese and Mandarin and 16 subjects who read in Mandarin but not in Cantonese. Results are provided of a similarity judgment task based on pairs of Chinese words, pronounced the same or differently, in one or both dialects. (21 references)…

This brochure explains in lay terms what an accent is and how it occurs, focusing on how learners of English-as-a-Second-language come to have what is perceived as an accent. It begins with an explanation of two kinds of accent: that of a non-native speaker and that of a speaker from a particular region in which a language is spoken. The second…