Language learners need to map a continuous, multidimensional acoustic signal to discrete abstract speech categories. The complexity of this mapping poses a difficult learning problem, particularly for second language learners who struggle to acquire the speech sounds of a non-native language, and almost never reach native-like ability. A common…

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…

Research has suggested that the type and frequency of learning strategies employed by successful listeners is greater than their less successful counterparts. Based on evidence that metacognitive strategies (e.g. listening-for-gist; inferring meaning) are more effective than cognitive ones (e.g. word-for-word translation), this study sought to…

This dissertation investigates how English-speaking second language (L2) learners of Mandarin perceive, process and learn Mandarin lexical tones. While most languages use modulations in pitch (intonation) to convey meanings at the phrasal and sentential levels, a number of languages, including Mandarin, also use suprasegmental features such as…

Listening has long been recognized as a challenging skill for teachers, students, and researchers working within the English as a Second Language (ESL)/English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts. Moreover, up until the recent past, it was the least researched of the four language skills in second language acquisition studies. One of the issues…

Prosody is a linguistic feature in spoken English that is complex yet plays an important role in oral communication. Nevertheless, many EFL pronunciation classes in Thailand have not adequately emphasized the importance and functions of prosody to learners. This research study aims to investigate effect of an oral fluency instructional method…

ELT materials tend to use prestige variety speakers as models, an underlying assumption being that this is needed in order to acquire the phonology necessary to parse English speech (Rose & Galloway, 2019). Global Englishes Language Teaching (GELT) (Galloway & Rose, 2018) provides the potential for movement away from such 'native speaker'…

Do learners of a second language (L2) need frequent contact with native speakers of that language in order to master its phonology? What if they hear audio recordings of native speakers and receive immediate corrective feedback about their perception? We used a randomized controlled experiment with 135 Chinese speakers (with English as their L2)…

This study investigates the role of orthography in German vowel production by Polish native speakers (L1) with German as a second language (L2). Eighteen intermediate to advanced Polish L2 German learners and 20 German native speakers were recorded during a picture-naming task in which half of the experimental items were explicitly marked in their…

Many types of L2 phonological perception are often difficult to acquire without instruction. These difficulties with perception may also be related to intelligibility in production. Instruction on perception contrasts is more likely to be successful with the use of phonetically variable input made available through computer-assisted pronunciation…

Multimodal approaches have been shown to be effective for many learning tasks. In this study, we compared the effectiveness of five multimodal methods for second language (L2) Mandarin tone perception training: three single-cue methods (number, pitch contour, color) and two dual-cue methods (color and number, color and pitch contour). A total of…

Explanations for the well-documented second language (L2) learning challenge of the English regular past include verb semantics (Bardovi-Harlig, 2000), phonetic properties (Goad, White, & Steele, 2003), and frequency factors (Collins, Trofimovich, White, Cardoso, & Horst, 2009). Difficulty perceiving past-tense morphology (i.e., hearing…

A high variability phonetic training technique was employed to train 26 Mandarin speakers to better perceive ten English vowels. In eight short training sessions, learners identified 200 English vowel tokens, produced in a post bilabial stop context by 20 native speakers. Learners' ability to identify English vowels significantly improved in the…

Recent psycholinguistic findings showed that (a) a multi-modal phonetic training paradigm that encodes visual, interactive information is more effective in training L2 learners' perception of novel categories, (b) decreasing the acoustic variance of a phonetic dimension allows the learners to more effectively shift the perceptual weight towards…

Traditional pronunciation instruction and instruction in second language (L2) phonetics have been shown to improve learners' L2 accent in some, though certainly not all, cases. Learners in intermediate and advanced Spanish FL courses have shown modest improvement in the pronunciation of some L2 phones after receiving such instruction.…