Although second language (L2) learners often have difficulty with learning the L2 pronunciation, the literature has reported a mix of more successful and less successful learners. Many factors could contribute to individual variation in L2 speech sound learning. This dissertation examines a few factors that are hypothesized to influence L2…

The present study examines the impact of both short vowels and context on adult native English speakers' reading accuracy of Arabic orthography. To this end, two groups of adult Arabic learners with different proficiency levels were recruited: 30 second-year, and 30 third-year learners. Subjects were instructed to read 50 isolated words, 20…

Phonotactic patterns are generalizations that govern the order of consonants and vowels, within words and syllables. Certain second-order phonotactic patterns--those that relate multiple sounds within a syllable, such as "if the vowel is [near-close near-front unrounded vowel], then [s] can only appear at the end of the…

Teaching reading to adults who struggle with literacy learning is a difficult task, and there is a paucity of evidence-based programming designed especially for them. Three research teachers describe their experiences while teaching an evidence-based reading program to adult literacy students. This article provides an overview of the program…

This article describes the experiences of three research teachers working for an adult literacy research and development center (csal.gsu.edu). This paper provides an overview of the program content delivered in the research adult literacy classes, shares experiences teaching this program, describes the learners' responses to the program, and…

Instruction in second language (L2) English phoneme pronunciation almost invariably includes a focus on improving the learners' use of their articulatory organs to pronounce the relevant sounds. However, the pronunciation of many English sounds also relies on effort from the abdominal region, and under-utilization of this region can often…

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…

Using an artificial language learning manipulation, Maye, Werker, and Gerken (2002) demonstrated that infants' speech sound categories change as a function of the distributional properties of the input. In a recent study, Werker et al. (2007) showed that Infant-directed Speech (IDS) input contains reliable acoustic cues that support distributional…

This study investigated adult cochlear implant users' (n == 39) vowel recognition and confusions by an open-set syllable test during 4 years of implant use, in a prospective repeated-measures design. Subjects' responses were coded for phoneme errors and estimated by the generalized mixed model. Improvement in overall vowel recognition was highest…

This paper introduces a new vowel notation system aimed at aiding the teaching of English pronunciation. This notation system, designed as an enhancement to orthographic text, was designed to use concepts borrowed from the representation of musical notes and is also linked to the acoustic characteristics of vowel sounds. Vowel timbre is…

Background: Altered auditory feedback can facilitate speech fluency in adults who stutter. However, other findings suggest that adults who stutter show anomalies in "audiovocal integration", such as longer phonation reaction times to auditory stimuli and less effective pitch tracking. Aims: To study audiovocal integration in adults who stutter…

Improvement in second-language (L2) perception has been posited to occur early in L2 learning when the L2 vocabulary is still small, whereas a large L2 vocabulary curtails perceptual learning (the perceptual assimilation model for SLA [PAM-L2]; Best & Tyler, 2007). This proposition is extended by suggesting that early L2 lexical development…

Whereas second language (L2) education research has extensively examined how different types of interactional feedback can be facilitative of L2 development in meaning-oriented classrooms, most of these primary studies have focused on recasts (i.e., teachers' reformulations of students' errors). Some researchers have claimed that recasts serve an…

Recent research has shown that adults can implicitly learn artificial phonotactics constraints from experience producing syllables that contain those constraints, and that this learning is reflected in their speech errors. However, second-order constraints in which the placement of a consonant depends on another characteristic of the syllable…

The purpose of this study was to use acoustic analyses to describe speech outcomes over the course of 1 year after radial forearm free flap (RFFF) reconstruction of the tongue. Eighteen Canadian English-speaking females and males with reconstruction for oral cancer had speech samples recorded (pre-operative, and 1 month, 6 months, and 1 year…