Students will speak a second language with an accent if they learn the language after the age of six. It does not matter how motivated and clever they are, the accent will not go away. Only a few gifted students can speak a second language flawlessly. The exact reasons for this phenomenon are unknown. Although a large number of hypotheses have…

The project aimed to examine the effect of raters' familiarity with accents on their judgments of non-native speech. Participants included three groups of raters who were either from Spanish Heritage, Spanish Non-Heritage, or Chinese Heritage backgrounds (n = 16 in each group) using Winke & Gass's (2013) definition of a heritage learner as…

Many studies have shown that using music and songs while learning a new language can be of great benefit to students in aspects such as grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary. However, the use of songs in class as motivation to learn English is a subject that has not been explored thoroughly. The purpose of this study is to explore how the use of…

Acoustic and perceptual studies investgate B2-level Polish learners' acquisition of second language (L2) English word-boundaries involving word-initial vowels. In production, participants were less likely to produce glottalization of phrase-medial initial vowels in L2 English than in first language (L1) Polish. Perception studies employing word…

Learning statistics requires learning the language of statistics. Statistics draws upon words from general English, mathematical English, discipline-specific English and words used primarily in statistics. This leads to many linguistic challenges in teaching statistics and the way in which the language is used in statistics creates an extra layer…

Good listening and pronunciation skills lead to successes in foreign language learning. The main purpose of this study was to examine the benefits of adopting the Proprioceptive Method in learning English by Thai local government officials with the help of Facebook. A seventeen-day training course was implemented, comprising two days of…

The learning of modern languages in primary school (PL) was recently promoted to statutory status in the curriculum of England and Wales, but practice remains patchy. Low PL capacity amongst primary school teachers and constraints on curricular time persist. Viewed through the lenses of policy, learning theory and context, current PL practice can…

Bilingual child ability in two languages is become popular issue in the comparison of those two languages. In this paper, the Indonesian bilingual child has parent, school and course using English actively, then his environment using Bahasa Indonesia. This research was conducted to measure ability and difficulties faced by bilingual child in…

Late second language (L2) learners often struggle with L2 prosody, both in perception and production. This may result from first language (L1) interference or some property of how a second language functions in a late learner independent of what their L1 might be. Here we investigate prosody's role in determining information structure through…

A large body of empirical research demonstrates that people exploit a wide variety of cues for the segmentation of continuous speech in artificial languages, including rhythmic properties, phrase boundary cues, and statistical regularities. However, less is known regarding how the different cues interact. In this study we addressed the question of…

This study examined intelligibility of twelve American English vowels produced by English, Chinese, and Korean native speakers in quiet and speech-shaped noise in which vowels were presented at six sensation levels from 0 dB to 10 dB. The slopes of vowel intelligibility functions and the processing time for listeners to identify vowels were…

English-speakers' learning of a French vowel contrast (/schwa/-/slashed o/) was examined under six different stimulus conditions in which contrastive and noncontrastive stimulus dimensions were varied orthogonally to each other. The distribution of contrastive cues was varied across training conditions to create single prototype, variable far…

This dissertation investigates the syntax and semantics of nine Chinese "measures for verbs" (Chao 1968:615), which are words used with numerals to form event quantifiers counting the eventualities denoted by the predicate of a sentence. Based on their syntactic behavior, I argue that the nine words can be divided into two groups. The…

Applied linguists have turned increasingly in recent years to meta-analysis as the preferred means of synthesizing quantitative research. The first step in the meta-analytic process involves defining a domain of interest. Despite its apparent simplicity, this step involves a great deal of subjectivity on the part of the meta-analyst. This article…

This study investigates a teacher's L1 use during focus-on-form episodes (FFEs). FFEs assist L2 learning by bringing learners' attention to language. We studied the language used in FFEs in a Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) classroom to better understand the pedagogical purposes of L1 use in the classroom. We video-recorded 12 hours…