Drawing on current theories in personality, second-language (L2) oral ability, and psychometrics, this study investigates the extent to which self-consciousness and assertiveness are explanatory variables of L2 oral ability. Three hundred sixty first-year Japanese university students who were studying English as a foreign language participated in…

This study examines the significance of language use for second language (L2) accent and tests it against factors such as length of residence (LOR) and age of onset (AO). Participants include 42 non-native speakers of English and 8 native speaker controls. Read-aloud items and guided free-speaking tasks are rated on a 5-point scale. Correlation…

This study investigates what beginning learners of Chinese perceive as helpful in learning to recognize characters. Thirteen English-speaking participants in a beginning Chinese class answered journal questions and completed a survey over one semester at a large Midwestern university. Findings suggest that participants perceived the usefulness of…

While there is growing evidence that pronunciation teaching can work, there is a need to establish what it is that makes it work. The study reported here tested for the effect of two particular factors: socially constructed metalanguage (SCM) and critical listening (CL). SCM is a term proposed for metalanguage developed by students working…

In recent years, language researchers and teachers have attempted to put meaningful communication at the centre of learners' classroom interactions. Yet the majority of existing computer-assisted language learning (CALL) applications have relied on largely non-communicative learner-computer interactions. The challenge facing CALL developers,…

Using assistive reading software may be a cost-effective way to increase the opportunity for independent learning in students with learning disabilities. However, the effectiveness and perception of assistive reading software has seldom been explored in English-as-a-second language students with learning disabilities. This research was designed to…

The purpose of this study is to investigate learners' perceptions of the benefits of tasks using voice tools to reinforce their oral skills. Additionally, this study seeks to determine what aspects of task design affected the students' perceptions. Beginner learners aged 18 to 36 with little or no experience in the use of technological tools for…

This article discusses the novel "Pygmalion" by George Bernard Shaw (1957) which depicts Eliza, a flower girl from East London, who became the subject of an "experiment" by a Professor of Phonetics who vowed to change the way she spoke. The story is an excellent example of a very real and contextual portrait of how language,…

The goal of this dissertation is to introduce a method for deriving morphemes from Arabic words using stem patterns, a feature of Arabic morphology. The motivations are three-fold: modeling with morphemes rather than words should help address the out-of-vocabulary problem; working with stem patterns should prove to be a cross-dialectally valid…

This study examined the effect of second language (L2) age of acquisition and amount of experience on the production of word-final stop consonant voicing by adult native Korean learners of English. Thirty learners, who differed in amount of L2 experience and age of L2 exposure, and 10 native English speakers produced 8 English monosyllabic words…

The early development of vocalic and consonantal production in Mandarin-learning infants was studied at the transition from babbling to producing first words. Spontaneous vocalizations were recorded for 24 infants grouped by age: G1 (0 ; 7 to 1 ; 0) and G2 (1 ; 1 to 1 ; 6). Additionally, the infant-directed speech of 24 caregivers was recorded…

Adult English language learners in the United States approach the learning of English pronunciation from a wide variety of native language backgrounds. They may speak languages with sound systems that vary a great deal from that of English. The pronunciation goals and needs of adult English language learners are diverse. These goals and needs…

Although coarticulatory variation is largely systematic, and serves as useful information for listeners, such variation is nonetheless linked to sound change. This article explores the articulatory and perceptual interactions between a coarticulatory source and its effects, and how these interactions likely contribute to change. The focus is on…

Previous tests of toddlers' phonological knowledge of familiar words using word recognition tasks have examined syllable onsets but not word-final consonants (codas). However, there are good reasons to suppose that children's knowledge of coda consonants might be less complete than their knowledge of onset consonants. To test this hypothesis, the…

The regularity of stress patterns in a language depends on "distributional stress regularity", which arises from the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, and "durational stress regularity", which arises from the timing of syllables. Here we focus on distributional regularity, which depends on three factors. "Lexical stress patterning"…