Explores the development in children of dual-level phonological processing. The study suggests that even language-delayed six year olds form underlying representations composed of morphophonemic segments. Differences in performance between the groups studied (first graders, young adults, language-delayed first graders) are discussed. (55…

Argues for the inclusion of courses in phonetics and phonology in college Italian programs, claiming that the myth of Italian as a phonetic language blurs the clear need for such training and that students actually require advanced coursework in phonetics and phonology to improve their articulation and pronunciation. (43 references) (Author/CB)

The type of relatively rapid speech modification sometimes called "accommodation" was examined by tracking change on the part of speakers of Honduran Spanish newly resident among speakers of Northern Mexican Spanish. Final /n/ velarization and spirantization both changed toward local norms, but local contact resulted in greater change…

A sociolinguistic analysis of pronunciation patterns of postnuclear occlusive consonants in northern peninsular Spanish resulted in (1) understanding of the vitality of the use of distinct allophonic variations; (2) characterization of sociolinguistic usage tendencies in relation to speakers' demographic characteristics; and (3) identification of…

Discusses the possible use of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for training students to improve their accents in a foreign language. Principles of good language training as well as the limits of the use of ASR and how to deal with them are discussed, and an example from the Carnegie Mellon FLUENCY system is used to show how such a system may…

Proposes a model for the inclusion of a pronunciation teaching unit within second language/foreign language teacher preparation programs. A pilot course was offered at the University of Kansas in 1998. It was expected that this component would give prospective language teachers the requisite background for making decisions concerning pronunciation…

Studies the possible influence of Spanish on native speakers of that language during their assessment of marked iconicity in English. Looks at discrimination by Spanish learners of English of information focus as signaled by placement of nuclear tones in sentence initial and medial positions. (Author/VWL)

Considers the value of relating music and language in the English-as-Foreign-Language (EFL) classroom. This "melodic" approach is based on evidence that musicality of speech has an effect not only on the pronunciation skills of EFL students but also their entire acquisition process. (Author/VWL)

Argues that, contrary to what is believed by many in the field of applied linguistics, phonology can and should be taught to adult learners. The argument is based on a critical analysis of research on the teachability of phonology in a second language and on an examination of the nature of adult phonological acquisition. (Author/SM)

Addresses the issue of using a continuous speech recognition tool to obtain phonetic or phonological representations of speech. Two experiments were carried out in which the performance of a continuous speech recognizer was compared to the performance of expert listeners in a task of judging whether a number of prespecified phones had been…

Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have investigated the role of phonological processing by utilizing nonword rhyming decision tasks (e.g., Pugh et al., 1996). Although such tasks clearly engage phonological components of visual word recognition, it is clear that decision tasks are more cognitively involved than the…

Two experiments involving Chinese 2nd graders and 4th graders investigated the use of subcharacter information to learn to pronounce unfamiliar semantic-phonetic compound characters. Experiment 1 confirmed that children can use the information in both tone-different and onset-different characters to learn character pronunciations and showed that…

The complexity of Chinese orthography has hindered the progress of research in Chinese to the same level of sophistication of that in alphabetic languages such as English. Also, there has been no publicly available resource concerning the decomposition of Chinese characters, which is essential in any attempt to model the cognitive processes of…

The story-telling multimedia, Living Book, is one of the most common edutainment genres, in which children hear and play with interactive and animated stories, in a highly-engaging multimedia environment. Living Books are designed so that every word of the story is projected as text on the computer monitor simultaneously with its narration. This…

The 23rd EUROCALL conference was held in Cyprus from the 24th to the 27th of August 2016. The theme of the conference this year was "CALL Communities and Culture." It offered a unique opportunity to hear from real-world CALL practitioners on how they practice CALL in their communities, and how the CALL culture has developed in local and…