Some of the articulatory, theoretical, instrumental, and psycholinguistic evidence concerning the validity of the notion of ambisyllabicity in English is examined. Applications of the concept, including the notion of syllables being "half-closed" by ambisyllabic consonants, are considered. A set of rules is presented. (76 references) (Author/LB)

Reviews and discusses the process that the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) engaged in to develop their current policy on accented or dialect inflected speech to educate and assist its members and others with such speech who may be subject to discrimination in educational programs, employment, or delivery of services. (Author/DB)

Presents an approach to teaching pronunciation to Chinese students of English that has been successful in improving students' pronunciation and intonation, as well as their basic skills in English. The approach compares Chinese and English sound systems, advocates perception before production, and emphasizes teaching in a meaningful and…

Examines the realization of accent in Indian English (IE) compared to American English produced by teaching assistants in similar contexts. In teaching discourse, a lexically accented syllable is often realized in IE with a relative drop in frequency and without a reliable increase in amplitude. (Author/VWL)

Presents a new method that can compare lexical priming (word-word) and sentential priming (sentence-word) directly within a single paradigm. Shows that it can be used to address modular theories of word comprehension, which propose that the effects of sentence context occur after lexical access has taken place. (Author/VWL)

The distribution of variants of the FACE and GOAT vowels in Tyneside English (TE) is assessed with reference to the age, sex, and social class of 32 adult TE speakers. Effects of phonological context and speaking style are also examined. Patterns in the data are suggestive of dialect leveling, whereby localized speech variants become recessive and…

Examines the dual challenges teachers often face: (1) testing the theoretical assumptions made by the authors of textbooks; and (2) evaluation of achievement tests that have been developed for use with those textbooks. Addresses these issues in the context of the use of an English-as-a-Foreign/Second-Language pronunciation textbook and achievement…

Discusses the use of focus, or intonational prominence, to create meaning for learners of English. Presents an alternative approach to predicting focus that appeals to functional and meaning regularities that do not depend on extensive written input and are more easily adaptable to normal conversation. (Author/VWL)

In-depth interviews with 34 English immigrants living in the "Anglophilic" eastern United States examined the social status of various English accents, anxiety engendered by creeping Americanization of their accents, how they coped with claiming an identity undermined by changing accents, and mechanisms to distance themselves from…

Explores the hypothesis that children identified as having phonological processing problems may have difficulty processing a different accent. Children with speech difficulties were compared with matched controls on four measures of auditory processing. Children were presented with stimuli in their own accent and in an unfamiliar accent…

Discusses the recent shift in the use of English by nonnative speakers using English for international communication, resulting in nonnative speakers of the language outnumbering native speakers. Argues that this shift has serious implications for English language teaching pedagogy, principally with regard to phonology and pronunciation.…

When college students pronounce nonwords, their vowel pronunciations may be affected not only by the consonant that follows the vowel, the coda, but also by the preceding consonant, the onset. We presented the nonwords used by Treiman and colleagues in their 2003 study to a total of 94 first graders, third graders, fifth graders, and high school…

Two experiments were carried out to explore the units of analysis used by children to read Dutch bisyllabic pseudowords. Although Dutch orthography is highly regular, several deviations from a one-to-one correspondence occur. In polysyllabic words, the grapheme e may represent three different vowels: /e/, /e/, or [/schwa/]. In Experiment 1, Grade…

We assessed the effect of additional tasks on language perception in second-language and native speakers. The N400 component of the event-related potential was recorded to spoken nouns that had to be judged for synonymity with a preceding word, while additional choice responses were required to visual stimuli. In both participant groups N400 was…

This article describes the case of a client who displayed some interesting patterns of realization of the target English phoneme /r/. These varied according to both distribution within the word, and style of utterance. We speculate as to the cause of some of these forms, and on possible therapy strategies.