Research on social markedness and second language pronunciation is reviewed, and some general conclusions are drawn. A number of issues arising from this research are identified and inherent difficulties in forming hypotheses, performing analyses, and interpreting data are discussed. (30 references) (Author/MSE)

Forty-four university students, of whom 11 had learning disabilities (LD), were tested on tasks requiring multisyllabic pseudoword repetition, oral reading, memory for digits, and vocabulary. In both LD and non-LD groups, significant correlations were found between pseudoword repetition accuracy and reading, suggesting that poor readers also have…

Two surveys of Parisian French mid-vowel articulation and preference, performed in 1986 and 1988, are reviewed and compared. Informants were 21 male teacher trainees (study 1) and 60 male local transportation workers, aged 20 to 60 (study 2). Conclusions are drawn concerning mid-vowel opposition, anteriorization, and vowel harmony. Emphasis is…

Untrained native English listeners assigned foreign accent scores to sentence and narrative utterances produced by native English speakers and Mandarin-speaking learners of English, rendered unintelligible through low-pass filtering. Because the filtered speech stimuli contained little of what could be considered segmental information, results…

Discusses how native speakers of Spanish, accustomed to dealing with nonnative Spanish speakers, evaluated 18 taped nonnative speech samples that provided a wide sample of pronunciation. Comprehensibility, voice agreeability/ disagreeability, and nativeness of accent were rated. (32 references) (LB)

Examination of the effect of second-language experience on the production of second-language vowels found that experienced native-speaking German learners of English did not pronounce similar English vowels more intelligibly than inexperienced learners, but experienced speakers produced a dissimilar English vowel better than inexperienced…

Examines linguistic data from peripheral areas of Mexico and suggests that the contemporary resistance of the final /s/ in Spanish is characteristic only of urban regions. The study also hypothesizes that Spanish final /s/ was once more generally weakened throughout Mexico. An indirect Nahuatl contribution is also postulated. (62 references)…

Investigated phonetic activation in reading a nonalphabetic script (Chinese) of 16 subjects who read in Cantonese and Mandarin and 16 subjects who read in Mandarin but not in Cantonese. Results are provided of a similarity judgment task based on pairs of Chinese words, pronounced the same or differently, in one or both dialects. (21 references)…

Summaries of eight language-related research projects are presented from Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. Topics include a sociolinguistic profile, teacher and learner views of language lessons, Malay-accented English and employability, reading difficulties, language culture disjunction, placement interviews, and…

The IBM SpeechViewer was used in tutorial sessions within a program of training for international teaching assistants (ITAs) to examine the value of computer-based displays of speech in the teaching of pronunciation. ITAs did not improve significantly with SpeechViewer, but both ITAs and instructors indicated great enthusiasm for it as a teaching…

Ten college students and 10 Ph.D.s read aloud 30 unfamiliar English words, 2 to 5 syllables in length of Greek, Latin, and Germanic origin. Each response was compared to the rule predicted, dictionary prescribed, and most frequent pronunciation for the word. Models of reading are examined in light of the results. (71 references) (JL)

A classroom approach that brings oral and written language learning closer together is outlined. The strategy focuses on proper pronunciation using minimal pairs and uses exercises designed for listening and visualization, production, discrimination, re-use and reinforcement, and computer-assisted instruction. (MSE)

Presents a case study of three reading-disabled children. Concludes that pronunciation and comprehension skills are two dissociable components of the reading process and follow separate courses of development. Suggests that the question of whether poor readers are also deficient in language comprehension depends on the types of disabled readers…

Tested the hypothesis that accented speech heard at a reduced rate would sound less accented and more comprehensible than speech produced at a normal rate. In two experiments, English native-speaker listeners rated a passage read by 10 high-proficiency Mandarin learners of English. Findings suggest that a general speaking strategy of slowing down…

Focuses on English dictionaries and their development in second-language-learning contexts, taking the perspective that standards are usually codified in reference grammars, pronouncing dictionaries, and word dictionaries. Presents contemporary discussions of "English" and "Englishes" in Asia, a phenomenon that has come about…