Second language phonology at the interface between acoustic and orthographic input

Orthographic Input and the Acquisition of Second Language Phonological Forms

English phonology and an acoustic language universal

Acoustic analyses of eight different languages/dialects had revealed a language universal: Three spectral factors consistently appeared in analyses of power fluctuations of spoken sentences divided by critical-band filters into narrow frequency bands. Examining linguistic implications of these factors seems important to understand how speech sounds carry linguistic information. Here we show the...

The Relationship between First and Second Language Literacy in Writing

This paper explores the ways in which the transfer of assumptions from first language (L1) writing can help the process of writing in second language (L2). In learning second language writing skills, learners have two primary sources from which they construct a second language system: knowledge and skills from first language and input from second language. To investigate the relative impact of ...

At the interface between language testing and second language acquisition: communicative language ability and test-taker characteristics

The present study investigates the nature of communicative language ability as manifested in performance on the TOEFL iBT test, as well as the relationship between this ability with test-takers’ study-abroad and learning experiences. The research interest in the nature of language ability is shared by the language testing community, whereas understanding the factors that affect language acquisi...

Event Relations At The Phonetics/Phonology Interface

In this paper a procedure for the constrnction of event relations at the phonetics/phonolngy interface is presented. The approach goes further than previous formal interpretations of autosegmental phonology in that phonological relations are explicitly related to intervals in actual speech signals as required by a speech recognition system. An event structure containing the temporal relations o...