This study uses articulography, the measurement of the position of tongue and lips during speech, as a tool to quantitatively assess the differences between pronunciations of native and non-native (Dutch) speakers of English. In our study, we focus on two pairs of English sound contrasts: /s/-/ʃ/ and /t/-/θ/. Our analysis focuses on the anterior-posterior position of the tongue tip during the p...

Mandarin Chinese does not allow consonant finals except /n/ and /ng/. This raises questions concerning how well Mandarin speakers learning German can produce a clear /l/ at syllable final positions. This study investigates 490 German speech tokens with embedded postvocalic /l/ produced by 12 Mandarin speakers from 3 different levels and 2 native German speakers. Acoustic analyses indicate that ...

This study tested the predictions of the Speech Learning Model (SLM, Flege, 1988) on the case of native Japanese (NJ) speakers' perception and production of English /ɹ / and /l/. NJ speakers' degree of foreign accent, intelligibility of /ɹ -l/ productions, and ability to perceive natural speech /ɹ -l/ were assessed as a function of length of residency in North America, age of arrival in North A...

This study investigates ultimate attainment of patterns of segmentation and temporal structuring of events in L2 speakers. The participant group consists of 35 L1 Spanish – L2 Swedish adult bilinguals living in Sweden, with ages of L2 acquisition ranging from 1 to 19 years. Fifteen native speakers of Swedish and 15 native speakers of Spanish were engaged as controls. The participants provided o...

Reading and understanding morphologically complex words can sometimes be a particular challenge to nonnative speakers. For example, compound words consist of multiple free morphemes, oftentimes without explicit marking of the morpheme boundaries. In a lexical decision task, we investigated compound reading in native and nonnative speakers of Dutch. The compounds differed in that the letter bigr...

UNLABELLED The present study investigated how well individuals knowledgeable about stuttering are able to make disfluency judgments in clients who speak another language than their own. Fourteen native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese identified and judged stuttering in Dutch speakers and in Portuguese speakers. Fourteen native speakers of Dutch identified and judged stuttering in Brazilian Por...

We assess the use of hedge phrases in “affective” NLG texts. A simple experiment suggests non-native speakers prefer texts that contain hedge phrases, but native speakers prefer texts that do not contain hedge phrases.

This study tested the hypothesis that heritage speakers of a minority language, due to their childhood experience with two languages, would outperform late learners in producing contrast: language-internal phonological contrast, as well as cross-linguistic phonetic contrast between similar, yet acoustically distinct, categories of different languages. To this end, production of Mandarin and Eng...

Do the languages that people speak affect the way they think about musical pitch? Here we compared pitch representations in native speakers of Dutch and Farsi. Dutch speakers describe pitches as „high‟ (hoog) and „low‟ (laag), but Farsi speakers describe high-frequency pitches as „thin‟ (naazok) and low-frequency pitches as „thick‟ (koloft). Differences in language were reflected in differences...

This study was conducted with the purpose of examining Persian speakers’ article acquisition and use with reference to Ionin, Ko and Wexler’s (2004) model, which is based on the prediction of Fluctuation Hypothesis (FH) that EFL learners of [-article] languages, like Persian, make erroneous article use in [+definite, -specific] and [-definite, +specific] contexts. From among the students of an ...