Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou (2007) observed that uninterpretable features are unavailable in second language (L2) acquisition after the critical period. In this paper, we verify this claim by providing evidence from Persian speaking learners of English as an L2 on the status of resumptive pronouns (RPs) as uniterpretable features. Unlike English which does not allow RPs, Persian shows various b...

This paper investigates the perception of non-native phoneme contrasts which exist in the native language, but not in the position tested. Like English, Dutch contrasts voiced and voiceless obstruents. Unlike English, Dutch allows only voiceless obstruents in word-final position. Dutch and English listeners' accuracy on English final voicing contrasts and their use of preceding vowel duration a...

The study involved the analysis of Polish speech samples of 59 Polish-English bilingual children of Polish immigrants to the UK. It aimed to explore differences in phonological performance between these early bilinguals and their Polish monolingual peers. The data collection procedure involved a sentence repetition task. 14 preselected sentences from this task were subsequently analysed auditor...

Non-native speakers of English far outnumber native speakers; English is the main language of books, newspapers, airports, air-traffic control, international business, academic conferences, science, technology, diplomacy, sports, international competitions, pop music, and advertising (British Council 2014). Online education in the form of massive online open courses is also primarily in English...

This study examined the intelligibility of native and Mandarin-accented English speech for native English and native Mandarin listeners. In the latter group, it also examined the role of the language environment and English proficiency. Three groups of listeners were tested: native English listeners (NE), Mandarin-speaking Chinese listeners in the US (M-US) and Mandarin listeners in Beijing, Ch...

The primary aim of this study was to determine if adults whose native language permits neither voiced nor voiceless stops to occur in word-final position can master the English word-final /t/-/d/ contrast. Native English-speaking listeners identified the voicing feature in word-final stops produced by talkers in five groups: native speakers of English, experienced and inexperienced native Spani...

This study used interval scaling to assess degree of perceived foreign accent in English sentences spoken by native and non-native talkers. Native English listeners gave significantly higher (i.e., more authentic) pronunciation scores to native speakers of English than to Chinese adults who began learning English at an average age of 7.6 years. The results for the "child learners" suggest that ...

The intelligibility of speech in noisy environments depends not only on the functionality of listeners' peripheral auditory systems, but also on cognitive factors such as their language learning experience. Previous studies have shown, for example, that normal-hearing listeners attending to a non-native language have more difficulty identifying speech targets in noisy conditions than do native ...

The study examines a number of acoustic properties of non-native speech directed to a native speaker, a non-native speaker with a shared first language background, and a non-native speaker with a different first language. Results demonstrate that the interlocutor condition interacts with the language attitudes factor: Participants with more positive attitudes towards their second language (Engl...

This study investigated talker-dependent and talker-independent perceptual adaptation to foreign-accent English. Experiment 1 investigated talker-dependent adaptation by comparing native English listeners' recognition accuracy for Chinese-accented English across single and multiple talker presentation conditions. Results showed that the native listeners adapted to the foreign-accented speech ov...