As is well known, Japanese adults who have just begun to learn English often err in producing /r/ and /l/ because their native language does not possess such liquid consonants. The aim of this study was to determine if Japanese adults eventually learn to produce /r/ and /l/ accurately in words like read and lead. Liquids spoken by 12 native Japanese speakers who had lived in the United States f...

This study examines the phonetic properties of lexical stress in English produced by Persian speakers learning English as a foreign language. The four most reliable phonetic correlates of English lexical stress, namely fundamental frequency, duration, intensity, and vowel quality were measured across Persian speakers’ production of the stressed and unstressed syllables of five English disyllabi...

This study is the first to examine acquisition of two Mandarin tone sandhi rules by Cantonese speakers. It designs both real and different types of wug words to test whether learners may exploit a lexical or computation mechanism in tone sandhi rule application. We also statistically compared their speech production with Beijing Mandarin speakers. The results of functional data analysis showed ...

Ten female native speakers of American English (NS) and ten Japanese females who speak English as a second language (NNS) were recorded reading a text containing emphatically-assertive tag questions. Evidence was sought to determine whether or not native speakers can correctly identify these utterances as produced by native or non-native speakers on the basis of intonation alone. The tag questi...