Monolingual English-speaking children in the United States express social preferences for speakers of their native language with a native accent. Here we explore the nature of children's language-based social preferences through research with children in South Africa, a multilingual nation. Like children in the United States, Xhosa South African children preferred speakers of their first langua...

Are speakers sensitive to the frequency with which phrases occur in language? The authors report an eye-tracking study that investigates this by examining the processing of multiword sequences that differ in phrasal frequency by native and proficient nonnative English speakers. Participants read sentences containing 3-word binomial phrases (bride and groom) and their reversed forms (groom and b...

Kwon, Harim. 2007. A F'honetic Analysis of Korean EFL, Learners' Production of English Reduced Vowel. SNU Working Papers i n English Linguistics and Language 6, 1-13. This study investigates the phonetic properties of English reduced vowel of Korean EFL learners. Five native speakers of Korean (experimental group) and two native speakers of English (control group) participated in the study. Whi...

Bilingual speakers often have less language experience compared to monolinguals as a result of speaking two languages and/or a later age of acquisition of the second language. This may result in weaker and less precise phonological representations of words in memory, which may cause greater retrieval effort during spoken word recognition. To gauge retrieval effort, the present study compared th...

Elicitation Materials. Subjects were given the same set of disyllabic real words in both English and Spanish in carrier phrases, which made the tokens closer to natural speech. This maintained control and comparability of the segments in the same environment, since vowel height and syllabic stress are known to affect aspiration (Keating, 1983). The English carrier phrase was "Say the word ___ag...

This study examined whether native English (NE) speakers perceive non-native tones of Mandarin in terms of their English intonational categories (Flat pitch, Question, Uncertainty, and Statement). The results indicated that NE listeners assimilated non-native tones to their native intonational categories, which share phonetic similarities with those ofMandarin tones. Thus, the assumption that a...

Existing regimes on training Japanese learners of English to acquire the nonnative contrast /l/ and /r/ in English focus on having the learners attend to differences in acoustics cues. Such training does show a certain amount of improvement in /l/-/r/ discrimination among Japanese learners, yet the level of achievement is not equivalent to the performance of native speakers. In light of the fac...

This paper presents a method for identifying non-English speech, with the aim of supporting an automated speech proficiency scoring system for non-native speakers. The method uses a popular technique from the language identification domain, a single phone recognizer followed by multiple languagedependent language models. This method determines the language of a speech sample based on the phonot...

By some accounts, speakers of classifier languages such as Mandarin or Japanese, which lack count-mass syntax, require classifiers to specify individuated meanings of nouns. This paper examines this view by testing how Mandarin speakers interpret bare nouns and use classifier knowledge to guide quantification in four studies. Using a quantity judgment task, Study 1 found that Mandarin speakers ...