Voice onset time (VOT) is a salient acoustic parameter of speech which signals the 'voiced' and 'voiceless' status of plosives in English (e.g. the initial sound in 'bat' versus the initial sound in 'pat'). As a micro-temporal acoustic parameter, VOT may be sensitive to changes in hormones which may affect the neuromuscular systems involved in speech production. This study adopted a novel appro...

Very sharp discrimination functions for the timing of voice onset relative to stop release characterize perceptual boundaries between certain pairs of stop consonants for adult speakers of many languages. To explore how these discriminations depend on experience, their development was studied among Kikuyu children, whose native language contains no stops in which voicing is substantially delaye...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the language attitudes of Japanese university students toward Japanese English in comparison to their attitudes toward Chinese English and American English. Voiced Guise Technique and questionnaires were used as methodology, having 80 students as participants. The study found that their evaluation of Japanese English was intermediate in terms of solid...

The purpose of this study is to determine whether a pedagogy grounded in dialogical ideals has the potential to empower students to make changes in English classroom interaction. The study first scrutinized the traditional “banking” educational system in English classrooms in which students were passive learners to realize students’ silence and powerlessness in classrooms. Then, after realizing...

The present study examines phonetic characteristics of Korean L2 learners in their acquisition of English and Japanese stop voicing contrasts. Voice onset time (VOT) was measured on their Korean, English and Japanese utterances, and it was found that VOT is functional in distinguishing a three-way contrast of Korean stops, and that Korean L2 learners use their tense, unaspirated stops for voice...

Korean nasals /m/ and /n/ are generally considered by Korean phoneticians to be hardly different from the corresponding English sounds, but those in word-initial position are often perceived as plosives by native speakers of English. This had been noted by only a few previous observers, and investigated on a very limited scale. In this study, various experimental methods were employed in system...

Many cross-language perceptual models consider allophonic distributions in predicting the pattern of cross-language perception. Allophonic processes, however, are related to not only the existence of particular phonetic events but also to their linkage to the particular context in which such phonetic events occur. This study investigated how the determination of context and allophonic variation...

The way that bilinguals produce phones in each of their languages provides a window into the nature of the bilingual phonological space. For stop consonants, if early sequential bilinguals, whose languages differ in voice onset time (VOT) distinctions, produce native-like VOTs in each of their languages, it would imply that they have developed separate first and second language phones, that is,...

Previous studies investigating the acquisition of L2 stops have found a positive effect experience, but few focused on voiced stops, particularly prevoicing. This study investigates /b/ and /g/ by two populations, English learners Spanish English. Three groups varying in amount experience (mainly length residence, also use instruction) were investigated for each L1 population. Participants comp...

EAP courses for various disciplines are designed as a conduit between academic research and practical applications (Paltridge & Starfield, 2013, p. 175). On the other hand, one of the main missions of ESP practitioners is to prepare learners for realities of English on the job (Paltridge & Starfield, 2013, p. 185). This study aimed to provide a profile of target professional English needs of Ir...