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...

In this article, we examined an oft-observed ‘interaction problem’ in the internationalising classroom by adding some reflections on universities’ internationalisation-interculturality praxis. Drawing existing research and examples, scrutinised ‘path’ (multicultural interaction) ‘goal’ (intercultural learning) entailed ‘problem’ through theoretical lenses of dialogicality, space boundary. Our e...

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...

An improved spectral subtraction algorithm for enhancing speech corrupted by additive wideband noise is described. The artifactual noise introduced by spectral subtraction that is perceived as musical noise is 7 dB less than that introduced by the classical spectral subtraction algorithm of Berouti et al. Speech is decomposed into voiced and unvoiced sections. Since voiced speech is primarily s...

In cases of articulatory conflict, gestures involved in preserving phonemic distinctiveness are generally favored over gestures that do not. Here, an apparent exception to the phonemic distinctiveness preservation hypothesis is shown to in fact conform to it: in English, the larynx is lowered before voiced stops to maintain voicing distinctiveness, but the larynx is raised during high vowels, a...

We estimated the perceptual entropy rate of the phonemes of American English and found that the upper limit of the perceptual entropy of voiced phonemes is approximately 1.4 bit/sample, whereas the perceptual entropy of unvoiced phonemes is approximately 0.9 bit/sample. Results indicate that a simple voiced/unvoiced classi cation is suboptimal when trying to minimize bit rate. We used two di er...

All Dutch dialects — or, more generally, all West-Germanic dialects except English — display the effects of a process called final devoicing (FD), illustrated in (1) for standard Dutch: an underlyingly voiced obstruent devoices when it occurs at the end of a syllable. That the obstruent is underlyingly voiced can be seen in other morphological contexts, where it does not end the syllable. Thus ...