English /r/-/l/ perceptual training for Japanese speakers can improve production. However, it is unclear whether Japanese speakers actually improve their production of the primary acoustic cue for English /r/ and /l/, the third formant frequency (F3). The present study tested whether an English /r/-/l/ identification training program improves Japanese speakers’ production of these phonemes in t...

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...

Does language play a role in how people interpret and remember causal events? One source of variation in causal event descriptions is agentivity, such as the difference between “She broke the vase” (agentive) vs. “The vase broke” (non-agentive). In this paper, we examined English and Japanese speakers’ descriptions of intentional and accidental events, as well as their memory for the causal age...

Native Spanish speakers and Canadian English learners of Spanish produced the five Spanish vowels in utterance final /sV/ syllables. The syllables were presented in random order to Spanish and English listeners for identification of vowels in terms of Spanish vowel categories. The English listeners also identified the vowels in terms of English vowel categories. Initial analysis of perceptual r...

We examined cross-language differences in neural encoding and tracking of intensity and pitch cues signaling English stress patterns. Auditory mismatch negativities (MMNs) were recorded in English and Mandarin listeners in response to contrastive English pseudowords whose primary stress occurred either on the first or second syllable (i.e., "nocTICity" vs. "NOCticity"). The contrastive syllable...

To date, little research on pragmatic transfer has considered a multilingual situation where there is an interaction among three different languages spoken by one person. Of interest was whether pragmatic transfer of refusals among three languages spoken by the same person occurs from L1 and L2 to L3, L1 to L2 and then to L3 or from L1 and L1 (if there are more than one L1) to L2. This study ai...

Previous studies have shown that even advanced L2 speakers align pitch accents differently from native speakers, and the only possibility for full attainment of L2 is through immersion. This study investigated two groups of five advanced L2 English speakers who first exposed to English through early immersion. Their alignment of prenuclear and nuclear accents was compared with that of the nativ...

In this study we analyse 18 metrics which were extracted fully automatically from the acoustic signal to describe the melodic characteristics of recordings of English read by L2 Chinese speakers from Shanghai. The metrics were compared to those of native English speakers recording the same material and also to comparable Chinese recordings read by the same speakers from Shanghai and also by oth...

This study investigated perception by non-native listeners of English fricatives produced in clear and conversational speaking styles. We measured babble thresholds for fricative voicing and place of articulation contrasts by Standard German and Swabian German and native American English speakers. Overall, Swabian German speakers performed worse than both native English and Standard German spea...