Foreign language learners tend to mispronounce sounds in the target language by subconsciously searching and substituting with “similar corresponding sounds” in their native dialects. Correction of EFL pronunciation is thus difficult for both instructors and learners. Yet Critical Period Hypothesis is being increasingly misused by Chinese teachers and researchers as an excuse for not paying att...

Thai learners of Russian language produced sounds of their mother tongue as well as sounds from a previously learned language, English, along with normative Russian consonants. The negative results of interference are caused by the specific structure of the Thai language and absence of the equivalents of Russian consonants. The results permit me to conclude that the character of interference de...

PURPOSE To analyze the effectiveness of stimulability as a complementary task to the diagnosis of speech sound disorders (SSD), and to describe the performance of children with absent sounds from the phonetic inventory according to stimulable absent sounds, severity, gender, age, and occurrence of different phonological processes. METHODS Participants were 130 male and female children with ag...

I describe a body of work undertaken to explore the effect of experience on the perception of speech sounds. The work is undertaken within the context of my overall theoretical perspective, in which language is viewed as reflecting the influence of graded rather than categorical constraints and in which experience gradually shapes the way we respond to the sounds we experience, including sounds...

Ackermann et al. mention the "acquisition of species-atypical sounds" in apes without any discussion. In our commentary, we demonstrate that these atypical sounds in chimpanzees not only include laryngeal sounds, but also have a major significance regarding the origins of language, if we consider looking at their context of use, their social properties, their relations with gestures, their late...

This paper is concerned with the nature and time course of phonetic drift in one’s first language during acquisition of a second language. In a longitudinal study of native English speakers’ acquisition of Korean, 20 late learners produced the same English and Korean items at weekly intervals over the course of intensive beginning Korean language classes. Results of acoustic analyses indicate t...

The degree of similarity between the sounds a speaker’s first and second language (L1 L2) is believed to determine likelihood accurate perception production L2 sounds. This paper explores relationship cross-linguistic subset English vowels, including highly productive /iː/-/ɪ/ contrast (as in “beat” vs. “bit”), by group Spanish/Catalan native speakers learning as an L2. learners’ ability identi...

There are certain universal properties of language that are taken to be definitional to the concept of language itself, such as the arbitrary relationship between sounds and meanings of words. Another possibility is that these “design features” of language may instead be the expressed consequences of general purpose learning constraints within the cognitive system learning the language. To test...