This study examines the acoustic characteristics of English high tense and lax vowels (/i, I, u, ʊ/) and the perceptual difference of those vowels between English speakers and Korean speakers of English. In Experiment I, the first three formant values and duration of the four vowels in /hVd/ carrier were measured. The result shows that the high tense vowels have larger F2–F1 values and longer d...

Previous auditory and acoustic research reports variation in /l/ between ‘Asian’ and ‘Anglo’ speakers of British English, with Asian speakers producing ‘clearer’ realisations of /l/ than Anglo speakers from the same geographical region [8, 11, 22]. Whilst research on /r/ in British Asian English suggests variable rhoticity [8, 9], less work has documented /r/ variation in this community in non-...

This study attempts to compare the Inter-Stress Interval (ISI) patterns of English between the native speakers of English and Korean. One of the invariable results of the experiments about English speech rhythm has been that the strict concept of isochronism did not seem to exist at least in the surface phonetic level. However, the remarkable difference shown from the production experiment of t...

Perception and production of English cues to plosive voicing by native Mandarin speakers" (2013). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 429. Abstract The acquisition of non-native sounds is a prominent feature of second language acquisition. Mandarin does not permit the voiced plosives /b d g/ or plosives in the syllable coda position, both features of many English words. This disparity presents a...

This research identifies how English and German speakers differ in the range of situations they describe as causal and how these difference may influence causal reasoning. In Experiments 1 and 2, English and German speakers described 3D animations of complex events using CAUSE verbs (cause, get) and ENABLE verbs (let, enable). As predicted, English speakers used CAUSE verbs to describe a wider ...

The expanding role of English as the language of international communication has important implications for English language pedagogy. Statistics show that speakers of English as a second and foreign language worldwide largely outnumber the speakers of English as a first language, so that International English can no longer be considered the ‘exclusive property’ of its native speakers (Ferguson...

This study uses articulography, the measurement of the position of tongue and lips during speech, as a tool to quantitatively assess the differences between pronunciations of native and non-native (Dutch) speakers of English. In our study, we focus on two pairs of English sound contrasts: /s/-/ʃ/ and /t/-/θ/. Our analysis focuses on the anterior-posterior position of the tongue tip during the p...

Previous work on the rhythm of Malaysian English has been based on impressionistic observations. This paper utilizes acoustic analysis to measure the rhythmic patterns of Malaysian English. Recordings of the read speech and spontaneous speech of 10 Malaysian English speakers were analyzed and compared with recordings of an equivalent sample of Singaporean English speakers. Analysis was done usi...

This study investigated how Japanese-speaking learners of English pronounce the three point vowels /i/, /u/, and /ɑ/ appearing in the first and second monosyllabic words of noun phrases, and the schwa /ə/ appearing in disyllabic words. First and second formant (F1 and F2) values were measured for four Japanese speakers and two American English speakers. The hypothesis that the area encompassed ...

Thai has imperfective aspectual morphemes that are not obligatory in usage, whereas English has obligatory grammaticized imperfective aspectual marking on the verb. Furthermore, Thai has verb final deictic-path verbs that form a closed class set. The current study investigated if obligatoriness of these grammatical categories in Thai and English affects the expression of co-occurring temporal e...