This paper examines the prosodic organization of L2 Japanese produced by L1 Swedish at the beginner level. Japanese and Swedish have been well studied for their prosodic structures and some well-defined prosodic phrases have been proposed. However, these existing prosodic phrases are found to be inadequate in analyzing L2 intonation seen as interlanguage. Instead, it consists of some unique phr...

Two hypotheses have been advanced in the recent literature with respect to the so-called Interlanguage Speech Intelligibility Benefit (ISIB): a nonnative speaker will be better understood by a another nonnative listener than a native speaker of the target language will be (a) only when the nonnatives share the same native language (matched interlanguage) or (b) even when the nonnatives have dif...

In earlier work on second language acquisition by adults, Klein & Perdue (1997) have shown that L2-learners tend to create their own language system. They do this, not only by trying to follow the grammatical rules of the L2, but also by imposing on their new language system a number of constraints. If the learners do not violate these constraints, chances are that their utterances will be corr...

This study investigated the intelligibility of native and Mandarin-accented English speech for native English and native Mandarin listeners. The word-final voicing contrast was considered (as in minimal pairs such as `cub' and `cup') in a forced-choice word identification task. For these particular talkers and listeners, there was evidence of an interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for ...

Producing narrative is a skill that must be acquired in order to become a competent language user in a first as well as in a second language. In children, narrative competence is often acquired late (Karmiloff-Smith, 1979), in part because children only start stringing sentences together regularly, once they have acquired the linguistic skills necessary to form sentences. Cohesive discourse, ho...

A comprehensive pragmatic theory will certainly have to address both these issues. In the search for such a comprehensive view of pragmatics a question immediately arises: how are socio-pragmatics and cognitive pragmatics related? One answer given in the literature is that the two domains are separate and socio-pragmatics controls cognitive pragmatics in the sense that socio-pragmatic entities ...

The paper summarizes post–World War II research on the understanding of Swedish by Danes and vice versa. Self-evaluation results as well as test results point to increased mutual comprehension. Preliminary results from ongoing investigations on both sides of the Øresund are given. They suggest a number of possible future scenarios, the most realistic prediction being that the wellknown language...