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摘要：This study investigates the effects of Acoustic Spectrographic Instruction on the production of the English phonological contrast /i/ and / I /. Acoustic Spectrographic Instruction is based on the assumption that physical representations of speech sounds and spectrography allow learners to objectively see and modify those non-accurate features in their oral production which may impede effective communication in the target language. Twenty-six pre-service non-native English teachers, 16 in the experimental group and 10 in the control group, participated in the investigation. During a two-week period, the experimental group received Acoustic Spectrographic Instruction while the control group was exposed to a more traditional pronunciation approach. Production accuracy of the target segments was evaluated by two production tasks and a perceptual identification task. Acoustic measurements from the production tasks show that Acoustic Spectrographic Instruction significantly improved pronunciation of both vowels. Data from perceptual identification also indicate pronunciation improvement of both vowels, particularly for English / I /. Taken together, the results of these three experiments lend support to the use of acoustic features of speech and spectrography in English segmental acquisition. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Children's spoken nonmainstream American English (NMAE) dialect use and their knowledge about phonological representations of word pronunciations were assessed in a sample of 105 children in kindergarten through second grade. Children were given expressive and receptive tasks with dialect-sensitive stimuli. Students who produced many NMAE features in speech nonetheless demonstrated considerable knowledge of 'standard' English forms on the tasks, and their phonological representations were not deficient. In regression analyses, an inverse relationship between NMAE use and reading skill was observed, but mediated by phonological awareness. The findings are inconsistent with the view that print-speech mismatches interfere with young NMAE speakers' reading acquisition, and instead suggest that dialect variation among beginning readers reflects metalinguistic differences that influence reading acquisition. Adapted from the source document

摘要：We examined negative transfer from English and Spanish to Portuguese pronunciation. Participants were native English speakers, some of whom spoke Spanish. Participants completed a computer-based Portuguese pronunciation tutorial and then pronounced trained letter-to-sound correspondences in unfamiliar Portuguese words; some shared orthographic form with their translation in Spanish or Spanish and English. Spanish-speaking participants were more accurate and made more Spanish-like than English-like errors. Contrary to predictions, non-Spanish speakers made more Spanish-like than English-like errors on cognates. Participants with higher working memory were more accurate and made more Spanish-sounding errors on cognates. The results suggest that the first language is inhibited during second-language production and that higher working memory is associated with an improved ability to inhibit the first language.

摘要：This article, part of a larger study (Kennedy and Trofimovich, 2010), focuses on how classroom learners' language awareness is positively related to L2 pronunciation ratings. Drawing on previously unpublished data collected through the Language Activity Log (Ranta and Meckelborg, 2009), the goal of the study in the current article was to clarify the link between language awareness and L2 use found by Kennedy and Trofimovich (2010). The Language Activity Log is useful in this task as it elicits rich, detailed, and longitudinal data on learners' L2 use. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Comprehensibility, a major concept in second language (L2) pronunciation research that denotes listeners' perceptions of how easily they understand L2 speech, is central to interlocutors' communicative success in real-world contexts. Although comprehensibility has been modeled in several L2 oral proficiency scales -- for example, the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) or the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) -- shortcomings of existing scales (e.g., vague descriptors) reflect limited empirical evidence as to which linguistic aspects influence listeners' judgments of L2 comprehensibility at different ability levels. To address this gap, a mixed-methods approach was used in the present study to gain a deeper understanding of the linguistic aspects underlying listeners' L2 comprehensibility ratings. First, speech samples of 40 native French learners of English were analyzed using 19 quantitative speech measures, including segmental, suprasegmental, fluency, lexical, grammatical, and discourse-level variables. These measures were then correlated with 60 native English listeners' scalar judgments of the speakers' comprehensibility. Next, three English as a second language (ESL) teachers provided introspective reports on the linguistic aspects of speech that they attended to when judging L2 comprehensibility. Following data triangulation, five speech measures were identified that clearly distinguished between L2 learners at different comprehensibility levels. Lexical richness and fluency measures differentiated between low-level learners; grammatical and discourse-level measures differentiated between high-level learners; and word stress errors discriminated between learners of all levels. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study investigated factors that could affect inter-examiner reliability in the pronunciation assessment component of speaking tests. We hypothesized that the rating of pronunciation is susceptible to variation in assessment due to the amount of exposure examiners have to nonnative English accents. An inter-rater variability analysis was conducted on the English pronunciation ratings of three test candidate interlanguages: Chinese, Korean, and Indian English. Pronunciation was rated by 99 International English Language Testing System (IELTS) examiners across five geographically dispersed test centres. The examiners had either prolonged exposure, or no, or little exposure to the interlanguage of the candidates. A significant proportion of examiners rated pronunciation higher when they had prolonged exposure, and lower when they had no, or little, exposure to the candidates' interlanguage. The location of the test centre also had a significant effect on the pronunciation rating, independent of the familiarity variable, with a significant proportion of NNS raters scoring candidates from their home country higher than those who were not. It is recommended that interlanguage phonology familiarity should be considered in the design of speaking tests and rater training and that research is required into test centre bias and the phonological judgements and awareness of OPI raters. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications, Ltd., copyright holder.]

摘要：The authors present a research timeline that traces the empirical bases of current approaches to second language pronunciation teaching, with particular attention given to the concepts of accent and intelligibility. Their approach was to begin with an empirical core of classroom pronunciation studies and situate this within the context of other studies and opinion pieces that reflect major themes in the field. The timeline is heavily oriented toward studies of adult ESL learners focusing on the speech stream and how it is perceived. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Many learners of a foreign language (L2) struggle to correctly pronounce newly learned speech sounds, yet many others achieve this with apparent ease. Here we explored how a training study of learning complex consonant clusters at the very onset of L2 acquisition can inform us about L2 learning in general and individual differences in particular. To this end, adult Dutch native speakers were trained on Slovak words with complex consonant clusters (e.g., pstruh/pstrux/"trout", stvrt'/(esh)tvrc/"quarter") using auditory and orthographic input. In the same session following training, participants were tested on a battery of L2 perception and production tasks. The battery of L2 tests was repeated twice more with 1 week between sessions. In the first session, an additional battery of control tests was used to test participants' native language (L1) skills. Overall, in line with some previous research, participants showed only weak learning effects across the L2 perception tasks. However, there were considerable individual differences across all L2 tasks, which remained stable across sessions. Only two participants showed overall high L2 production performance that fell within 2 standard deviations of the mean ratings obtained for an L1 speaker. The mispronunciation detection task was the only perception task which significantly predicted production performance in the final session. We conclude by discussing several recommendations for future L2 learning studies. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Sixty-five Japanese learners of English participated in the current study, which investigated the acquisitional value of form-focused instruction (FFI) with and without corrective feedback (CF) on learners' pronunciation development. All students received a 4-hr FFI treatment designed to encourage them to notice and practice the target feature of English /(turned r)/ in meaningful discourse, except those in the control group (n= 11), who received comparable instruction but without FFI on English /[turned r]/. During FFI, the instructors provided CF only to students in the FFI + CF group (n= 29) by recasting their mispronunciation or unclear pronunciation of /(turned r)/, whereas no CF was provided to those in the FFI-only group (n= 25). Acoustic analyses were conducted on frequency values of the third formant (F3) of English /(turned r)/ tokens elicited via pretest and posttest measures targeting familiar items and a generalizability test targeting unfamiliar items. The results showed that: (a) F3 values of the FFI + CF group significantly declined after the intervention, not only at a controlled-speech level but also a spontaneous-speech level, regardless of following vowel contexts; (b) change in F3 values of the FFI-only group and the control group was not statistically significant; and (c) the generalizability of FFI to novel tokens remained unclear. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study investigated second language (L2) learners' acquisition of English /t, d/ deletion patterns in word-final consonant clusters, (a) focusing on how constraints such as grammatical conditioning and phonological environment affect deletion of /t, d/ in L2 acquisition and (b) determining the extent to which these L2 learners had acquired native-speaker-like patterns of deletion in ways that may be similar to patterns attested for first and second language acquisition in previous research. Seven native speakers of Mandarin Chinese, all graduate students at a Midwestern university in the United States, participated in the study. Findings indicate that the participants had not yet acquired targetlike use of /-t, -d/ deletion patterns for all constraints. Following the linguistic environment, possibly due to the influence of sonority, appeared to be the easiest constraint to acquire. Other linguistic constraints, such as preceding linguistic environment and grammatical conditioning, appeared to be more difficult to acquire, probably due to the effects of first language transfer. Adapted from the source document

摘要：We examined negative transfer from English and Spanish to Portuguese pronunciation. Participants were native English speakers, some of whom spoke Spanish. Participants completed a computer-based Portuguese pronunciation tutorial and then pronounced trained letter-to-sound correspondences in unfamiliar Portuguese words; some shared orthographic form with their translation in Spanish or Spanish and English. Spanish-speaking participants were more accurate and made more Spanish-like than English-like errors. Contrary to predictions, non-Spanish speakers made more Spanish-like than English-like errors on cognates. Participants with higher working memory were more accurate and made more Spanish-sounding errors on cognates. The results suggest that the first language is inhibited during second-language production and that higher working memory is associated with an improved ability to inhibit the first language. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Pronunciation errors may be caused by several different deviations from the target, such as voicing, intonation, insertions or deletions of segments, or that the articulators are placed incorrectly. Computer-animated pronunciation teachers could potentially provide important assistance on correcting all these types of deviations, but they have an additional benefit for articulatory errors. By making parts of the face transparent, they can show the correct position and shape of the tongue and provide audiovisual feedback on how to change erroneous articulations. Such a scenario however requires firstly that the learner's current articulation can be estimated with precision and secondly that the learner is able to imitate the articulatory changes suggested in the audiovisual feedback. This article discusses both these aspects, with one experiment on estimating the important articulatory features from a speaker through acoustic-to-articulatory inversion and one user test with a virtual pronunciation teacher, in which the articulatory changes made by seven learners who receive audiovisual feedback are monitored using ultrasound imaging. Adapted from the source document

摘要：In recent years, language researchers and teachers have attempted to put meaningful communication at the centre of learners' classroom interactions. Yet the majority of existing computer-assisted language learning (CALL) applications have relied on largely non-communicative learner-computer interactions. The challenge facing CALL developers, therefore, is to explore new ways of providing learners with communicative practice. This article reviews existing uses of automatic speech recognition in second and foreign language teaching and describes the development of an innovative interactive automatic speech recognition system for developing second language speaking skills. This system uses video clips and the EduSpeak speech recognition system to simulate a nurse-patient interview. The system allows learners (for example, health care professionals whose first language is not English) to ask questions to an English-speaking patient and to receive both meaningful responses from the patient and feedback about their own pronunciation accuracy from the speech recognizer. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study examines the significance of language use for second language (L2) accent and tests it against factors such as length of residence (LOR) and age of onset (AO). Participants include 42 non-native speakers of English and 8 native speaker controls. Read-aloud items and guided free-speaking tasks are rated on a 5-point scale. Correlation analyses confirm the significance of AO, LOR, and experiential factors such as first language (L1) use, breadth of L2 use across multiple modes, and especially domain-based L2 use, such as personal, interactive contact with native speakers of the target language. Results suggest that experiential quality has a more significant impact on accent than experiential quantity and that, according to multiple regression models, experience is independent of the influences of AO and LOR. Based on these analyses, closer investigations of language experience and its connections to LOR are recommended. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This is a qualitative study of normative English speakers who speak English as a lingua franca (ELF) in their graduate student dormitory in the United States, a community of practice (Wegner, 2004) comprised almost entirely of second language users. Using a sequential analysis (Koshik, 2002; Markee, 2000; Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974; Schegloff, Koshik, Jacoby, & Olsher, 2002), the study investigates how these ELF speakers successfully manage their intercultural communication through accommodation strategies (e.g., Jenkins, 2000, 2006) used to address differences in pronunciation and familiarity with a range of ELF speech styles. Drawing on my own experience as a member of this community, I investigate how speakers display equality and legitimacy as English language users in the ELF community in face-to-face interactions when they negotiate understanding in spite of their different accents. ELF speakers exhibit a wide variety of pronunciations as a result of first language cross-linguistic influence, and those phonological differences may hamper intercultural communication, more than any other linguistic feature. For this reason, I have chosen to focus on phonological issues for this study. I argue that sequential analysis of the interactions among speakers of English as a lingua franca may provide useful examples of successful communication among these groups. Data from such analysis should be included in English language teaching as a model of successful interaction strategies directed toward students who will face these situations. The analysis of this ELF data will also be useful as a model for the study of other languages that are often used as lingua francas. Adapted from the source document