Download or read book Factors Affecting English Speakers Perception of L2 Spanish Vowels written by Leslie S. Gordon and published by ProQuest. This book was released on 2008 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the existing studies of the perceptual abilities of the English speaking learner of Spanish some important variables have been left unexplored. The first of these regards the difference in size of the vowel inventories of these two languages and the effect of the larger English inventory upon listeners' perception of the L2 Spanish inventory. Specifically, the English vowel inventory includes some vowel categories whose existence has been shown to interfere with the English speaker's perception of Spanish vowels (Bradlow 1995, 1996). Additionally, the duration and diphthongized quality of English tense vowels may exert an influence upon the perception of 'similar' Spanish vowels. Lastly, studies on the effects of training on vowel perception have shown mixed results, (Francis, et al., 2000; Jamieson & Morosan, 1989; Lisker, 1970; Logan & Pruitt, 1995; Pisoni et al., 1982; Strange & Dittman, 1984; Tees & Werker, 1984; Werker & Tees, 1984). The current study addresses the effects of vowel inventory size, acoustic differences and perceptual training measures upon the vowel perception of native English speakers learning L2 Spanish.

Download or read book Second Language Speech Learning written by Ratree Wayland and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-04 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Including contributions from a team of world-renowned international scholars, this volume is a state-of-the-art survey of second language speech research, showcasing new empirical studies alongside critical reviews of existing influential speech learning models. It presents a revised version of Flege's Speech Learning Model (SLM-r) for the first time, an update on a cornerstone of second language research. Chapters are grouped into five thematic areas: theoretical progress, segmental acquisition, acquiring suprasegmental features, accentedness and acoustic features, and cognitive and psychological variables. Every chapter provides new empirical evidence, offering new insights as well as challenges on aspects of the second language speech acquisition process. Comprehensive in its coverage, this book summarises the state of current research in second language phonology, and aims to shape and inspire future research in the field. It is an essential resource for academic researchers and students of second language acquisition, applied linguistics and phonetics and phonology.

Download or read book Exploring Cross linguistic Effects and Phonetic Interactions in the Context of Bilingualism written by Mark Amengual and published by MDPI. This book was released on 2021-07-21 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Special Issue includes fifteen original state-of-the-art research articles from leading scholars that examine cross-linguistic influence in bilingual speech. These experimental studies contribute to the growing number of studies on multilingual phonetics and phonology by introducing novel empirical data collection techniques, sophisticated methodologies, and acoustic analyses, while also presenting findings that provide robust theoretical implications to a variety of subfields, such as L2 acquisition, L3 acquisition, laboratory phonology, acoustic phonetics, psycholinguistics, sociophonetics, blingualism, and language contact. These studies in this book further elucidate the nature of phonetic interactions in the context of bilingualism and multilingualism and outline future directions in multilingual phonetics and phonology research.

Download or read book The Acquisition of Vowels in Spanish and English as a Second Language written by Mariche García de las Bayonas and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Initial State for California English Learners of Spanish and Portuguese Vowels written by Polina Vasiliev and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Second language (L2) learners often struggle with achieving native-like production and perception of L2 sounds. While there is ample research on the non-native perception of English vowels by native speakers of languages with smaller vowel inventories, scant research exists up-to-date on the opposite scenario. The aim of the present study is to investigate the initial state for Californian English (CE) listeners' perception of two different smaller vowel inventories, namely Spanish and Portuguese vowels, before any perceptual learning has taken place. The objective is to determine how CE listeners' native vowel inventory of (at least) ten phonemes affects their non-native perception of the five Spanish and seven Portuguese vowel phonemes. Monolingual speakers of English from Southern California (N = 18) completed a perceptual assimilation task, in which they labeled naturally produced tokens of Spanish and Portuguese vowels in terms of ten native English categories, as well as a categorial discrimination task with four Spanish and six Portuguese vowel contrasts. In the perceptual assimilation task, CE listeners mapped almost every Spanish and Portuguese vowel contrast to more than two native categories, resulting in many instances of Multiple Category Assimilation (MCA, Escudero and Boersma, 2002). Furthermore, some phonologically common vowels between Spanish and Portuguese, namely /e/, /o/, and /a/, were mapped differently to English categories, suggesting that cross-linguistic differences in the acoustic distributions of these sounds result in differences in their categorization by non-native listeners. In the discrimination task, CE listeners were highly accurate at distinguishing all Spanish vowel contrasts but were less accurate on three Portuguese vowel contrasts, /i-e/, /o-u/, and /a-O/. Crucially, MCA was found to be responsible for listeners' lower discrimination accuracy only when it contributed to two vowels being perceptually assimilated to an overlapping set of native categories, i.e., when two different vowels had a high perceptual assimilation overlap score. The results are examined vis-à-vis two main models of second language speech perception, the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM, Best, 1995) and the Second Language Linguistic Perception Model (L2LP, Escudero, 2005). Implications for L2 acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese vowels by English-speaking learners are discussed.

Download or read book Tutorials in Bilingualism written by Annette M.B. de Groot and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2014-05-12 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past fifteen years have witnessed an increasing interest in the cognitive study of the bilingual. A major reason why psychologists, psycholinguists, applied linguists, neuropsychologists, and educators have pursued this topic at an accelerating pace presumably is the acknowledgment by increasingly large numbers of language researchers that the incidence of monolingualism in individual language users may be lower than that of bilingualism. This alleged numerical imbalance between monolinguals and bilinguals may be expected to become larger due to increasing international travel through, for instance, tourism and trade, to the growing use of international communication networks, and to the fact that in some parts of the world (i.e., Europe), the borders between countries are effectively disappearing. In addition to the growing awareness that bilinguals are very common and may even outnumber monolinguals, there is the dawning understanding that the bilingual mind is not simply the sum of the cognitive processes associated with each of the two monolingual modes, and that the two languages of bilingual may interact with one another in complicated ways. To gain a genuinely universal account of human cognition will therefore require a detailed understanding of language use by both pure monolinguals as well as bilinguals, unbalanced and balanced, and of the representations and processes involved. These two insights, that bilingualism is a common human condition and that it may influence cognition, were presumably instrumental in putting bilingualism on the agendas of many researchers of cognition and language in recent years. But other reasons may have played a role too: The study of bilingualism also provides a unique opportunity to study the relation between language and thought. A final reason for the growing interest in this area of research is the awareness that bilingualism may confer the benefit of broadening one's scope beyond the limits of one's own country and culture. This book serves as an excellent introduction to the important topics in the psycholinguistic study of bilingualism. The chapters represent a comprehensive and interrelated set of topics that form the core of contemporary research on the psycholinguistics of bilingualism. The issues raised within this perspective not only increase our understanding of the nature of language and thought in bilinguals but also of the basic nature of the mental architecture that supports the ability to use more than one language.

Download or read book English with a Latin Beat written by Barbara O. Baptista and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2006-12-14 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although it has long been recognized that second language pronunciation is strongly influenced by the native language, second language phonology has only become a recognized area of study during the last thirty years. While English has been the most frequent target language involved, the learners' L1s have varied greatly. This is the first collection to gather together studies involving English learners whose L1 is Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese, two closely-related languages with important phonological differences. The research covers vowel perception and production, syllable simplification strategies, word and compound stress, and vowel reduction. While the papers confirm the important role of the native language, they also shed light on the sometimes subtle and unexpected ways in which this variable interacts with universal markedness relationships to determine the formation of phonetic categories and their use in perception and production. These eleven carefully conducted empirical studies will provide insights for practitioners and stimulate further research.

Download or read book Linguistic Approaches to Portuguese as an Additional Language written by Karina Veronica Molsing and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book includes a selection of theoretical and practical accounts of the acquisition of Portuguese from a broad range of linguistic perspectives. This collection is particularly appealing in the broad academic sphere of language acquisition due to the fact that there has yet to be one entirely dedicated to Portuguese as an Additional Language (PAL). This volume showcases the breadth of research being carried out on topics ranging from the acquisition of aspects from the main language modules (syntax, morphology, semantics, phonology, and pragmatics) to applied perspectives involving corpus-based approaches and experimental methodologies. Moreover, we present studies addressing a variety of learning contexts and learner types. The target audience includes researching scholars with a background in second language acquisition studies interested in learning more about the acquisition of Portuguese as an Additional Language from linguistic perspectives.

Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Spanish Linguistics written by Kimberly L. Geeslin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-23 with total page 1098 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written for both researchers and advanced students, this Handbook provides a state-of-the-art survey of the field of Spanish linguistics. Balancing different theoretical perspectives among expert scholars, it provides an in-depth examination of all sub-fields of research in Hispanic linguistics, with a focus on recent advances.

Download or read book Romance Phonetics and Phonology written by Mark Gibson and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores recurring topics in Romance phonetics and phonology. Topics studied range from the low-level mechanical processes involved in speech production and perception to high-level representation and computation, based on data from across the Romance language family, including from varieties that are less widely studied.

Download or read book Speech Perception and Production in L2 written by Elena Kkese and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is concerned with studying speech perception and production in an L2. It deals with segments, syllables, and features above syllable level (the suprasegmental level). The volume brings together careful theoretical and empirical research conducted in different countries, including the United States of America, Greece, Northern Cyprus, Canada, the Republic of Cyprus, Israel, and Spain.

Download or read book A Time to Speak written by Thomas Scovel and published by Newbury House Publishers. This book was released on 1988 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Extending the Boundaries of Research on Second Language Learning and Teaching written by Mirosław Pawlak and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-08-30 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book contains a selection of papers reflecting cutting-edge developments in the field of learning and teaching second and foreign languages. The contributions are devoted to such issues as classroom-oriented research, sociocultural aspects of language acquisition, individual differences in language learning, teacher development, new strands in second language acquisition research as well as methodological considerations. Because of its scope, the diversity of topics covered and the adoption of various theoretical perspectives, the volume is of interest not only to theorists and researchers but also to methodologists and practitioners, and can be used in courses for graduate students.

Download or read book Dissertation Abstracts International written by and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Phonology and Second Language Acquisition written by Jette G. Hansen Edwards and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008-03-05 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a collection of 13 chapters, each devoted to a particular issue that is crucial to our understanding of the way learners acquire, learn, and use an L2 sound system. In addition, it spans both theory and application in L2 phonology. The book is divided into three parts, with each section unified by broad thematic content: Part I, “Theoretical Issues and Frameworks in L2 Phonology,” lays the groundwork for examining L2 phonological acquisition. Part II, “Second Language Speech Perception and Production,” examines these two aspects of L2 speech in more detail. Finally, Part III, “Technology, Training, and Curriculum,” bridges the gap between theory and practice. Each chapter examines theoretical frameworks, major research findings (both classic and recent), methodological issues and choices for conducting research in a particular area of L2 phonology, and major implications of the research findings for more general models of language acquisition and/or pedagogy.

Download or read book Training Spanish Speakers in the Perception and Production of English Vowels written by Grisel María García Pérez and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis investigates the effects of training native speakers of Spanish in the perception and production of the English pairs of vowels /i/-/I/, /u/-/u/, and /a/-/A/ in a regular ESL classroom setting. Thirty-two adult native Spanish speakers, sixteen in the control group and sixteen in the experimental group, participated in the study. The experimental design included a pretest-posttest procedure in order to compare the subject's performance before and after training. Perception was tested using a minimal pair forced choice task including multiple samples of the three pairs of vowels. Production data was provided by reading 15 sentences and a paragraph, all of which contained the target vowel contrasts. Over a three-week training period, the subjects in the experimental group were given instruction on how to identify and produce the English pairs of vowels 111-/I/, /u/- /u/, and /a/-/A/. Their progress was tested through quizzes at the end of each week. No recordings were used during the lessons. The effect of training on perception was demonstrated through a direct comparison between the scores on the pretest and posttest. Analysis reveals a significant improvement (from 60.1% to 83.3%) in the subjects' performance as an effect of training. A mixed design ANOVA with 1 between factor (group) and 2 within factors (vowel and time) shows a significant group x time interaction (p

Download or read book The Handbook of Spanish Second Language Acquisition written by Kimberly L. Geeslin and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-08-14 with total page 581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together a comprehensive collection of newly-commissioned articles, this Handbook covers the most recent developments across a range of sub-fields relevant to the study of second language Spanish. Provides a unique and much-needed collection of new research in this subject, compiled and written by experts in the field Offers a critical account of the most current, ground-breaking developments across key fields, each of which has seen innovative empirical research in the past decade Covers a broad range of issues including current theoretical approaches, alongside a variety of entries within such areas as the sound system, morphosyntax, individual and social factors, and instructed language learning Presents a variety of methodological approaches spanning the active areas of research in language acquisition