This study reports an exploratory analysis of the age of arrival (AoA) effect on the production of second language (L2) prosody. Three groups of Mandarin-speaking immigrants (N = 10 in each group) with varying AoA in the United States and ten native speakers of English as controls participated in the study. All participants read a paragraph of…

This study investigated identification of fragmented Mandarin tones by non-native listeners. Monosyllabic Mandarin words were digitally processed to generate intact, silent-center, center-only, and onset-only syllables. The syllables were recorded with two carrier phrases such that the offset of the carrier tone and the onset of the target tone…

Study looked at abilities of 5-to 15-year-old monolingual English schoolchildren to replicate foreign pronunciation and intonation. Results show ability to replicate pronunciation declined fairly steadily over the whole age range studied. (Author/BK)

Attempts to show that audio-visual feedback is more effective in intonation learning than auditory feedback. While practice time did not seem to be a major factor, results showed audio-visual feedback to be more effective than auditory feedback. In addition, feedback modality was shown to influence learning behavior. (SL)

A descriptive model elaborated to account for the rhythmic organization of French and English is applied to the speech of French learners of English to identify the particular type of cross-linguistic influence operating therein. Evidence is presented for the existence of transitional rhythmic groups, perceived in the interlanguage vowel reduction…