The study investigates the relationship between lexical encoding and production in order to establish whether learners are able to produce a difficult contrast in words that they merged in their mental lexicon. Forty American English learners of Russian were tested on their production and lexical encoding of familiar and highly-frequent words with…

Phonetic characteristics of English spoken by Japanese university students were analyzed and classified, and the degree of intelligibility of nonnative speech presented to native English speakers was measured. It was found that the degree of intelligibility was closely related to the level of context presented. (33 references) (JL)

Untrained native English listeners assigned foreign accent scores to sentence and narrative utterances produced by native English speakers and Mandarin-speaking learners of English, rendered unintelligible through low-pass filtering. Because the filtered speech stimuli contained little of what could be considered segmental information, results…

Pronunciation of words with a fricative content was elicited over a seven-month period from seven English-speaking children ranging in age from 1;5 to 2;3. The recorded speech was analyzed for correct fricative production and substitutions. Results indicate that: (1) overall percentage of correct production is slightly higher in final position…

Some of the areas in which second language acquisition (SLA) theories and research have contributed to language teaching are highlighted. It is noted that while results of SLA research may have contributed to understanding of language learning, insights from such research may have little direct effect on classroom instruction. One explanation is…

Presents results of a study that sought to test the pronunciation problems of a large number of American students in a beginning college-level French course. Learner difficulties over a 15-week period were used to create a hierarchy of minimal contrasts representing major, secondary, and minor problems for the students in learning French sounds.…

An error analysis based on phonetic transcription of French utterances by native speakers of Cantonese yielded a scale of difficulty for word-initial and word-final consonants. The Markedness Differential Hypothesis explained some errors. Evidence also pointed to interaction of language acquisition with markedness reversals. (35 references) (CNP)

A report on a study exploring the relationship between observed variability in second-language speech and the process in which correct variants are acquired and incorrect ones are replaced. Three phonological variables in the English speech of French-Canadian second-language speakers in Montreal were investigated. The method, results and…

The purpose of this study was to describe the pronunication of American college students learning French. To gather the data a set of 21 sounds, all theoretically in contrast with English sounds, was chosen. These were elicited in a series of sessions during the subjects' first semester of French. The subjects recorded their pronunciation on…

Smith's 1973 model of articulatory phonological development between the ages of two and four is re-examined in an attempt to develop a model that includes the possibility of both perceptual and articulatory learning. Smith's data, regarding phonological transformations of words after rules established by his infant son's pronunciation of the words…

Discusses difficulties in perception of English /r/ and /l/ and concludes the error pattern is not predictable on the basis of contrastive phonological analysis but might be the result of acoustic-phonetic factors. (EKN)

Studies the role played by native language transfer and task formality in the second-language acquisition of the Spanish voiced stop phonemes /b d g/ and their spirantized variants to identify specific problems affecting learners. Results indicate that native language transfer markedly inhibits acquisition of the voiced spirants. (21 references)…

This article discusses error correction in the writing and speaking of foreign language learners. If it is decided that student errors should be corrected, should all errors be corrected or only particular ones? How should errors be corrected, when, and by whom? (CFM)

Native speakers of Egyptian Arabic make errors in their pronunciation of English that cannot always be accounted for by a contrastive analysis of Egyptian analysis of Egyptain Arabic and English. This study focuses on three types of errors in the pronunciation of voiced and voiceless "th" made by fluent speakers of English. These errors were noted…

Three essays are presented that deal with phonetic correction and that are intended specifically for Anglophones. They deal with the following topics: (1) methods and processes useful in phonetic correction with students called "false intermediates"; (2) a synthesis and a methodology of methods of phonetic correction of the "French R" with…