Studies of the acquisition of the lenited allophones of Spanish voiced stops have traditionally focused on the production (Lord, 2010; Rogers & Alvord, 2014; Zampini, 1994), but not on the perception of these sounds. This pilot study examines relationships between (a) learner proficiency and perception of target sounds; (b) learner perception…

This study investigated the role of inhibition in second language (L2) learners' phonological processing. Participants were Spanish learners of L2 English and American learners of L2 Spanish. We measured inhibition through a retrieval-induced inhibition task. Accuracy of phonological representations (perception and production) was assessed through…

Research in second language speech has often focused on listeners' accent judgment and factors that affect their perception. However, the topic of listeners' application of specific sound categories in their own perceptual judgments has not been widely investigated. The current study explored how listeners from diverse language backgrounds weighed…

Certain ill-formed phonological structures are systematically under-represented across languages and misidentified by human listeners. It is currently unclear whether this results from grammatical phonological knowledge that actively recodes ill-formed structures, or from difficulty with their phonetic encoding. To examine this question, we gauge…

This study examined the perception of the four Mandarin lexical tones by Mandarin-naive Hong Kong Cantonese, Japanese, and Canadian English listener groups. Their performance on an identification task, following a brief familiarization task, was analyzed in terms of tonal sensitivities (A-prime scores on correct identifications) and tonal errors…

This study investigated whether task instructions affect sound-isolation performance. The effects of phoneme class and phoneme position were also assessed. Two hundred Dutch kindergartners were presented with a free-sound-isolation task and its constrained counterparts: an initial-, a middle-, and a final-sound-isolation task. All tasks contained…

This article outlines the bases of the verbo-tonal method of correcting phonetic errors in second language learning, a method based on awareness of the phonological system of the learner's native language and its influence on the phonological system of the target language. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

This article describes a study designed to test the basic notions of the verbo-tonal method of error correction in second language learning, a method based on an awareness of the phonological system of the speaker's native language and its influence on the phonological system of the target language. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

A study investigated perception of elliptical speech in an adult cochlear implant patient. Two experiments were conducted using sets of meaningful and anomalous English sentences: one set contained correct place of articulation cues, the other was transformed into elliptical speech. The patient and controls labeled the sentences as the same.…

A study examined if 10 children (ages 4-12) with repaired cleft palate who demonstrate posterior placement of alveolar targets differed from 10 children with cleft palate without such error patterns, and from 10 controls in the perception of alveolar targets. Children with posterior placement appeared unable to distinguish alveolar targets.…

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)

Papers from three conferences on applied linguistics include the following: "Evaluating Language Success in an Irish Context" (D. P. O Baoill); "Facilitation of Language Development in the Deaf Child" (M. Nicholas Griffey, Sr.); "Observations on Thematic Interference Between Irish and English" (M. Filppula); "A…