This research investigated whether observing beat gesture and hearing contrastive accenting with novel words enhances their learning in early childhood and whether these effects differ by sex in light of sex differences in the pace of language development. Fifty-three 3- to 5-year-old boys and girls learned pairs of novel words with contrasting…

This study examined whether social bias manipulation can influence how naïve multiage listeners evaluate second language (L2) speech. Sixty native English-speaking listeners (Montreal residents) rated audio recordings of 40 Quebec French speakers of L2 English for five dimensions of oral performance (accentedness, comprehensibility, segmental…

Late second language (L2) learners often struggle with L2 prosody, both in perception and production. This may result from first language (L1) interference or some property of how a second language functions in a late learner independent of what their L1 might be. Here we investigate prosody's role in determining information structure through…

The phonetics and phonology of the Kyungsang dialect of Korean is distinct from those of the standard Seoul dialect with regard to segments and lexical pitch. However, whether the distinctive phonetics and phonology of Kyungsang Korean are maintained by younger speakers is questionable due to the increased exposure to Seoul Korean and the…

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)

A study compared the Swedish tone accent acquisition of native-speaking children (N=2) and nonnative speaking college students (N=12). Both groups overgeneralized one pitch pattern to all bisyllabic words. Children used "Accent 2" (two-peaked) and adults "Accent 1" (one-peaked), analogous to the prevailing patterns of their…

Neurophysiological aspects of the development and use of accents in language are considered, including the function of age of the second language learner, left brain hemisphere, language tasks, and other neuroanatomical considerations. (CB)

Reviews the general trends of research concerned with second language phonology, citing several principal factors involved in foreign accent such as age and native language interference. More recent investigations show that pronunciation of a foreign language is influenced by factors of stylistic variation and stages of development unrelated to…

This booklet points out some of the characteristics of the varieties of English spoken in Riverside and in the rest of California. The first chapter provides a general discussion of language variation and change on the levels of vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar. The second chapter discusses California English and pronunciation and vocabulary…