In this dissertation, I investigated how cognitive resources as well as formal, and informal language experience impact language learning in two studies. In the first study (Chapter 2), I examined the learning of Spanish grammatical gender by Chinese international students who were studying abroad in the US. The goal of that study was to uncover…

The study aims to analyze the distributional features of adverbial modifier of manner in two languages that are typologically and genealogically different: English and Azerbaijani. Although the issue has been focused in these languages separately from various angles including semantic, syntactic and prosodic perspectives, there is a gap in the…

This comparative study, conducted in multicultural London, investigates the occurrence in interviews with a researcher and in constructed same-sex peer conversations of five linguistic features characteristic of London English in the speech of two groups of British-born adolescents: ethnic Bangladeshis and ethnic Chinese of Cantonese heritage. The…

Investigation of native Chinese speakers' acquisition of French suprasegmental features found that the subjects not only perceived the different directions of pitch but also placed them in the right categories, in spite of the differences between the use of pitch in tonal and intonational languages. (34 references) (CB)

Certain simplification and reduction processes used by Arabs in learning English as a second language are examined, such as: (1) simplification of syllables, (2) deletion of English articles, and (3) generation of English questions by using only intonation and leaving word order intact. The study is made from the perspective of two theories of…

Comparison of how English and Spanish speakers express contrastive emphasis revealed that, while English speakers used pitch and intensity, Spanish speakers used changes in syntax and lexicon as well as pitch and intensity in showing contrasts. (CB)

Since 1971 the approach adopted in the teaching of English phonetics in Denmark has been a contrastive one. In this paper it is argued that although the original contrastive hypothesis (Lado 1957) has to be modified and weakened, a contrastive approach is highly useful in learning and teaching the pronunciation of a foreign language. Selected…

This paper lays out techniques for investing different types of phonation from acoustic data. Nearly all the world's languages distinguish between voiced and voiceless phonation. Many languages use other phonation types, such as the breathy voice--also described as speaking while sighing. Another kind of voice quality, one frequently found in…

This collection of twenty-six papers is the fourth resulting from the Polish-English Contrastive Project. The overall purpose of the project is to prepare a Polish-English contrastive grammar and to develop pedagogical materials. The basic model used for research is the transformational generative one. Among the papers on phonology, topics such as…

The sound system of English is described in all its complexity, from the relationship between spelling and pronunciation to the rules of connected speech, focusing on the methods and rationale of teaching pronunciation of English, particularly to English as a second language learners. (CB)