This study examines whether explicit phonetic instruction helps Spanish and French speakers more closely approximate native pronunciation of the aspirated variants of the English consonants p, t, and k. The study results indicate that phonetic instruction clearly benefited the subjects, and the findings warrant further investigation. Native speakers of English consistently use aspirated variant...

A sample of 560 Arab Facebook users consisting students, faculty, schoolteachers, and other professionals with different proficiency levels in English was selected. The study analyzed how Arabic personal names on to find out the glottal stop (hamza) [ʔ] and/or voiced pharyngeal fricative [ʕ] initial, medial final positions, short long vowels before after them are spelled; whether there variatio...

ABSTRACT It is well known to anyone involved in teaching English to Finnish students that it is difficult for Finns to distinguish between English /ptk/ and /bdg/. This second volume ip a series on a Finnish-English contrastive project reports on a study which attempted to obtain more concrete knowledge about the ability of speakers of Finnish to use the various perceptual cues connected with t...

The primary aim of this study was to determine if adults whose native language permits neither voiced nor voiceless stops to occur in word-final position can master the English word-final /t/-/d/ contrast. Native English-speaking listeners identified the voicing feature in word-final stops produced by talkers in five groups: native speakers of English, experienced and inexperienced native Spani...