The primary objective of this study was to investigate the extent to which second language (L2) pronunciation proficiency, language use, and age of L2 acquisition (AoA) are associated with variation in enhanced executive control in bilinguals. The secondary objective was to examine whether bilinguals’ executive control, as reflected in the incongruent response time for the Flanker task, differe...

In this study we compare the consonantal production of L4 learners (level A1+B2) with the expected canonical pronunciation and the pronunciation of a German L1 control group. The L4 speakers’ source languages are Hong Kong Cantonese (HKC) L1, Hong Kong English (HKE) L2 and Putonghua/Mandarin (P) L3. Due to major disparities across the typologically distant language pair Cantonese and German, an...

The term ‘foreign accent’ (FA) is used to refer to the pronunciation of a language that shows deviations from native norms. These deviations occur at the phonetic and phonemic level, and at the segmental and prosodic levels, characterising the user of a second language (L2) as a non-native speaker. There is a consensus that the pronunciation of an L2 is deeply affected by the native language, a...

The present contribution provides an overview of some innovative approaches to pronunciation pedagogy, focusing on cross-modal reinforcements aimed at facilitating the process of L2 phonological perception and production. The paper starts with a brief introduction to recent theories of multisensory integration and proceeds with practical suggestions for multimodal reinforcements integrating vis...

Second Language Comprehensibility Revisited: Investigating the Effects of Learner Background Dustin Crowther The current study investigated first language (L1) effects on listener judgment of comprehensibility and accentedness in second language (L2) speech. The participants were 60 university-level adult speakers of English from four L1 backgrounds (Chinese, Romance, Hindi, Farsi), with 15 spe...

This study concerns good pronunciation from the L2 Japanese listeners’ point of view. More precisely, focusing on prosodic variations, this study investigates whether L2 Japanese listeners from different L1 backgrounds perceive foreign-accented Japanese differently. The experimental results obtained from the two L2 Japanese groups who speak Mandarin Chinese and Bahasa Indonesian, respectively a...

This research presents an investigation performed on the ASU corpus. We analyse to what extent does the pronunciation of intended words reflects in spelling errors done by L2 Swedish learners. We also propose a method that helps to automatically discriminate the misspellings affected by pronunciation from other types of misspellings.

Recent research has shown that a properly designed ASRbased CALL system (Dutch-CAPT) was capable of detecting pronunciation errors and of providing comprehensible feedback on pronunciation. Since pronunciation is not the only skill required for speaking a second language, we explored the possibility of extending the Dutch-CAPT approach to other aspects of speaking proficiency like morphology an...

This work reports on the construction of a rated database of spontaneous speech produced by second language (L2) learners of English. Spontaneous speech was collected from 28 L2 speakers representing six language backgrounds and five different proficiency levels. Speech was elicited using formats similar to that of the TOEFL iBT and the Speaking Proficiency English Assessment Kit (SPEAK) test. ...

The current emphasis in second language teaching lies in the achievement of communicative effectiveness. In line with this approach, pronunciation training is nowadays geared towards helping learners avoid serious pronunciation errors, rather than eradicating the finest traces of foreign accent. However, to devise optimal pronunciation training programmes, systematic information on these pronun...