Infants can discriminate languages that belong to different rhythmic classes at birth. The ability perform within-class discrimination emerges around the fifth month of life. cues infants use between prosodically close remain elusive. Segmental information could be a potential cue, since notice vowel mispronunciations their names, show first signs word recognition and perceptual narrowing for v...

This article is based on a professional development session or presentation that the author gave in regional TESOL affiliate conference, and it discusses importance of teaching, why ESL/ EFL teachers should teach pronunciation, reasons they generally give for avoiding how we can integrate into our curriculum. The sheds light SLA, Second Language Acquisition, research especially studies are rela...

In light of the fact that L2 pronunciation errors are often caused by the transfer of well-established L1 sound systems, this paper examines some of the characteristic phonological differences between Japanese and English. Comparing segmental and suprasegmental aspects of both languages, this study also discusses several problematic areas of pronunciation for Japanese learners of English. Based...

Models of phonological development assume that speech perception precedes speech production and that children acquire suprasegmental features earlier than segmental features. Studies of Chinese-speaking children challenge these assumptions. For example, Chinese-speaking children can produce tones before two-and-a-half years but are not able to discriminate the same tones until after 6 years of ...

Motivated by a desire to assess speaking and reading skills and perform unsupervised tutoring of non-native speakers in a foreign language, robust evaluation of speech variability and pronunciation quality must incorporate perceptually meaningful information from many domains of speech analysis – spectral and prosodic, segmental and suprasegmental, and so on. In this paper we present three tech...