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Development of speech perception and speech production abilities in adult second language learners*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Susan Gass
Susan Gass*
Affiliation:
The University of Michigan
*
Susan Gass, Department of Linguistics, 1076 Frieze Building, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109
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Abstract

This study examines the acquisition of production and perception by adult learners of English. The particular focus is voice onset time of initial /b/'s and /p/'s. The subjects are 10 nonnative speakers of English and six native speakers who provided identification responses to synthesized stimuli varying along a voice onset time continuum. Additionally, they each produced words with initial /b/'s and /p/'s. These measures were repeated at three 1-month intervals for the nonnative speakers. The results show that nonnative speaker perception differs from native speaker perception in two important ways: (1) stop consonants are perceived continuously rather than categorically and (2) nonnative speaker perception is influenced by the location of phoneme boundaries in both the native and target languages. Nonnative speaker production shows a greater amount of similarity to native speaker production, although, where deviations occur, nonnative speakers tend to overcompensate for differences between the native and target languages. Finally, methodological issues are raised relating to the comparison of perception and production.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , March 1984 , pp. 51 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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Footnotes

*

This article was processed and accepted under the editorship of Sheldon Rosenberg.

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