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Culture shapes pupils' mathematical learning, their performances and life trajectories of participation (César, 2013a, 2013b). It also contributes to the senses they attribute to mathematical learning (Bakhtin, 1929/1981). Using collaborative work and interempowerment mechanisms facilitates knowledge appropriation (César, 2009). This is particularly important for pupils participating in minority cultures, socially undervalued and whose L1 is not the instruction language. Bi-univocal culture mediation (César, 2017b) is important regarding empowerment. We used an instrument to evaluate pupils' abilities and competencies (IACC), conceived by the "Interaction and Knowlwdge" (IK) team (Machado, 2014), and other mathematical tasks. The goal we address is to trace the differences between their approaches to problems, mathematical reasoning and solving strategies used by pupils whose L1 is ideographic (Creole, Cape Verde) or phonetic (Portuguese). We developed an intrinsic case study (Stake, 1995). The main participants are the pupils from almost 600 classes (all over Portugal and Cape Verde) who participated in the IK. The analysis of some examples illustrates that L1 shapes pupils' approaches to problems, mathematical reasoning and solving strategies. This evidence plays an important role in their access to school achievement and in teachers' understanding about how they can promote pupils' mathematical learning.

Language reflects how people think and behave in their culture. To have successful conversations, both language use and cultural awareness should be taken into consideration. Undeniably, Japanese grammar is different from Thai making it even harder for Thai learners to have fluent and appropriate conversations in the Japanese language. In the classroom, typically teachers often focus on grammar, leaving less time for students to practice conversation. Consequently, beginner learners often miss cultural details in conversations and are unable to communicate effectively. Thus, it is important for teachers to immerse students in the Japanese culture to improve their speaking skills and cultural understanding. In so doing, Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) and Reader's Theater (RT) were integrated and used to aid beginners in understanding language contexts in order to help users grasp conversational contexts and interlocutors, and use scripted practices to simulate real-life scenarios. This study aims to investigate the impact of an instructional model based on CMM and RT on improving oral communication skills in Thai beginner-level Japanese learners. The study employed an experimental design with 11th-grade Japanese-major students from a secondary school in Bangkok, involving 48 classes over 16 weeks. Instruments included a Japanese oral communication skills test and video-recorded classroom observations. Descriptive statistics, the Wilcoxon signed-rank test were used to analyze quantitative data, and thematic analysis was used to analyze qualitative data. The results showed a significant improvement in post-test scores compared to pre-tests. Moreover, the model has raised students' phonetics awareness. Phonetic features like short and long sounds, pauses, and flapping received more attention. Interestingly, they adapted Japanese pronunciation for Thai or English words enhancing communication with native speakers and avoided using personal pronouns like "anata" opting to address interlocutors by name, adhering to Japanese cultural norms. This instructional model effectively improved both linguistic and cultural competences in Japanese language learners.

Acknowledged as a far-reaching pedagogical method, Project-Based Learning is nationally imperative in Indonesian education despite the disinclination of its execution. This paper scrutinizes the phonetics and phonology-based English pronunciation dimensions and scaffolding traits as the bases to devise the scaffolding assignments for PBL execution, explores the process of PBL with scaffolding assignment adoption, and examines whether the exertion of the PBL enhances the academic achievement of English pronunciation and autodidacticism as Self-Directed Learning skills. The study exploits design-based research through repetitive actions of analysing, designing, developing, implementing, and evaluating. The result exhibit that the scaffolding assignments are designed by decomposing the phonetics and phonology pronunciation-related conceptions into smaller tasks of English pronunciation learnings and trainings based on instructional scaffolding fundamentals. The scaffolding assignments infused PBL is applied through orientation, action, reflection, and presentation stages which cover the learning activities of launching the project as the entry event marked with the driving question disclosure; building knowledge, understanding, and skills to answer the driving question; developing the project products and answers to the driving question; and presenting the products and answers to the driving question. The exertion of the PBL with scaffolding assignments is proven influential in promoting the students' English pronunciation and SelfDirected Learning skills.

In linguistics, onomastics is the science that studies the history and origin of toponyms, along with their structural aspects. This study aimed to determine the origin of toponyms by comparing their linguistic and ethnocultural, as well as mythical, information. A qualitative research design guided this study. A few toponyms were identified through random sampling method including Yrgyz (Irgiz), Burkanbulak, Esik (Yssyk), Auliesu, Zhaiyk (Ural) and Zher-Su, which were collected from etymological, explanatory and mythological dictionaries and collections of mythical texts. The etymological and component analysis methods were applied to study these names. The criteria to select these toponyms were that all should be names of rivers or hydronyms, since river-water was a mythological symbol (the source of life, death and disorder); and that they should occur not only in one language, but in several related languages. The findings revealed that the archetype of each word conformed to phonetic changes. There were also structural connections between these words. Besides, each word had symbolic connotations. This study would provide useful insights about ethnocultural and mythical information of these words and help in broader understanding of the cultural characteristics.

High-Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT) has demonstrated effectiveness in second language (L2) acquisition. This study utilizes a meta-analysis to explore the influence of high variability on learning L2 pronunciation and identifies the factors that moderate this impact. The studies were collected using a keyword search in the SCOPUS database. In total, our meta-analysis incorporated 18 primary studies that presented results obtained from experimental and control group designs, encompassing a total of 22 effect sizes. The results of our meta-analysis revealed that the overall effect size of HVPT on L2 pronunciation was medium (g = 0.77). Specifically, the effect size was large for consonant sounds and lexical tones, particularly pronounced when utilized by advanced learners. For beginners, the effect size was medium. The context in which the training was conducted also played a role, with a medium effect size observed when sentences were used. Additionally, the number of talkers involved in the study influenced the effect size, with a medium effect size found when 5 to 8 talkers were included. In other cases, the reported effect sizes were either small or non-significant.

The use of phonetic symbols in language teaching classrooms, as a bottom-up approach to pronunciation instruction, has been debated. This study investigates the perspectives of Turkish instructors of English as a foreign language on their use of phonetic symbols for teaching pronunciation at tertiary-level institutions. To explore this issue, semistructured interviews were conducted with six instructors of English as a foreign language from a higher education institution. The qualitative findings reveal that while most instructors recognize the importance of phonetic symbols, they express various teacher-related and student-related concerns that lead to their avoidance and offer recommendations for improvement. The participants also emphasize the importance of teacher training, student self-monitoring as an assessment tool, and technology integration, as essential components for effective pronunciation instruction using phonetic symbols.

The study described in this article evaluates the effectiveness of methods of improving phonetic, grammatical, and syntactic skills in children with general speech underdevelopment in a bilingual environment. The method is based on a theoretical study of severe speech disorders, a structural analysis of linguistic samples, and a comparative study of the results of research by various scientists in an interdisciplinary discourse. An experimental study was carried out concerning the assessment of the effectiveness of speech therapy exercises for forming linguistic skills (phonetic-phonemic, morphological, word-formation, lexical, and syntactic) at different language levels in preschoolers with a general speech disorder in the context of bilingualism (Kazakh was considered the main language, and Russian was considered an additional language). The materials presented in this paper can be used to develop linguistic skills for various speech defects.

Persuasiveness in oral communication in English can be expressed with various vocal phonetic cues that may not be readily accessible to English second language (L2) learners whose native language may employ a different set of cues. With a goal to increase L2 learners' perceived spoken confidence and persuasiveness, and obtain empirical evidence for phonetic adjustments that native English speakers make to influence listeners, the current study explored the use of consonant prolongation in stressed syllable onsets for emphasis by native British English speakers and English L2 learners. The native speakers' durations of continuant consonants and voiceless stop consonant voice onset times (VOTs) in (1) neutrally-produced speech and (2) persuasively delivered motivational/shocking/emotional messages were compared to Latvian L2 English speakers' productions. The results revealed that in persuasive speech, the British speakers' consonantal durations, particularly those of continuants, got significantly longer relative to the vowels that followed them; for English L2 learners, the duration of consonants did not change as a factor of speech type. This is in line with our previous research with American English speakers and carries implications for L2 speech learning and teaching.

Infants' preference for vowelharmony (VH, a phonotactic constraint that requires vowels in a word to be featurally similar) is thought to be language-specific: Monolingual infants learning VH languages show a listening preference for VH patterns by 6 months of age, while those learning non-VH languages do not (Gonzalez-Gomez et al., 2019; Van Kampen et al., 2008). We investigated sensitivity to advanced tongue root (ATR) harmony in Akan (Kwa, Niger-Congo) in 40 six-month-old multilingual infants (21 girls) in Ghana, West Africa (an understudied population), all learning Akan, Ghanaian English, and most of them several other understudied African languages (e.g., Ga, Ewe). We hypothesized that infants learning both ATR harmony and nonharmony languages would demonstrate sensitivity to ATR harmony. Using the central fixation procedure, infants were presented with disyllabic nonwords that were either harmonic (e.g., puti) or nonharmonic (e.g., pet[open-mid back rounded vowel]) based on their ATR features. Infants demonstrated sensitivity to ATR harmony with a familiarity preference, listening longer to harmonic syllable sequences than nonharmonic ones. The relative amount of exposure to (an) ATR harmony language(s) did not modulate the preference. These results shed light on our understanding of early multilingualism: they suggest that early sensitivity to VH in multilinguals may be similar to monolingual infants learning other types of VH, irrespective of simultaneous experience with non-VH languages. We conclude with reflections on studying infant language acquisition in multilingual Africa.

The writing system -- the transparency of orthography in alphabet-based systems and differences between logographic and phonetic-based systems -- can affect the efficiency of inferential word learning when words are introduced visually. It can also shape how people self-evaluate their learning success (we refer to such type of self-evaluation as metacognitive monitoring of word learning). By contrast, differences in metacognition and learning performance do not emerge when words are presented auditorily. To measure metacognition, we assessed retrospective confidence by asking participants to rate their certainty about the correctness of their responses. As this direct question raises a person's conscious awareness of how well they have learned a particular lexical unit, it allowed us to measure those aspects of metacognition that are modulated by consciousness. Such consciousness comes into play when a word is associated with an object. Differences in conscious awareness of the word learning success when words are represented visually make differential demands on word learning across languages and modalities. The observed differences between populations using different writing systems and between perceptual modalities may potentially modulate the effectiveness of vocabulary acquisition activities during foreign language learning.

Purpose: This study aims at investigating the phonological development of the six guttural consonants of Jordanian Arabic, /[chi]/, /[voiced uvular fricative]/, /[voiceless pharyngeal fricative]/, /[voiced pharyngeal fricative]/, /[glottal stop]/, and /h/. Method: An articulation test is designed to involve two tasks: picture naming and repetition. The test includes 54 words for picture naming and 18 words for repetition, representing all possible positions of the targeted guttural sounds. Samples are collected from 40 typically developing Ammani-Jordanian Arabic-speaking monolingual children, living in Amman, Jordan. Respondents are equally divided into eight age-related trajectories: 2-2;6, 2;6-3, 3-3;6, 3;6-4, 4-4;6, 4;6-5, 5-5;6, and 5;6-6 (years;months). No child with a history of hearing, speech, or vision disorders is included. The data are analyzed using "production accuracy," where the three developmental trajectories of production (customary, acquisition, and mastery) are determined for each guttural, and "error analysis," addressed based on perceptual judgments, providing details of every mispronounced or deleted guttural. Results: The results show that /[chi]/, /[voiceless pharyngeal fricative]/, /[voiced pharyngeal fricative]/, and /[glottal stop]/ are acquired before the age of 6 years, while /[voiced uvular fricative]/ and /h/ are still not acquired by this age. Respondents use relatively variant alternatives for the mispronounced cognates, including guttural, nonguttural sounds, and vowel substitution. The /[voiced uvular fricative]/ is the guttural with the highest number of alternatives, while /[glottal stop]/ gets the least. The analysis also reveals patterns of guttural deletion, with variations across different guttural sounds and positions. Despite errors/deviations made, respondents score accuracy percentages that gradually increase in correlation with age. The guttural /[voiced uvular fricative]/ starts with the lowest accuracy percentages, while /[glottal stop]/ and /[voiceless pharyngeal fricative]/ start with the highest. Conclusions: These findings illuminate on the developmental trajectory of guttural acquisition and enrich our understanding of children's evolving perception and production abilities. They offer valuable insights into the patterns of guttural sound production in Jordanian Arabic-speaking children, laying the groundwork for further research and the development of targeted assessment and intervention strategies to support phonological development in this population.

This article provides a review of previous studies that have examined the effects of orthography on establishing contrastive phonological representations in second language acquisition and presents results from an original study on Mandarin speakers' production of English stops investigating how the presence of orthography affects the production of phonological categories that involve allophony. English voiceless stops are canonically represented as aspirated [p[superscript h], t[superscript h], k[superscript h]] in word-initial/stressed onset positions but are realized as unaspirated [p, t, k] following /s/ and in unstressed, non-initial onset positions. The results of our imitation experiment showed that Mandarin speakers failed to correctly imitate the unaspirated allophones when presented with written input, and this orthographic effect was stronger with nonwords than with real words. These results are best explained by an orthography effect mediated by phonological awareness and prior linguistic experience.

The current study examined the phonolexical processing of Mandarin segments and tones by English speakers at different Mandarin proficiency levels. Eleven English speakers naive to Mandarin, 15 intermediate and 9 advanced second language (L2) learners participated in a word-learning experiment. After learning the sound and meaning of 16 Mandarin disyllabic words, they judged the matching between sound and meaning pairs, with half of the pairs being complete matches while the other half contained segmental or tonal mismatches. The results showed that all three groups were more sensitive to segmental than tonal mismatches. The two learner groups outperformed the Naive group on segmental mismatches but not on tonal mismatches. However, their reaction times revealed that the learners but not the Naive group attended to tonal variations. The current findings suggest that increasing L2 experience has limited benefit on learners' phonolexical processing of L2 tones, probably due to their non-tonal native language background. Experience in a tonal L2 may enhance learners' attention to the tonal dimension but may not necessarily improve their accuracy.

A central question in multilingualism research is how multiple languages interact. Most studies have focused on first (L1) and second language (L2) effects on a third language (L3), but a small number of studies dedicated to the opposite transfer direction have suggested stronger L3 influence on L2 than on L1 in postpuberty learners. In our study, we provide further support for stronger L3-to-L2 than L3-to-L1 influence and show that it extends to (a) phonetics and the lexicon and (b) childhood learners. Fifty Spanish-Basque-English trilingual adults who had acquired Spanish from birth and Basque between 2 to 4 years of age through immersion participated in a speeded trilingual switching task measuring production of voice onset time and lexical intrusions. Participants experienced more phonetic and lexical crosslinguistic influence from L3 English during L2-Basque production than during L1-Spanish production. These findings show that even highly proficient early bilinguals experience differential influence from a classroom-taught L3 to L1 and to L2.

Purpose: The present study investigates the perception of vowel nasality in French-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs; CI group) and children with typical hearing (TH; TH group) aged 4-12 years. By investigating the vocalic nasality feature in French, the study aims to document more broadly the effects of the acoustic limitations of CI in processing segments characterized by acoustic cues that require optimal spectral resolution. The impact of various factors related to children's characteristics, such as chronological/auditory age, age of implantation, and exposure to cued speech, has been studied on performance, and the acoustic characteristics of the stimuli in perceptual tasks have also been investigated. Method: Identification and discrimination tasks involving French nasal and oral vowels were administered to two groups of children: 13 children with CIs (CI group) and 25 children with TH (TH group) divided into three age groups (4-6 years, 7-9 years, and 10-12 years). French nasal vowels were paired with their oral phonological counterpart (phonological pairing) as well as to the closest oral vowel in terms of phonetic proximity (phonetic pairing). Post hoc acoustic analyses of the stimuli were linked to the performance in perception. Results: The results indicate an effect of the auditory status on the performance in the two tasks, with the CI group performing at a lower level than the TH group. However, the scores of the children in the CI group are well above chance level, exceeding 80%. The most common errors in identification were substitutions between nasal vowels and phonetically close oral vowels as well as confusions between the phoneme /u/ and other oral vowels. Phonetic pairs showed lower discrimination performance in the CI group with great variability in the results. Age effects were observed only in TH children for nasal vowel identification, whereas in children with CIs, a positive impact of cued speech practice and early implantation was found. Differential links between performance and acoustic characteristics were found within our groups, suggesting that in children with CIs, selective use of certain acoustic features, presumed to be better transmitted by the implant, leads to better perceptual performance. Conclusions: The study's results reveal specific challenges in children with CIs when processing segments characterized by fine spectral resolution cues. However, the CI children in our study appear to effectively compensate for these difficulties by utilizing various acoustic cues assumed to be well transmitted by the implant, such as cues related to the temporal resolution of stimuli.

Purpose: This study builds upon an established effective training method to investigate the advantages of high variability phonetic identification training for enhancing lexical tone perception and production in Mandarin-speaking pediatric cochlear implant (CI) recipients, who typically face ongoing challenges in these areas. Method: Thirty-two Mandarin-speaking children with CIs were quasirandomly assigned into the training group (TG) and the control group (CG). The 16 TG participants received five sessions of high variability phonetic training (HVPT) within a period of 3 weeks. The CG participants did not receive the training. Perception and production of Mandarin tones were administered before (pretest) and immediately after (posttest) the completion of HVPT via lexical tone recognition task and picture naming task. Both groups participated in the identical pretest and posttest with the same time frame between the two test sessions. Results: TG showed significant improvement from pretest to posttest in identifying Mandarin tones for both trained and untrained speech stimuli. Moreover, perceptual learning of HVPT significantly facilitated trainees' production of T1 and T2 as rated by a cohort of 10 Mandarin-speaking adults with normal hearing, which was corroborated by acoustic analyses revealing improved fundamental frequency (F0) median for T1 and T2 production and enlarged F0 movement for T2 production. In contrast, TG children's production of T3 and T4 showed nonsignificant changes across two test sessions. Meanwhile, CG did not exhibit significant changes in either perception or production. Conclusions: The results suggest a limited and inconsistent transfer of perceptual learning to lexical tone production in children with CIs, which challenges the notion of a robust transfer and highlights the complexity of the interaction between perceptual training and production outcomes. Further research on individual differences with a longitudinal design is needed to optimize the training protocol or tailor interventions to better meet the diverse needs of learners.

Rhythm metrics can detect second language development of target-like speech rhythm but interpretation of the results from metrics in learners' speech is problematic because the mapping of metrics to underpinning phonological features is indirect. We investigate speech rhythm in first language (L1) Arabic / second language (L2) English, which differ in key properties contributing to the percept of rhythm: unstressed vowel reduction and syllable structure. Our production data are interpreted using additional measures, of stressed and unstressed vowels and of consonant cluster realization, alongside standard rhythm metrics; this combination facilitates disambiguation of competing interpretations of the metric results. The findings confirm the importance of using multiple rhythm metrics to study L2 speech rhythm and demonstrate how simple additional measures can guide interpretation of their results. In this study the metrics results showed that the speech produced by the L2 speakers, regardless of their length of residence in the UK, exhibited lower vocalic durational variability than the speech produced by the native Arabic and English speakers. However, closer inspection of the degree of vowel reduction by the native and nonnative groups confirms that no single metric captures the complex nature of the observed L2 rhythm patterns. Future L2 studies are advised not to draw firm conclusions about the degree of vowel reduction and consonant cluster realization in L2 speech based solely on the results of the rhythm metrics.

Pronouncing English clusters may be challenging for Arab English learners. Technology-based strategies can be used to improve their pronunciation of English consonant clusters. This study examined how high variability phonetic training (HVPT) can be used to improve the pronunciation of consonant clusters among English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. The current study examined 58 Saudi undergraduate students. The participants were randomly assigned to two groups. The control group was provided with a list of words in the consonant clusters. Participants in this group viewed a video in which all these words were pronounced in isolation (decontextualized group). The use of HVPT as a platform for contextualized pronunciation led to considerable improvement in the participants' ability to pronounce words with consonant clusters. Moreover, using HVPT helped the students remember the correct pronunciation of the relevant words with consonant clusters.

An introductory phonetics course provides foundational content for future clinical practice and may serve as a student's first experience within the field of Communication Sciences and Disorders. The Students as Partners framework (Cook-Sather et al., 2014) offers a model for valuing student assets and experiences in co-creating learning materials to enhance active learning and deepen understanding. Incorporating positive affective feelings around learning complex material, integrating technology, and building a mutually respectful learning community can foster inclusive practices. In this manuscript, the authors share how redesigning an introductory Phonetics and Acoustics course at a large, urban, commuter, public university led to increased student engagement, increased practice, increased collaboration, and increased generalization. This was achieved through personalized content and activities, warm-up activities that fostered success and integration, and co-created active learning activities, such as phonetic memes, spectrogram cards, phonetic pun activities, and sociolinguistic discussions of personal experiences. Thematic analysis of course evaluation data for the redesigned course revealed themes related to: student-instructor partnerships; practice opportunities and clinical application; and sense of belonging within the learning community.

Correct pronunciation significantly increases the intelligibility of communication. However, it is uncertain whether acquiring the pronunciation of the words enhances word retention capability. Therefore, the major purpose of this research is to evaluate whether vocabulary acquisition with the aid of pronouncing with artificial intelligence leads to a longer memory. In this research, a full experimental pattern, and a pre-test and post-test control group design were applied. Furthermore, a total of 56 high school students aged between 14-15 were asked to memorize unknown vocabulary with two pronunciation teaching methods. Prior to the experimental process, the pre-test was applied to both groups, and then, the artificial intelligence-based speech recognition pronunciation teaching process was to the experimental group while the phonetic alphabet pronunciation process was to the control group on the 4th, 8th, and 12th weeks. According to the findings, it was obtained that pronunciation practice via artificial intelligence-enabled the words to remain in memory longer. Additionally, the participants' views were gathered at the end of the research. For further research, this study will benefit other research with a variety of accessible tools to meet objectives by utilizing a new artificial intelligence-supported pronunciation model, through recording and reacting to learners' pronouncing practices in different languages.

The present study seeks to determine whether superior musical hearing is correlated with successful production of second language (L2) intonation patterns. Fifty Polish speakers of English at the university level were recorded before and after an extensive two-semester accent training course in English. Participants were asked to read aloud a series of short dialogues containing different intonation patterns, complete two musical hearing tests measuring tone deafness and melody discrimination, and a survey regarding musical experience. We visually analyzed and assessed participants' intonation by comparing their F[subscript 0] contours with the model provided by their accent training teachers following ToBI (Tones and Break Indices) guidelines and compared the results with the musical hearing test scores and the survey responses. The results suggest that more accurate pitch perception can be related to more correct production of L2 intonation patterns as participants with superior musical ear produced more native-like speech contours after training, similar to those of their teachers. After dividing participants into four categories based on their musical hearing test scores and musical experience, we also observed that some students with better musical hearing test scores were able to produce more correct L2 intonation patterns. However, students with poor musical hearing test scores and no musical background also improved, suggesting that the acquisition of L2 intonation in a formal classroom setting can be successful regardless of one's musical hearing skills.

A learning crisis across Arabic-speaking countries is leading to human capital deficits, undermining efforts to reduce poverty and putting achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals at risk. The World Bank has introduced the concept of learning poverty to highlight this crisis -- measured as the percentage of 10- year-old children who are unable to read and understand a simple text. In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, this affects around 6 in 10 children, and likely more, because of the COVID-19-related school disruptions. The World Bank has proposed a path to reduce learning poverty through advancing Arabic language teaching and learning. The proposed path comprises a set of purposeful actions that governments and stakeholders can take to reorient education systems so that they can best achieve essential core Arabic language skills and learning for all. This includes, for example, setting literacy goals, aligning instructional resources to follow a systematic phonetic approach with a focus on reading comprehension in a literature-rich environment, ensuring high-quality instruction, and identifying and intervening early with struggling readers. As the largest external financier of education in the developing world, the World Bank has a significant role to play in helping countries to recognize these key challenges and to mobilize resources to address them effectively and efficiently. This paper outlines the World Bank's approach and explores how it is taking shape in the World Bank's support to countries' education programs across the MENA region.

The fundamental skills in language teaching are reading, listening, speaking and writing. It is important to establish links with other language skill areas in the development of writing skills. In this study, it was aimed to analyze the writing skills of Kyrgyz students studying distance learning at A1 level during the pandemic. 28 Kyrgyz students participated in the study. In this context, it was desired to determine the most common mistakes in written expression in order to evaluate the students' habits of using Turkey's Turkish language structures at A1 level. The data in the study were generated by having the students write a self-introductory article. In this framework, descriptive analysis was used in this study designed with qualitative research model. The data were collected through the writings uploaded on the web interface of Kyrgyzstan-Turkey Manas University. The instructor took the data from the E-Course Distance Education Portal tool and analyzed them in order. Based on the writing assignments in the study, errors originating from the students were evaluated and interpreted. These errors were categorized as phonetics, morphology and spelling. As a result of the research, it was determined that students made negative transfers with the influence of their mother tongue. However, it was supported that the instructor should keep the motivation of the student high with the role of a guide in the language teaching process and the materials that attract the student's interest in the distance education process should be more involved in the learning-teaching environment. In this context, it is assumed that the results of the study will contribute to teaching Turkey's Turkish to Kyrgyz.

This study examined how Korean EFL learners in different proficiency levels attest contrasts of L2 phonology. To this end, twenty Korean EFL learners in high and low levels of English proficiency produced words with word-final contrasts of /[esh]/ vs. /[esh]i/, /t[esh]/ vs. /t[esh]i/, and /d[ezh]/ vs. /d[ezh]i/. Acoustic analyses of lexical vs. epenthetic vowels and lexically vs. derivationally final sibilants were conducted. The results of the acoustic analyses revealed that Korean learners differentiated them at the acoustic level by employing different vowel ratios or F1 for the produced forms with a final lexical or epenthetic vowel which did not differ at the segmental level. On the other hand, the low group did not acoustically differentiate the two types of vowels after /d[ezh]/ at all. With the production of a final sibilant either lexical or derivational, Korean learners also made distinctions in terms of different frication ratios. The results of the study found L2 learners distinguish segmental contrasts acoustically, which is different from L1 speakers, and the proficiency level partially mediates this. The results implicate the existence of interlanguage phonology with its independent system.

High frequency words, commonly referred to as sight words, are often a focus of emergent reading instruction. Instructional practices abound that require emergent readers to memorize the spelling and pronunciation of the words without drawing attention to grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) in the words. These approaches ignore a critical aspect of Ehri's theory of orthographic mapping. This article reviews the literature on storing words in memory, in general, and the research on learning high frequency words, more specifically. Analyses of high frequency words on the widely used, Dolch list, are included that show the overwhelming regularity of the GPCs in these words. The analyses provide insight into the most common GPCs in these high frequency words, and they provide examples of GPCs that if taught, unlock the regularity of several other high frequency words. Discussion focuses practitioners gaining more advanced phonetic knowledge in order to better understand the orthographic regularity of high frequency words. Recommendations include supplementing traditional phonics programs for students with at least some advanced phonetic knowledge, ensuring practitioners have this level of knowledge in order to capitalize on teachable moments with high frequency words, and/or organizing classroom lists of high frequency more strategically.

Previous research has established that phonetics has been marginalized within language teaching, proving to be particularly challenging for learners in EFL contexts. This paper presents EPSSML (https://www.usc.gal/multimlab/), an e-learning platform designed within Mayer's (2008, 2009) Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning to instruct English phonetics and phonology in an EFL context. Inspired by prior work (e.g., Clark, 2009; Godwin-Jones, 2009; Hansen Edwards et al., 2021), we examined the efficiency of EPSSML as a Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) resource alongside the students' perceptions of it including gender differences. The scores obtained by 504 Spanish EFL learners in an English phonetics undergraduate course were analyzed comparing performance before and after EPSSML-assisted instruction. The analysis of rated results shows that there is a significant difference between the means of scores of those learners that used and those that did not use the platform, as well as between male and female students. Additionally, 127 students that used EPSSML responded to an online questionnaire on the tool and course methodology. Responses reveal that 91.3% of the learners enjoyed and were very interested in EPSSML and web-mediated phonetic training. The findings demonstrate the importance of CAPT-based instruction and suggestions are also made for additional resources and approaches for its implementation, thereby contributing to the educational shift from traditional, teacher-centered learning methods to blended instructional methodologies in formal and informal settings.

This study explored the production of 11 English vowels by Acehnese Indonesian EFL students. Ten undergraduates (five males and five females) from the Pidie District, Aceh, participated, with Acehnese and Bahasa Indonesia as their first languages, and English learned formally at school since the 7th grade. Using PRAAT, recordings of vowel elicitations were measured and analyzed, revealing distinctions in vowel pairs. Statistical tests were employed to compare vowel productions between the males and females. The results showed that the females produced many of the vowel pairs similarly: /i:/-/[near-close near-front unrounded vowel]/, /[open-mid front unrounded vowel]/-/[near-open front unrounded vowel]/, /u:/-/[near-close back rounded vowel]/, /[open-mid back unrounded vowel]/-/[open back unrounded vowel]?/, and /[open back unrounded vowel]?/-/[open back rounded vowel]/. The pairs they differentiated were /[open-mid central unrounded vowel]:/-/[open-mid back unrounded vowel]/ and /[open-mid back rounded vowel]:/-/[open back rounded vowel]/. However, the female students could not discriminate between the long and short vowel pairs. Meanwhile, the male students could distinguish the following pairs: /i:/-/[near-close near-front unrounded vowel]/, /[open-mid central unrounded vowel]:/-/[open-mid back unrounded vowel]/, /[open-mid back unrounded vowel]/-/[open back unrounded vowel]?/, and /[open-mid back rounded vowel]:/-/[open back rounded vowel]/. The others, /[open-mid front unrounded vowel]/-/[near-open front unrounded vowel]/, /u:/-/[near-close back rounded vowel],/ and /[open back unrounded vowel]?/-/[open back rounded vowel]/, were produced similarly. Additionally, they could distinguish the long and short vowels in the /[open-mid central unrounded vowel]:/-/[open-mid back unrounded vowel]/, /u:/-/[near-close back rounded vowel]/, /[open-mid back unrounded vowel]/-/[open back unrounded vowel]?/, and /[open back unrounded vowel]?/-/[open back rounded vowel]/ pairs, but not /i:/-/[near-close near-front unrounded vowel]/, /[open-mid front unrounded vowel]/-/[near-open front unrounded vowel]/ and /[open-mid back rounded vowel]:/-/[open back rounded vowel]/. This study has shown complex distinctions in the production of English vowels by Acehnese Indonesian EFL students. These findings underscore the importance of considering gender-specific phonetic patterns in English language acquisition, providing valuable insights for language educators and researchers.

There is a long-standing debate in the literature about the benefits that acoustic components of Infant Directed Speech (IDS) might have for infants' language acquisition. One of the highly contested features is vowel space expansion, which refers to the enlargement of the acoustic space between the corner vowels /i, u, a/ in IDS compared to Adult Directed Speech (ADS). Some evidence indicates that vowel space expansion in IDS facilitates infants' speech perception, thus promoting language development, whereas other studies have questioned these benefits and have proposed that any processing benefits of IDS are due to its other prosodic features such as exaggerated and variable pitch. This study aimed to tease apart the effects of vowel space expansion and prosodic exaggeration in IDS on 18-month-old infants' speech processing. Using a looking-while-listening paradigm, two between-subjects conditions were compared: Exaggerated Pitch (with exaggerated pitch height and range, but without vowel space expansion) and Expanded Vowel Space (with vowel space expansion, but no exaggeration in pitch height and range). Our results showed that infants recognized the meanings of the words more accurately in the Expanded Vowel Space compared to the Exaggerated Pitch condition. This suggests that vowel space expansion in IDS facilitates infants' lexical processing even when it does not cooccur with the prosodic exaggeration typical of IDS.

Increasing phonological awareness of children with special needs is of vital importance, as it helps them to face different problems they face. Therefore, this study assessed the efficacy of implementing an instructional program to raise phonological awareness in improving the phonetic sequential-memorisation ability of students with learning disabilities in Irbid city. A total of forty students from grades 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 were chosen from schools in Irbid city district's Directorate of Education to participate in the current study. The special education teacher diagnosed the participants as having learning disabilities. The participants of the study were divided into two groups, one experimental and one control group using the quasi-experimental methodology. The experimental group outperformed the control group in commanding the phonetic sequential-memorisation ability mainly due to implementing the instructional program. Due to grade differences, the participants did not demonstrate statistical differences in their phonetic sequential-memory abilities. According to the findings, the instructional program demonstrated a long-term impact on improving the phonetic sequential-memorisation abilities of students with learning disabilities in Irbid city district.

Purpose: The purpose of the present study was to examine whether there is a listening preference for child-directed speech (CDS) over backward speech in moderate-preterm infants (MPIs). Method: Eighteen MPIs of gestational age of 32.0 weeks (range: 32-34.06 weeks), chronological age of 8.09 months, and maturation age of 6.48 months served as the experimental group. The two control groups consisted of a total of 36 infants--20 full-term infants matched for chronological age and 16 full-term infants matched for maturation age. The infants were tested using the central fixation procedure and were presented with 16 trials of CDS and backward speech. A follow-up was conducted 5 years after the initial experiment using a developmental and a five-item parent questionnaire. Results: MPIs did not demonstrate a preference for CDS over backward speech, whereas both control groups demonstrated a listening preference for CDS over backward speech. MPIs showed a delayed use of first words and word combinations and lower scores on the five-item questionnaire compared to term infants. Twelve MPIs (67%) did not demonstrate a preference for CDS over backward speech. Four of them (33%) were later diagnosed with neurodevelopmental disorders. Conclusions: The lack of preference for CDS over backward speech in the MPIs group suggests delayed developmental pattern of speech processing compared to full-term peers. Delays in neurological maturation as well as listening experience in an unregulated environment outside the uterus during a sensitive period of brain development may affect the recognition of phonological and prosodic patterns that support listening preference for speech over backward speech.

The role of phonological awareness and alphabet knowledge in learning to read is well established in mono-lingual English speakers. However, it is under explored in the context of English Language Learners (ELL), especially in regions like India where the native language differs phonologically and orthographically from the target literate language, which is English. The present research explored phonological awareness and alphabet knowledge in typically developing ELL between 3.6 to 6.6 years. A total of 60 typically developing children, 20 each from Lower Kindergarten (LKG), Upper Kindergarten (UKG), and Grade I were selected from schools with English medium of instructions. The phonological awareness and alphabetic knowledge was assessed and compared between the groups. The results indicate that English Language Learners (ELL) demonstrate substantial advancements in both phonological awareness and alphabet knowledge during the initial three years of formal education, highlighting the existence of considerable potential for further development.

Psycholinguistic research on children's early language environments has revealed many potential challenges for language acquisition. One is that in many cases, referents of linguistic expressions are hard to identify without prior knowledge of the language. Likewise, the speech signal itself varies substantially in clarity, with some productions being very clear, and others being phonetically reduced, even to the point of uninterpretability. In this study, we sought to better characterize the language-learning environment of American English-learning toddlers by testing how well phonetic clarity and referential clarity align in infant-directed speech. Using an existing Human Simulation Paradigm (HSP) corpus with referential transparency measurements and adding new measures of phonetic clarity, we found that the phonetic clarity of words' first mentions significantly predicted referential clarity (how easy it was to guess the intended referent from visual information alone) at that moment. Thus, when parents' speech was especially clear, the referential semantics were also clearer. This suggests that young children could use the phonetics of speech to identify globally valuable instances that support better referential hypotheses, by homing in on clearer instances and filtering out less-clear ones. Such multimodal "gems" offer special opportunities for early word learning.

There is a scarcity of research into the relationship between speech perception and production from a multilingual perspective. The present exploratory study investigates longitudinally the acquisition of rhotic sounds in 24 adolescent learners who have the same language repertoires (English, German, Polish), with English being their L2, and German and Polish their L1 or L3. The design involved a forced-choice goodness task (for perception) and a delayed repetition task (for production) administered in both L2 and L3 at two testing times. The overall results show better performance in perception than production of L2/L3 rhotics at both testing points, although the relationship between the two domains was modulated by the L1 background and universal learnability of the target rhotics. A major effect of language proficiency was found, as overall a stronger link between the two modalities was found for the L2 than the L3 of the learner groups. However, detailed analyses demonstrate different types of perception-production link for individual learners over time.

Purpose: Talkers adapt their speech according to the demands of their listeners and the communicative context, enhancing the properties of the signal (pitch, intensity) and/or properties of the code (enhancement of phonemic contrasts). This study asked how mothers adapt their child-directed speech (CDS) in ways that might serve the immediate goals of increasing intelligibility, as well as long-term goals of supporting speech and language development in their children. Method: Mothers (N = 28) participated in a real-time interactive speech production/perception paradigm, in which mothers instructed their young (3- to 5-year-old) children, or an adult listener, to select the picture corresponding to a target word. The task was performed at low and high levels (56 vs. 75 dB SPL) of background noise to examine the Lombard effects of decreased audibility on speech production. Results: Acoustic-phonetic analyses of CDS and adult-directed speech (ADS) productions of target words and carrier phrase (e.g., "Find pig") revealed that mothers significantly enhanced the mean pitch, pitch variability, and intensity of target words in CDS, particularly at higher background noise levels and for younger children. Mothers produce CDS with a higher signal-to-noise ratio than ADS. However, limited evidence was found for phonetic enhancement of the segmental properties of speech. Although increased category separation was found in the voice onset time of stop consonants, decreased vowel category separation (an anti-enhancement effect) was observed in CDS. Conclusions: Mothers readily enhance the suprasegmental signal properties of their speech in CDS, but not the acoustic-phonetic properties of phonemes. This study fails to provide evidence of phonetic enhancement in preschool children in a dyadic communication task under noisy listening conditions.

Purpose: Apraxia of speech (AOS) is a motor speech disorder affecting articulatory planning and speech programming. When AOS is the sole manifestation of neurodegeneration, it is termed primary progressive apraxia of speech (PPAOS). Recent work has shown that there are distinct PPAOS subtypes: phonetic, prosodic, and those that do not clearly align with either (mixed). PPAOS subtypes differ with respect to the predominating motor speech difficulties, as well as disease progression and underlying pathology. Because past studies have determined PPAOS subtype based on clinical impression, the goal of the present study was to quantitatively determine the distribution of speech error types across PPAOS subtypes in a word repetition task and to investigate how word complexity affects the type and number of speech errors across PPAOS subtypes. Method: Forty-five patients with PPAOS (13 phonetic, 23 prosodic, and nine mixed) and 45 healthy controls produced multiple repetitions of words that varied in phonetic complexity. Sound additions, deletions, and substitutions/distortions (phonetic errors) and within-word segmentations (prosodic errors) were calculated. Results: All three PPAOS groups produced significantly more errors than controls, but the total number of errors was comparable among subtypes. The phonetic group produced more phonetic-type errors compared to the prosodic group but comparable to the mixed group. The prosodic group produced more segmentations compared to the phonetic and mixed PPAOS groups. As word complexity increased, the total number of errors increased for PPAOS patients. The phonetic and prosodic groups were more likely to produce phonetic- and prosodic-type errors, respectively, as word complexity increased. Conclusions: This study provides novel quantitative data showing that PPAOS subtype can be supported by the type and distribution of speech errors in a word repetition task. This may facilitate earlier, more reliable differential diagnosis and aid in disease prognosis, as PPAOS subtypes have distinct disease trajectories.

The linguistic interdependence hypothesis posits the existence of language features common to different languages. This set of characteristics, known as Common Underlying Proficiency (CUP), is a powerful facilitating agent in second language acquisition. Fluid intelligence (Gf), on the other hand, is the construct that encompasses those cognitive resources devoted to general learning, and its involvement in second language acquisition is unproven. The aim of this study is to determine the direct and interactive effect of L1 knowledge and Gf on second language acquisition in language immersion learners across different linguistic domains. The study analyzed the proficiency of 131 Romanian students in Spanish and Catalan, the official languages of Catalonia. Mixed-effects regression models were used to analyze lexical, morphosyntactic, and orthographic aspects. The results were obtained using mixed-effects regression models, revealing a particularly noticeable interdependence effect in lexical, morphosyntactic, and orthographic aspects, with differences between Catalan and Spanish. Furthermore, Gf had an impact on the morphosyntactic component with similar intensity for both languages but did not moderate the interdependence effect. The study discusses the possible causes of these effects, as well as their psycho-pedagogical consequences.

While phonetic training in laboratory settings has been shown to be helpful for second language (L2) sounds learning in prior studies , it is still open to debate whether a perception- or a production-based approach can better help adults learn L2 sounds in classroom settings. This study aimed to fill this knowledge gap. The participants were three groups of adult Chinese college students who had difficulties in perceiving and producing English/?/-/s/and/ð/-/z/. Group 1 and Group 2 were exposed to a perception-based and a production-based training approach respectively. Group 3 was the control group (no training). The training materials were "minimal pairs" embedding the target contrasts in various phonetic environments. Each session included explicit articulatory instructions and perception- or production-based practice activities. Individual participants' perception and production of the target contrasts were tested before (pretest), after (posttest), and one month after the training programme (delayed posttest). According to the results, (1) in comparison with the pretest, both the perception- and production-based groups showed significant perception and production improvement in the posttest, which remained in the delayed posttest; the control group had no significant perception or production changes across the three tests; (2) the production-based group had significantly better perception and production performance than the perception-based group both in the posttest and the delayed posttest. The overall results suggest that a production-based approach may be optimal for L2 sounds learning.

This article revisits Lee and Mok (2018) and examines how the Cantonese learners in the study produced second language (L2) Japanese short vs. long consonants which are absent in their first language (L1). Specifically, our goal is to find out whether these learners were substituting real geminates (i.e. long consonants) with the improvised strategy of an unreleased stop coda + homorganic initial consonant sequence (like in the phrase "cat tail"), which would not have been detectable with the durational ratios in the original study. We analysed the mean intensity of the words "sassa," "sesse," and "sosso," to investigate whether the learners were producing a [t]+/s/ cluster, presumably drawn from their L1. The results showed that the beginner group were indeed using this strategy, whereas the advanced learners were largely producing a genuinely geminated /s/ akin to the native speakers. The use of this transitional strategy was also speech-rate dependent, with more cases of /t/-insertion in slower speech for both learner groups. We conclude that (1) although having L1 false geminates does not enable beginners to readily acquire genuine L2 geminates, the latter can be learned after enough exposure, and (2) during this transition, Cantonese learners can draw on L1 phonotactic knowledge to improvise creative and effective strategies to attain L2 durational targets.

This study investigates sources of phonological cross-linguistic influence (CLI) at the initial stages of third language (L3) acquisition in light of the predictions of the second language (L2) Status Factor Model, the Typological Primacy Model, the Cumulative Enhancement Model, the Linguistic Proximity Model and the Scalpel Model. The productions of L3 rhotic sounds, /w/ and final obstruent devoicing, elicited in a delayed repetition task, were analysed auditorily in two groups of adolescent instructed learners with L1-German--L2-English--L3-Polish and L1-Polish--L2-English--L3-German language backgrounds. The results showed that dominant articulatory routines from the L1 play an important role in determining the source(s) of phonological CLI in the initial stages of L3 acquisition, at least in a learning constellation when L2 articulations have not been mastered yet in a consistently target-like manner. Based on loglinear and multiple correspondence analyses, the sources of phonological CLI were found in this study to vary feature-by-feature, thus giving some support to the Linguistic Proximity Model and the Scalpel Model. However, the high inter- and intra-individual variation that was found is so far not accounted for by any of the existing models.

While much research has examined second language (L2) phonetic acquisition, less research has examined first language (L1) attrition in terms of the voice onset time (VOT) of voiceless stops. The current study examined L2 acquisition and L1 attrition in the VOT of word-initial voiceless stops among late English-Arabic and Arabic-English bilinguals in order to explore the role of phonetic similarity in L2 acquisition and L1 attrition of speech. The study included 60 participants: 15 monolingual Arabic speakers, 15 monolingual English speakers, 15 English-Arabic bilinguals and 15 Arabic-English bilinguals. The bilinguals had been living in their L2 environment for more than 15 years. The participants narrated two cartoons in Arabic and/or three in English. The monolingual groups' results revealed clear cross-language differences in the VOT of voiceless plosives between the two languages. Phonetic similarity affected L2 acquisition in that those L2 sounds that were close in phonetic space to L1 sounds (i.e. /t/ and /k/) were more difficult to acquire than those that were dissimilar to L1 sounds (i.e. /p/). However, L1 attrition showed an asymmetric pattern, occurring only in the English-Arabic bilinguals' productions of the English /k/. We suggest that markedness might contribute to explaining this asymmetry.

Two acoustic studies of voice onset time (VOT) in sibilant-stop (ST) consonant clusters, produced by first language (L1) speakers of Polish, are presented. In the first, a baseline study of L1 Polish comparing ST clusters with initial singleton stops, a small degree of VOT shortening after /s/ was found for /p/, but not /t/. The second study compared ST productions by L1 Polish speakers of second language (L2) English across two levels of proficiency, speaking in both L1 and L2. Rather than shortening post-/s/ VOT, as is common in L1 English, speakers from both proficiency groups exhibited longer VOT in their L2 than in their L1. These results are consistent with the claim that Polish learners of English mistakenly apply the long VOT of L2 English singleton fortis stops in the post-/s/ position. A phonological interpretation of the results within the Onset Prominence framework is provided.

The expansion of the English language produced by non-native speakers has, in recent decades, been discussed by applied linguists from various theoretical perspectives. The discussion has highlighted evidence showing that the multiplicity and diversity of English uses have given rise to an acceleration in the rate of inter-variety contacts where pronunciation, as it is claimed, is the principle factor in international intelligibility. Further, it has been demonstrated that difficulty in intelligibility increases with the typological distance between interlocutors' first languages, referring to the distinct way that English pronunciation is strongly shaped by the phonetics of speakers' first language. Consequently, a careful examination of the typological distance between speakers' L1 and the target language--English--is compelling for the underpinning of the teaching and learning of pronunciation. Unfortunately, in English language teaching pedagogy, variations in pronunciation may be neglected in favor of other factors. In addition, pronunciation teaching experts stress that the study of pronunciation should be developed by locally-based educators, researchers, and authorities who are exposed to the relevant socio-cultural context, rather than being dominated by native speaker scholars based in Anglophone countries. Thai English pronunciation is considered to be one of the minor accents in World Englishes, and some local English language educators in Thailand may have insufficient in-depth knowledge of the linguistic characteristics of this accent. Presented here is a systematic review of Thai-accented English phonology, analyzed and synthesized via a review of relevant literature: the characteristics of Thai-accented English are clearly displayed, providing a reference for future researchers aiming to explore further Thai-accented English. The review can also be applied to other L1-influenced Englishes in the Southeast Asian region which possess similar phonological and phonetic characteristics.

In this study, we designed a class model using the Evernote application for the pronunciation learning of special moras, and applied it to a class to verify the learner's recognition of special moras and the effectiveness of pronunciation duration. This study consisted of 30 students who took an intermediate Japanese language class, which started in the first semester of 2019, and Japanese literature majors who had not yet been in Japan for more than 6 months. We conducted special mora pre- and post-tests and surveyed them. Positive results were obtained based on the research question of whether the application affects the self-awareness of special moras, which represented a significant academic achievement in terms of pronunciation duration. In addition, it was observed that learning using Evernote enabled a significant change in lecture satisfaction through one-to-one feedback work with learners. Although the research results were limited by the small size of the group, it was possible to suggest a method of special moras learning using Evernote, and it is believed that it will help in-class learning in the future.