This study examines effects of short, medium, and extended second language (L2) experience (3 months, 3 years, and 10 years of United States residence, respectively) on the production of five suprasegmentals (stress timing, peak alignment, speech rate, pause frequency, and pause duration) in six English declarative sentences by 30 adult Korean learners of English and 10 adult native English speakers. Acoustic analyses and listener judgments were used to determine how accurately the suprasegmentals were produced and to what extent they contributed to foreign accent. Results revealed that amount of experience influenced the production of one suprasegmental (stress timing), whereas adult learners' age at the time of first extensive exposure to the L2 (indexed as age of arrival in the United States) influenced the production of others (speech rate, pause frequency, pause duration). Moreover, it was found that suprasegmentals contributed to foreign accent at all levels of experience and that some supraseg-This research was partially supported by research grants from the University of Illinois and Brigham Young University+ Many thanks are extended to Youngju Hong for her help in testing the Korean participants and to Molly Mack and James E+ Flege for their advice throughout this research project+ The authors gratefully acknowledge Randall Halter, Elizabeth Gatbonton, and five anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper as well as Randall Halter for his invaluable statistical assistance+

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The current study investigated linguistic influences on comprehensibility (ease of understanding) and accentedness (linguistic nativelikeness) in second language (L2) learners' extemporaneous speech. Target materials included picture narratives from 40 native French speakers of English from different proficiency levels. The narratives were subsequently rated by 20 native speakers with or without linguistic and pedagogical experience for comprehensibility, accentedness, and 11 linguistic variables spanning the domains of phonology, lexis, grammar, and discourse structure. Results showed that comprehensibility was associated with several linguistic variables (vowel/consonant errors, word stress, fluency, lexis, grammar), whereas accentedness was chiefly linked to pronunciation (vowel/consonant errors, word stress). Native speaking listeners thus appear to pay particular attention to pronunciation, rather than lexis and grammar, to evaluate nativelikeness but tend to consider various sources of linguistic information in L2 speech in judging comprehensibility. The use of listener ratings (perceptual measures) in evaluating linguistic aspects of learner speech and their implications for language assessment and pedagogy are discussed.

This study investigated how listener experience (extent of previous exposure to non-native speech) and semantic context (degree and type of semantic information available) influence measures of intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness of non-native (L2) speech. Participants were 24 native English-speaking listeners, half experienced and half inexperienced with L2 speech, who transcribed and rated 90 English utterances spoken by six English and six Mandarin speakers. The utterances varied along two dimensions: real-world expectations (true vs. false utterances) and semantic meaningfulness (meaningful vs. meaningless utterances). Listeners with more experience understood more speech from the L1 and L2 speakers than listeners with less experience but did not rate it differently in comprehensibility and accentedness. All listeners understood and rated the utterances from L2 speakers based on the semantic context available: true–false utterances were understood and rated best, meaningless utterances least. These findings have implications for evaluating learner pronunciation and for training learners in successful L2 communication strategies.

The objective of this study was to determine how bilinguals' age at the time of language acquisition influenced the organization of their phonetic system(s). The productions of six English and five Korean vowels by English and Korean monolinguals were compared to the productions of the same vowels by early and late Korean-English bilinguals varying in amount of exposure to their second language. Results indicated that bilinguals' age profoundly influenced both the degree and the direction of the interaction between the phonetic systems of their native (L1) and second (L2) languages. In particular, early bilinguals manifested a bidirectional L1-L2 influence and produced distinct acoustic realizations of L1 and L2 vowels. Late bilinguals, however, showed evidence of a unidirectional influence of the L1 on the L2 and produced L2 vowels that were "colored" by acoustic properties of their L1. The degree and direction of L1-L2 influences in early and late bilinguals appeared to depend on the degree of acoustic similarity between L1 and L2 vowels and the length of their exposure to the L2. Overall, the findings underscored the complex nature of the restructuring of the L1-L2 phonetic system(s) in bilinguals.