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50 Years of ERIC
50 Years of ERIC
The Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) is celebrating its 50th Birthday! First opened on May 15th, 1964 ERIC continues the long tradition of ongoing innovation and enhancement.

Learn more about the history of ERIC here. PDF icon

Showing all 7 results
The Relationship between L1 Fluency and L2 Fluency Development
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Derwing, Tracey M.; Munro, Murray J.; Thomson, Ronald I.; Rossiter, Marian J. – Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2009
A fundamental question in the study of second language (L2) fluency is the extent to which temporal characteristics of speakers' first language (L1) productions predict the same characteristics in the L2. A close relationship between a speaker's L1 and L2 temporal characteristics would suggest that fluency is governed by an underlying trait. This…
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Mandarin Chinese, Ukrainian, Immigrants
The Mutual Intelligibility of L2 Speech
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Munro, Murray J.; Derwing, Tracey M.; Morton, Susan L. – Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2006
When understanding or evaluating foreign-accented speech, listeners are affected not only by properties of the speech itself but by their own linguistic backgrounds and their experience with different speech varieties. Given the latter influence, it is not known to what degree a diverse group of listeners might share a response to second language…
Descriptors: Mutual Intelligibility, Effect Size, Mandarin Chinese, Native Speakers
Modeling Perceptions of the Accentedness and Comprehensibility of L2 Speech: The Role of Speaking Rate.
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Munro, Murray J.; Derwing, Tracey M. – Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2001
A study observed a significant curvilinear relationship between speaking rates and accentedness and comprehensibility judgments of utterances produced by users from a variety of first language backgrounds. A second study manipulated rates with speech compression-expansion software established that this effect was due to the rate differences rather…
Descriptors: Computer Software, Language Proficiency, Pronunciation, Second Language Instruction
The Effects of Noise on the Intelligibility of Foreign-Accented Speech.
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Munro, Murray J. – Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1998
The effect of the presence of cafeteria noise on the perception of native English and Mandarin-accented speech was assessed in a sentence-verification task and a sentence-transcription task. The outcomes of both tasks indicated strong adverse effects of noise on the intelligibility of many of the accented utterances. (Author/JL)
Descriptors: English, English (Second Language), Interlanguage, Listening Comprehension
Accent, Intelligibility, and Comprehensibility. Evidence from Four L1s.
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Derwing, Tracey M.; Munro, Murray J. – Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1997
This study extends previous research on the relationships among intelligibility, perceived comprehensibility, and accentedness. The researchers obtained accent and comprehensibility ratings and transcriptions of accented speech of Cantonese, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish intermediate English-as-a-Second-Language students from native English…
Descriptors: Cantonese, College Students, Comparative Analysis, Dialects
Nonsegmental Factors in Foreign Accent: Ratings of Filtered Speech.
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Munro, Murray J. – Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1995
Untrained native English listeners assigned foreign accent scores to sentence and narrative utterances produced by native English speakers and Mandarin-speaking learners of English, rendered unintelligible through low-pass filtering. Because the filtered speech stimuli contained little of what could be considered segmental information, results…
Descriptors: Distinctive Features (Language), English (Second Language), Error Analysis (Language), Language Research
The Word Unit in Second Language Speech Production and Perception.
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Flege, James Emil; Munro, Murray J. – Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1994
Studied the word as a unit in second-language speech acquisition. Spanish and English monolinguals' renditions of "taco" differed systematically. Bilinguals' accuracy in producing the various segments of a second-language word may be interrelated. In judging second-language speech, listeners respond to phonetic errors distributed over the entire…
Descriptors: Acoustic Phonetics, Adult Students, Bilingualism, College Students