Language Experience in Second Language Speech Learning: In honor of James Emil Flege

This stimulating collection of articles from leading international researchers provides a state-of-the-art overview of core issues in second language speech perception and production. Aimed at phoneticians, speech scientists, psycholinguists, applied linguists, and pedagogical specialists, it presents engaging discussions of fundamental problems and controversies within the field, as well as new empirical findings arising from a variety of methodological approaches. Its twenty chapters, inspired by the ground-breaking work of James E. Flege, address such topics as the theoretical underpinnings of second language speech learning; the nature and etiology of foreign accents; the effects of age, experience, and training; speech intelligibility; and the acquisition of vowels, consonants, tone, and prosody. This volume will serve as a valuable resource, not only for researchers, but for anyone wishing to gain an understanding of an area of linguistics that is rapidly growing in importance.

Table of Contents:
1. Dedication; 2. Alphabetical List of Contributors; 3. Acknowledgments; 4. Biographical Note (by Flege, James Emil); 5. PART I: The nature of L2 speech learning; 6. The study of second language speech learning: A brief overview (by Munro, Murray J.); 7. Nonnative and second-language speech perception: Commonalities and complementarities (by Best, Catherine T.); 8. Cross-language phonetic similarity of vowels: Theoretical and methodological issues (by Strange, Winifred); 9. Investigating the role of attention in phonetic learning (by Guion, Susan G.); 10. You are what you eat phonetically: The effect of linguistic experience on the perception of foreign vowels (by Frieda, Elaina M.); 11. PART II: The concept of foreign accent; 12. Nativelike pronunciation among late learners of French as a second language (by Birdsong, David); 13. Second language acquisition of a regional dialect of American English by native Japanese speakers (by Fox, Robert Allen); 14. Acoustic variability and perceptual learning: The case of non-native accented speech (by Jongman, Allard); 15. PART III: Consonants and vowels; 16. Strategies for Realization of L2-Categories: English /s/ - /z/ (by McAllister, Robert); 17. Temporal remnants from Mandarin in nonnative English speech (by Wang, Yue); 18. Cross-language consonant identification: English and Korean (by Schmidt, Anna Marie); 19. The relationship between identification and discrimination in cross-language perception: The case of Korean and Thai (by Wayland, Ratree P.); 20. PART IV: Beyond consonants and vowels; 21. Music and language learning: Effect of musical training on learning L2 speech contrasts (by Gottfried, Terry L.); 22. Behavioral and cortical effects of learning a second language: The acquisition of tone (by Sereno, Joan A.); 23. The perception of tones and phones (by Burnham, Denis); 24. Prosody in second language acquisition: Acoustic analyses of duration and F0 range (by Aoyama, Katsura); 25. PART V: Emerging issues; 26. Implications of James E. Flege's research for the foreign language classroom (by Piske, Thorsten); 27. Speech learning, lexical reorganization, and the development of word recognition by native and non-native English speakers (by Walley, Amanda C.); 28. Phonemic errors in different word positions and their effects on intelligibility of non-native speech: All's well that begins well (by Bent, Tessa); 29. The graphical basis of phones and phonemes (by Port, Robert F.); 30. References; 31. Author Index; 32. Subject Index