This book addresses important issues of speech processing and language learning in Chinese. It highlights perception and production of speech in healthy and clinical populations and in children and adults. This book provides diverse perspectives and reviews of cutting-edge research in past decades on how Chinese speech is processed and learned. Along with each chapter, future research directions have been discussed. With these unique features and the broad coverage of topics, this book appeals to not only scholars and students who study speech perception in preverbal infants and in children and adults learning Chinese, but also to teachers with interests in pedagogical applications in teaching Chinese as Second Language.

Including contributions from a team of world-renowned international scholars, this volume is a state-of-the-art survey of second language speech research, showcasing new empirical studies alongside critical reviews of existing influential speech learning models. It presents a revised version of Flege's Speech Learning Model (SLM-r) for the first time, an update on a cornerstone of second language research. Chapters are grouped into five thematic areas: theoretical progress, segmental acquisition, acquiring suprasegmental features, accentedness and acoustic features, and cognitive and psychological variables. Every chapter provides new empirical evidence, offering new insights as well as challenges on aspects of the second language speech acquisition process. Comprehensive in its coverage, this book summarises the state of current research in second language phonology, and aims to shape and inspire future research in the field. It is an essential resource for academic researchers and students of second language acquisition, applied linguistics and phonetics and phonology.

This book is concerned with studying speech perception and production in an L2. It deals with segments, syllables, and features above syllable level (the suprasegmental level). The volume brings together careful theoretical and empirical research conducted in different countries, including the United States of America, Greece, Northern Cyprus, Canada, the Republic of Cyprus, Israel, and Spain.

Recent Research in Second Language Phonetics/Phonology: Perception and Production reports the findings of seventeen interphonology studies on perception/production of sounds by different first language speakers. All the papers describe careful empirical research, and as such will be of great interest to anyone working, or intending to work, in the specific field of second language phonological acquisition. However, given that speech production and perception are highly complex skills, the research findings in this volume will also be relevant to those with a broader interest in language learning or cognition in general.

Deals with the language experience in second language speech learning

A state-of-the-art survey of second language speech research, presenting revision of an influential model alongside new empirical studies.

This study examines the acquisition of phonological duration contrast in Japanese, and aims to contribute to second language acquisition theory from the viewpoint of interlanguage phonology. Acoustic techniques are used to investigate the mechanisms of English-speaking learners' speech perception and production.