Enhancement of laryngeal contrasts in non-native English clear speech: a comparison between L2-immersed sequential bilinguals and L1-immersed speakers.

Clear speech, a speaking style used to mitigate communicative circumstances affecting the transmission or decoding of speech signal, often involves the enhancement of language-specific phonological contrasts, including laryngeal contrasts. This study investigates the role of language dominance in the implementation of language-specific laryngeal contrasts in L2 clear speech. Two groups of Korean-English speakers (L1 Korean) were tested: a relatively less Korean-dominant L2-immersed group of sequential bilinguals ( = 30) and a strongly Korean-dominant L1-immersed group ( = 30), with dominance assessed based on the results of the Bilingual Language Profile.

Changes in coastal ecosystems affected by overburden dumping from amber open-cut mining on the Sambia Peninsula (Baltic Sea).

The Sambia Peninsula (Kaliningrad region) is historically well known for its amber mining. The 2019 year was the last year of direct overburden disposal into the Baltic Sea as a part of technological amber mining process. The extremely high-suspended particulate matter concentrations during that disposal were recorded immediately after the discharge of significant volumes of pulp and reached 200 mg/L.

Non-native talkers and listeners and the perceptual benefits of clear speech.

This study examined the intelligibility benefit of native and non-native clear speech for native and non-native listeners when the first language background of non-native talkers and listeners is matched. All four combinations of talkers and listeners were tested: native talker-native listener, non-native talker-native listener, native talker-non-native listener, and non-native talker-non-native listener. Listeners were presented with structurally simple but semantically anomalous English sentences produced clearly or casually and mixed with speech-shaped noise at 0 dB signal-to-noise ratio and asked to write down what they heard.

The effect of allophonic variability on L2 contrast perception: Evidence from perception of English vowels.

Current frameworks of L2 phonetic acquisition remain largely underspecified with respect to the role of L1 allophonic variability in acquisition. Examining the role of L1 allophonic variability, the current study compared the perceptual discrimination of English /i-ɪ/ and /ɛ-æ/ by L1 Korean and L1 Mandarin speakers. Korean and Mandarin vowel inventories differ in that Mandarin employs significantly greater allophonic variation of the mid-region /E/ vowel.