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In this paper, we demonstrate the use of Visible Vowels to detect formant and durational differences between L2 and L1 speakers. We used a dataset that contains vowel measures from L1 speakers of French and from L2 learners of French, with Italian, Spanish and English as L1. We found that vowels that are not part of the L1 phonological system are often pronounced differently by L2 speakers. Inspired by the Native Language Magnet Theory which was introduced by Patricia Kuhl in 2000, we introduced magnet plots that relate vowels shared by the French phonological system and the learners’ phonological system—the magnet vowels—to the vowels found only in the French phonological system. At a glance, it can be seen which vowels are attracted to the magnets and which vowels become further away from the magnets. When comparing vowel spaces, we found that the shape of the French vowel space of the English learners differed most from the shape of L1 speakers’ vowel space. Finally, it was found that the vowel durations of the L2 speakers are greater than that of the L1 speakers of French, especially those of the English learners of French.

The reported study investigated factors that could affect inter-examiner reliability in the pronunciation assessment component of speaking tests. The authors hypothesized that the rating of pronunciation is susceptible to variation in assessment due to the amount of exposure examiners have to nonnative English accents. An inter-rater variability analysis was conducted on the English pronunciation ratings of three test candidate interlanguages: Chinese, Korean, and Indian English. Pronunciation was rated by 99 International English Language Testing System (IELTS) examiners across five geographically dispersed test centres. The examiners had either prolonged exposure, or no, or little exposure to the interlanguage of the candidates. A significant proportion of examiners rated pronunciation higher when they had prolonged exposure, and lower when they had no, or little, exposure to the candidates' interlanguage. The location of the test centre also had a significant effect on the pronunciation rating, independent of the familiarity variable, with a significant proportion of NNS raters scoring candidates from their home country higher than those who were not. It is recommended that interlanguage phonology familiarity should be considered in the design of speaking tests and rater training and that research is required into test centre bias and the phonological judgements and awareness of OPI raters. (Verlag, adapt.).

Infants under six months are able to discriminate native and non-native consonant contrasts equally well, but as they learn the phonological systems of their native language, this ability declines. Current explanations of this phenome non agree that the decline indiscrimination ability is linked to the formation of native-language phonemic categories. The goal of this study was to evaluate the role of input statistics in learning these categories: our hypothesis was that relative frequency is a determinant of the relative order in which categories are acquired. English-learning infants of two age groups (6.5 months and 8.5 months) were tested on their ability to discriminate non-native consonant contrasts using the Conditioned Head Turn Procedure. As predicted, older infants were worse in their performance on the more frequent coronal stop contrast than on the less frequent dorsal stop contrast. In contrast, 6.5-month-olds discriminated both contrasts equally well. An adult control group tested with an AX task also discriminated both contrast sequally. These results provide preliminary confirmation of the hypothesis that frequency plays an important role in tuning of phonological systems to properties of the native language. A simple attractor model suffices to account for these and previous results on loss of discrimination of non-native-language contrasts and suggests that the technique of measuring graded loss of multiple contrasts, in combination with observation of inputfrequencies, can offer a powerful methodof assessing infants' phonological representations.