Language experience in second language speech learning: In honor of James Emil Flege (review)

This edited volume provides a comprehensive and up-to-date examination of the field of L2 speech perception and production. With chapters written by leading scholars in the field, the diversity of topics represented reflects the degree of influence Flege's speech learning model (SLM) has had.

The volume is divided into five parts. Part 1 comprises five chapters that provide an overview of L2 speech learning. In their introductory chapter, Munro and Bohn do an excellent job of bringing a sense of coherence to the volume as a whole. Next, Best and Tyler describe what Flege's SLM and Best's Perceptual Assimilation Model have in common and how they are fundamentally different. This is a particularly important chapter given that these two models are sometimes treated as equal. Strange discusses the crucial issue of how best to measure phonetic similarity across two languages. Guion and Pederson provide evidence that adult L2 learners can access speech learning mechanisms and that explicitly orienting learners' attention toward some L2 contrasts helps to promote learning. Frieda and Nozawa's research reinforces claims that the effect of a learner's L1 on L2 speech learning is mediated by the learner's degree of experience with the L2.

Part 2 deals with the concept of foreign accent in terms of age and experience. Birdsong's study suggests that motivation and pedagogical intervention allow adult L2 learners to attain a more native-like accent. Fox and McGory demonstrate that Japanese learners who live in the American South do not develop the ability to perceive vowels found in the ambient dialect, but instead are most sensitive to a standard American English dialect. Jongman and Wade argue that while variability in accented English may cause difficulties for native listeners, non-native listeners who share the same L1 background as those producing the accented speech may find accented contrasts easier to perceive.

Part 3 concerns L2 consonant and vowel learning. McAllister shows that the vowel duration cue used in L1 Swedish does not appear to facilitate the use of vowel duration to distinguish final stop voicing contrasts in L2 English. Wang and Behne report that Mandarin speakers' L2 English stop closure duration, VOT, and vowel duration are intermediate between Mandarin and English values. Schmidt finds that English listeners' perception of Korean consonant productions varies by context and token. Of methodological concern, Wayland demonstrates that the results of traditional category identification tasks are not entirely comparable to results from discrimination tasks.

Part 4 introduces issues that go beyond the level of the segment. Gottfried provides evidence that prior musical training is correlated with adult L2 learners' ability to identify, discriminate, and imitate Mandarin tone contrasts. Questions concerning whether musical tone should be compared with linguistic tone are raised in the two chapters that immediately follow. Sereno and Wang summarize a series of studies indicating that the perception of linguistic tone is not the same as the perception of pitch, providing strong evidence from neurolinguistic research. Burnham and Mattock's review of tone perception research reinforces this position, drawing parallels between tone perception and the perception of phonemic segments. Finally, Aoyama and Guion find L1 and age effects in the development of L2 English pitch and syllable duration by recently arrived Japanese speakers in the United States.

Part 5 addresses emerging issues in L2 speech learning. Piske discusses what implications Flege's body of research may have for classroom-based foreign language learning and proposes a number of strategies that may be employed to strengthen foreign language education. Walley examines interactions between the phonological level of L2 speech learning and the lexical level in terms of word frequency and the density of lexical neighbourhoods. Bent, Bradlow, and Smith investigate correlates of L2 speech intelligibility and find that while inaccuracy in L2 vowel production is correlated with intelligibility, the contribution of consonants is more complex; only inaccuracy in [End Page...