Phon&Phontastic is back!
The Department of Contemporary English and Multilingualism (DoCEM) and the Experimental Phonology and Phonetics Lab (EPPL) are excited to announce the first Phon&Phontastic meeting of the academic year!
26 November 2025
12:00 (note the one-time-only change from our usual 11:30!)
Room 211
We’ll kick things off with a guest talk by Gil Verbeke (University of Ghent): “Phonetic variation in regional accents of English: How does it affect perception and spoken word recognition for L2 listeners?”
After the talk, we’ll reveal the results of the perception quiz from Reading Groups Day and chat about our plans for the upcoming year.
Everyone is warmly invited — come join us and see how fun phonetics & phonology can be!
Abstract of the talk:
Listening in a second language (L2) often presents persistent challenges for late L2 learners. These challenges are particularly acute when the sound system of the target language contains sounds that do not exist in a learner’s first language (L1). Spanish learners of English, for instance, frequently struggle to distinguish ‘ship’ (/ʃɪp/) from ‘sheep’ (/ʃip/). According to prominent models of L2 speech learning, this difficulty arises because Spanish lacks the /ɪ/-/i/ contrast found in English; it only has /i/. Consequently, learners tend to interpret both English vowels as instances of /i/ (e.g., Best & Tyler, 2007; Escudero, 2005; Flege, 1995; Flege & Bohn, 2021). The problem may become even more complex when learners encounter speakers with unfamiliar regional accents, in which the concrete realization of speech sounds differs from their expectations (e.g., Adank et al., 2009; Verbeke et al., under review).
In this talk, I will explore how phonetic variation across regional English accents influences L2 speech perception and processing for late L2 learners. Specifically, I will present preliminary results from two ongoing studies with Catalan-Spanish bilingual learners of English. The first study investigates how these learners perceive regionally accented English vowels through the lens of their first languages, and how accurately they can identify vowel categories across different accents (Verbeke, Cebrian & Simon, in prep.). The second study shifts the focus to spoken word recognition, and examines how variation in vowel production influences the speed and accuracy with which learners identify spoken words (Verbeke, Llompart & Mitterer, in prep.). Together, these studies aim to shed light on how regional pronunciation differences shape both offline perception and online processing for adult L2 learners of English.