Many factors have been studied to account for why and how the phenomenon of sound symbolism occurs. This paper proposes an "articulatory dynamism" model, which may contribute as another, novel factor for the understanding of sound symbolism. The model was constructed based on the idea that the way humans use words in spoken language may somehow be related to the experience of articulatory activities. To verify the model, I conducted a sound-picture matching experiment with native speakers of English. The participants were asked to judge whether a nonsense word stimulus matched a visual stimulus by pressing a key labeled "matching" or "not matching." The word stimuli and visual stimuli either shared the feature of spatial distance, or did not. The overall results showed that the participants tended to give more negative judgements ("not matching") than positive judgements ("matching"). However, when the pairs did not share the concept of distance and articulation distance, they showed a remarkably higher negative judgement rate. This suggests that the way humans visually perceive distance may relate to the way they kinesthetically perceive distance through articulatory movements.

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This study examines two issues: (1) Whether listeners in the inner and expanding circles have the same perceptions of “natural” patterns in English pronunciation, and (2) whether listeners in the expanding circle, who have varied backgrounds, have the same perception patterns. Three groups of listeners participated in this study: 13 English native speakers (ENSs) as inner circle listeners, and 33 Japanese learners of English (JLEs) and 8 Indonesian learners of English (ILEs) as expanding circle listeners. They were asked to listen to sample sentences in four patterns: a fall and fall-rise intonation, with and without vowel epentheses between consonants. They rated the naturalness of speech on a 10-point Likert scale. The three groups’ evaluations of the recordings without vowel epenthesis were significantly higher than those with vowel epenthesis. While all groups showed similar tendencies in their perceptual evaluations, JLEs tended to rate recordings with vowel epenthesis lower than ENSs and ILEs. Results indicate that vowel epenthesis is a significant predictor of accentedness ratings in listeners from the inner and expanding circles, and that JLEs may stress it when judging the naturalness of their English pronunciation.

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This paper reports on the present-day vowel features of Lancaster (Lancashire) accent of English in comparison with vowels of Preston (Lancashire) and Bradford (West Yorkshire) accents. All the data are from original recordings made on field trips in 2018 and 2019. The vowels are shown on F1-F2 vowel diagrams, and the recent developments and the preservation of traditional Northern English accents discussed. (1) GOOSE is a central vowel. (2) Diphthongization of FACE and GOAT is in progress. (3) FOOT is [ʊ] and STRUT is [ɵ] in Lancaster accent although Northern English did not undergo the FOOT-STRUT Split. (4) PALM is [aː], which is different from a retracted vowel [ɑː] as in Preston and eastern Lancashire. The paper also discusses the phonemic and allophonic differences of Lancaster English vowels historically and orthographically.

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This article recorded the lecture on English phonetics by online lessons during the COVID-19 pandemic and considered the educational effects from the record and the students' questionnaire results. In the questionnaire, students answered their subjective feelings of learning effects and burdens on ten items such as teaching materials, learning activities, and assignments using a scale of 1 to 5 and provided free-form answers. The results showed that the lecture video had a very high sense of learning effect and was highly effective from the correlation with the feeling of burden in their learning. On the other hand, group activities were the most burdensome. However, the students needed to interact and have collaborative learning with their classmates to continue their motivated learning. It suggests that online lessons need both on-demand style and streaming lessons. Based on these results, this article proposed effective lectures on English phonetics as online lessons.

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