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The aim of this study was to test the abilities of native Sinhalese speakers to perceive and produce the English phonemes /w/ and Nl. It is well known that people who speak Sinhalese as their first language have difficulty in acquiring the English (L2) phoneme contrast w-v. This is commonly seen among these speakers in their L2 speech production, Experiment 1 involved native Sinhalese speakers completing language background questionnaires and carrying out an English phoneme identification task of natural speech for assessment of their L2 perception. Experiment 1 also consisted of a voice recording of the Sinhalese subjects in order to assess their L2 speech production. Experiment 2 required the native Sinhalese speakers to carry out an identification/goodness task of synthesised English phonemes and to state whether the stimuli could be assimilated to the native Sinhalese phoneme A)/. Experiment 2 also involved an identification/goodness task in which native Sinhalese bilinguals and English monolinguals assessed the synthesised stimuli for assimilations to the English phonemes /w/ and Nl. Experiment 3 was carried out by both Sinhalese and English speakers and involved a discrimination task and similarity task. The results showed that the Sinhalese bilinguals generally had a low sensitivity to perception of the English phonemes. The Sinhalese Bilinguals who had more proficient use of their second language L2 showed a high sensitivity for acoustical changes in the dimension of manner of articulation wile the English speakers were sensitive to both manner and place of articulation.

Much of the research into the spelling process focuses on developmental factors with reference to young learner writers (e.g. Gentry 1982, Frith 1985). Despite some studies into specific spelling difficulties of adults (e.g. Klein and Millar 1990) there is little research selectively focusing on persistent spelling difficulties at secondary school level. The aim of the research was thus to develop and evaluate an approach to the teaching and learning of spelling which would meet the diversity of needs experienced by young adults at secondary school level. The approach would need to recognise the value of paired learning (Topping and Whiteley 1990) as an effective means of addressing individualised spelling needs and of promoting spelling acquisition. The research was conducted in 5 secondary schools and involved a sample population of 33 teachers and 73 students. Additionally, as a result of two publications, a further selected sample of 25 teachers was drawn from the responses evoked. Research methods, within the framework of action research, involved the design and refining of the approach. This included observing and interviewing teachers and students and analysing the Researcher's recorded experiences as a participant observer. The findings of the research revealed that the approach, designated 'Prompt Spelling', was an effective method which significantly raised the spelling achievement of students with spelling difficulties in terms of increased standardised spelling ages and improved recognition of the principles of English orthography. Prompt Spelling was found to raise students' levels of metacognitive awareness whilst prompting systematic exploratory learning through discovering how to spell whilst providing a context within which teachers' appreciation of what students need to know about spelling was increased as they observed students' effective learning.

A growing phenomenon in British English is Regional Dialect Levelling. This is where accents lose their local characteristics in favour of more supralocal forms. The result is that different areas cease to have recognisably different dialects. For instance, neighbouring towns or villages become linguistically indistinguishable. Earlier elements of dialectal diversity are shaved off through processes of linguistic smoothing. This research focuses on two key issues: 1. The understanding of the mechanisms involved in regional dialect levelling; 2. How accounts of dialect levelling can inform models of sound change more generally. In this thesis I present an apparent time sociolinguistic study of regional dialect levelling in Hastings, a town on the coast of East Sussex, England. The study employs an empirical analysis of a number of ongoing sound changes. Specifically, the study examines three sound changes that, through previous analyses, have been shown to operate through different mechanisms: two features that are attributed to the externally motivated processes levelling and diffusion, and one internally motivated change driven by pressures inherent in the linguistic system. These contrasting mechanisms have been chosen in order to investigate a number of issues: first, to examine how each type of change may contribute to regional dialect levelling; and second, the analysis of these features enables a close examination of the interplay between external and internal forces of language change. More broadly, the evidence from this research is used to evaluate traditional principles of sound change in order to investigate how well they hold within a variety that is undergoing regional dialect levelling.

Theories of phonological word formation (e.g. Selkirk 1980, 1986; Nespor & Vogel 1986; Lahiri & Plank 2010) assume that prosodic units are not isomorphic with syntactic units. However, the prosodic status of compounds remain uncertain, at least in so far as language planning and phonological encoding is concerned. Theories are not transparent about the prosodic status of compounds: although a noun-noun compound in English consists of two lexical words (and therefore two prosodic words), it can also act as a single prosodic item by exhibiting main stress on the first unit and carrying inflection. Thus the question remains controversial - should these items be treated as a single prosodic unit, similar to a monomorphemic word, or as two distinct units for the purpose of post-lexical representation? Recursive word formation may suggest that compounds are a single unit. Psycholinguistic evidence measuring speech onset latency in native speakers of Dutch and Portuguese also shows compounds being treated as single prosodic units (Wheeldon & Lahiri 1997, 2002; Vigario, 2010). Although recent studies have produced evidence for the prosodification of compounds in native speakers, little is known about the process in non-native speakers. Our research questions are as follows: what is the post-lexical planning unit in English, and how do non-native fluent speakers of English plan these units for the purpose of phonological encoding? To investigate our hypotheses, we focus on the phonological encoding of compounds with and without encliticisation, for native and non-native speakers of English. In a series of delayed priming tasks, we found overwhelming evidence that reaction times reflected the total number of prosodic units in the target sentence. In online tasks, however, speech latencies only reflected the size of the first prosodic unit. Taken together,these results suggest that, despite containing two lexical and prosodic words, English compounds are planned as single prosodic units, exhibiting encliticisation and reaction times similar to those of monomorphemic words. As shown by the results in this study, this naming paradigm has proved extremely beneficial for eliciting data about the structure of prosodic units in speech production. Not only was it successful for native speakers of Dutch, European Portuguese, and English, we also found that it was easily implemented into a study of post-lexical encoding in non-native speakers of English.