Shu-chen Ou, Ph.D.

The laboratory was established in 2010 and is located in the College of Liberal Arts of National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan. It is mainly used for research purposes, particularly for running experiments related to the perception of speech sounds by native and non-native speakers. We preform analyses on a wide range of sound units and properties, including segments (vowels and consonants), suprasegmentals (stress, tone, duration, rhythm and intonation) and prosodic structure (syllable, foot, phonological words, phonological phrases and intonational phrases). In most cases, speakers apply their prior knowledge when performing linguistic tasks such as identifying contrastive sounds and segmenting speech into smaller units. It is therefore not surprising that they exhibit various types of non-target-like patterns when learning the phonological system of another language. For example, Taiwanese EFL learners may have difficulty recognizing the stress pattern of an English word if the word occurs in some pitch accent contexts. In recent years, our research has been focusing on speech segmentation by native speakers of Taiwanese Southern Min and the perception of English lexical stress by Taiwanese EFL learners. It is hoped that our work can shed a light on current theories and models of L1/L2 speech perception and provide practical suggestions to learning and teaching English pronunciation in the era of globalization.