Previous research has found that listeners understand talkers who speak with the same accent as themselves better than others. The aim of the current study was to investigate how speech intelligibility is modulated by this talker-listener accent interaction when native and non-native listeners hear spontaneous speech. To this end, native Southern British English listeners and native Korean list...

This paper reports on a initial research activity in the area of non-native children’s speech recognition that was carried out by exploiting two children databases, one consisting of speech collected from native English children, the other one consisting of English sentences read by Italian learners of English in the same age range of the native speakers. By exploiting the corpus of native spee...

This study was motivated by three factors, which also contribute to its significance for today’s academic writing. First, research articles are the significant means of communication between the writers all over the world. Second, persuasion and organization are crucial notions in academic writing where the authors have to consider the academic audiences and their needs.  Third, some writers ar...

Little research has examined working memory capacity (WMC) in signed language interpreters and deaf signers. This paper presents the findings of a study that investigated WMC in professional Australian Sign Language (Auslan)/English interpreters and deaf signers. Thirty-one professional Auslan/English interpreters (14 hearing native signers and 17 hearing non-native signers) completed an Englis...

AbstractThe interference of the native language in acquiring a foreign language is unavoidable. In an attempt to explore the phenomenon why this occurs, the study was conducted in English as a foreign language writing. The study also investigated how the native language interference occurred in the writing process. In fact, this qualitative study explored the reasons and the process of na...

The Computerized Propositional Idea Density Rater (CPIDR, pronounced "spider") is a computer program that determines the propositional idea density (P-density) of an English text automatically on the basis of part-of-speech tags. The key idea is that propositions correspond roughly to verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions. After tagging the parts of speech using MontyLingua...

Previous approaches for automated essay scoring (AES) learn a rating model by minimizing either the classification, regression, or pairwise classification loss, depending on the learning algorithm used. In this paper, we argue that the current AES systems can be further improved by taking into account the agreement between human and machine raters. To this end, we propose a rankbased approach t...

Native speakers of Spanish with different amounts of experience with English classified stop-consonant voicing (/b/ versus /p/) across different speech accents: English-accented Spanish, native Spanish, and native English. While listeners with little experience with English classified target voicing with an English- or Spanish-like voice onset time (VOT) boundary, predicted by contextual VOT, l...

In this research, we explored the effect of noise interruption rate on speech intelligibility. Specifically, we used the Hearing In Noise Test (HINT) procedure with the original HINT stimuli (English) and Igbo stimuli to assess speech reception ability in interrupted noise. For a given noise level, the HINT test provides an estimate of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) required for 50%-correct sp...