Relatively little is known about differences in English-administered, clinical neuropsychological test performance between native versus non-native English speakers, with prior literature yielding mixed findings. The purpose of this study was to examine the performance of native and non-native English speakers with similar age and educational backgrounds on a variety of cognitive tests. Partici...

Visual information about lip and facial movements plays a role in audiovisual (AV) speech perception. Although this has been widely confirmed, previous behavioural studies have shown interlanguage differences, that is, native Japanese speakers do not integrate auditory and visual speech as closely as native English speakers. To elucidate the neural basis of such interlanguage differences, 22 na...

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology has achieved a level of maturity, where it is already practical to be used by novice users. However, most non-native speakers are still not comfortable with services including ASR systems, because of the accuracy on non-native speakers. This paper describes our approach in constructing a non-native corpus particularly in French for testing and adapt...

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...

there are two common ways to assign relative importance in spoken language: tonic prominence and thematization. the former is expressing the main points of information units in speech (halliday, 1994), and the latter is putting an element at the beginning of a clause. this study explores how relative importance is realized in english and persian. it also investigates how advanced persian learne...

The purpose of the present study is to examine a) how lower-intermediate and upperintermediate level Turkish learners of English-as-a-foreign language (EFL) realize refusals in English, b) the differences between native and non-native speakers of English in the use of refusals, and c) if L2 proficiency affects possible pragmatic transfer or not. The participants in the study included 18 native ...

A speech recognition system is subjected to the speech of non-native speakers, using both native and non-native acoustic phone models. The problems involved with the mapping of phoneset from the nonnative to native language are investigated, and a detailed analysis of phone confusions is made. For Dutch speakers, British English acoustic models give the best word recognition results.

Do people who speak different languages think differently, even when they are not using language? To find out, we used nonlinguistic psychophysical tasks to compare mental representations of musical pitch in native speakers of Dutch and Farsi. Dutch speakers describe pitches as high (hoog) or low (laag), whereas Farsi speakers describe pitches as thin (nazok) or thick (koloft). Differences in l...

To investigate acoustic feature differences between Japanese nativeand non-native speakers in spoken Japanese, 29 Japanese words were digitally recorded by 10 each of Japanese, French, Korean, Thai, Taiwanese, and Vietnamese speakers. The results revealed that acoustic features in each language have different tendencies in relative duration, intensity, and fundamental frequency. For example, co...