The present study investigates the extent of word-final devoicing in Russian for three groups of speakers: monolingual native Russian speakers (4 Ss), native Russian speakers with knowledge of English (7 Ss), and American English learners of Russian (9 Ss). Thirty-four minimal pairs of Russian words differing in the underlying voicing of word-final obstruents were recorded. Acoustic analysis fo...

The processing of English noun-noun compounds (NNCs) was investigated to identify the extent and nature of differences between the performance of native speakers of English and advanced Spanish and German non-native speakers of English. The study sought to establish whether the word order of the equivalent structure in the non-native speakers' mothertongue (L1) had an influence on their process...

Focus is of communication function in discourse. How it is realized by native speakers has long been in vigorous discussion. However, studies on focus concerning language learners are few, with the ones taking dialects into account even fewer. This study takes eight Zhenjiang dialect speakers as the subjects and investigates if their phonetic and phonological realization of narrow focus in Engl...

Context speaking rate is an important cue in spoken-word recognition in a speaker’s native language [1], [2]. Native speakers entrain to the context rate; when they encounter ambiguous regions of speech, native speakers perceive fewer words and/or syllables when the surrounding speaking material is presented a relatively slow rate than when presented with a relatively fast context speaking rate...

______________________________________________________ Dialectal Effect on Articulation Rate in French This paper compares the articulation rate of 3 distinct varieties of French: Parisian French (hereafter PA); Swiss French spoken in Neuchâtel (hereafter NE) and French spoken by Swiss German speakers (hereafter CH) who have been living in a French speaking environment (in Neuchâtel) for 20 yea...

Automatic evaluation of non-native speech accentedness has potential implications for not only language learning and accent identification systems but also for speaker and speech recognition systems. From the perspective of speech production, the two primary factors influencing the accentedness are the phonetic and prosodic structure. In this paper, we propose an approach for automatic accented...

In order to improve automatic recognition of English commands spoken by non-native speakers, we have modeled non-native pronunciation variation of Dutch, French and Italian. The results of lexical and acoustical modeling appeared to be source language and speaker dependent. Lexical modeling only resulted in a substantial improvement (of 35%) for the French speakers. Acoustic model adaptation ha...

This paper presents a preliminary investigation of the differences in pitch range in English spoken as L1 and L2. In this study, the productions of 5 English sentences read by 18 native (American) English speakers and 18 non-native (Italian) English speakers are compared. The hypothesis being tested is that Italian speakers of English have a narrower pitch range and less pitch variation that na...