Non-native speakers of English far outnumber native speakers; English is the main language of books, newspapers, airports, air-traffic control, international business, academic conferences, science, technology, diplomacy, sports, international competitions, pop music, and advertising (British Council 2014). Online education in the form of massive online open courses is also primarily in English...

This study investigates whether adult L2 learners’ experience with lexical tones and pitch accent in their first language facilitates the acquisition of L2 lexical tones. Three groups of beginning learners of Mandarin with different L1 prosodic experience: native Hmong (a tone language), native Japanese (a pitch and accent language), and native English (a non-tone, non-pitch accent language) sp...

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...

The aim of the study was to assess speech recognition in noise using multitalker babble of native and non-native language at two different signal to noise ratios. The speech recognition in noise was assessed on 60 participants (18 to 30 years) with normal hearing sensitivity, having Malayalam and Kannada as their native language. For this purpose, 6 and 10 multitalker babble were generated in K...

Less-Detailed Representation of Non-Native Language: Why Non-Native Speakers' Stories Seem More Vague Shiri Lev-Ari a & Boaz Keysar b a Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, and Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, DEC-ENS, CNRS, EHESS, Paris, France b Department of Psychology, University of Chicago Accepted author version posted online: 11 Jun 2012.Version of re...

Native Language Identification (NLI) is the process of identifying the native language of non-native speakers based on their speech or writing. It has several applications namely authorship profiling and identification, forensic analysis, second language identification, and educational applications. English is one of the prominent language used by most of the non-English people in the world. Th...

Three groups of listeners identified the vowel in CV and VC syllables produced by an American English talker. The listeners were (a) native speakers of American English, (b) native speakers of Australian English (different dialect), and (c) native speakers of Dutch (different language). The syllables were embedded in multispeaker babble at three signal-tonoise ratios (0 dB, 8 dB, and 16 dB). Th...

We introduce a general method for automatic diagnostic evaluation of the pronunciation of individual non-native speakers based on a model of the human auditory system trained with native data stimuli. For each phoneme class, the Euclidean geometry similarity between the native perceptual domain and the non-native speech power spectrum domain is measured. The problematic phonemes for a given sec...

Previous research suggests that infant speech perception reorganizes in the first year: young infants discriminate both native and non-native phonetic contrasts, but by 10-12 months difficult non-native contrasts are less discriminable whereas performance improves on native contrasts. In the current study, four experiments tested the hypothesis that, in addition to the influence of native langu...