This paper reports the different realisations of the prosodic structure of Japanese telephone numbers in native and non-native Japanese speech. In Japanese, spoken telephone numbers have a structured prosody called bipodic template; and their accentuation is determined to occur every two digits. Pitch contours of the spoken telephone numbers were analysed and compared among speakers of Japanese...

This paper investigates the unique pharyngeal and uvular consonants of Arabic from the automatic speech recognition (ASR) point of view. Comparisons of the recognition error rates for these phonemes are analyzed in five experiments that involve different combinations of native and non-native Arabic speakers. The most three confusing consonants for every investigated consonant are uncovered and ...

The suprasegmental characteristics of non-native speech are generally described as differing from those of native speech. Recent work has shown that in addition to speaking at overall slower rates, non-native speakers in a reading task are more variable than native speakers in their speaking rate across utterances [1]. However, read speech may contain sources of variability that are specific to...

While both insight and divergent thinking tasks are used to study creativity, there are reasons to believe that the two may call upon very different mechanisms. To explore this hypothesis, we administered a verbal insight task (riddles) and a divergent thinking task (verbal fluency) to 16 native English speakers and 16 non-native English speakers after they underwent Transcranial Direct Current...

It is considered that a number of factors, such as the external social structure, language proficiency, and relative knowledge of the content domain, affect interaction. Therefore, one of the participants is thought to play a more important role in interaction and to dominate the conversation. However, some studies have illustrated that both participants in a conversation actively contribute to...

The aim of this paper is to investigate how automatic prosodic labeling systems contribute to the evaluation of non-native pronunciation. In particular, it examines the efficiency of a group of metrics to evaluate the prosodic competence of non-native speakers, based on the information provided by sequences of labels in the analysis of both native and non-native speech. A group of Sp ToBI label...

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...

the present study aims at exploring kinship terms and the different ways in which they are used to refer to and address relatives and non-relatives in hawrami, an iranian language spoken in paveh, a border city in kermanshah province. the relevant linguistic and cultural data are obtained primarily by one of the researchers as a native speaker of the dialect and through field works and intervie...

Many vehicles today are equipped with navigation systems, and all of these systems use speech or a combination of speech and graphics to provide drivers with directions to their destinations. This study investigates the effect of gender of voice when providing driving instructions in English to drivers that are non-native speakers of English. In a 2(native/non-native) by 2(gender of voice) betw...

the purpose of this study was to examine cook’s (2003) ‘multiple competence’ by investigating backward pragmatic transfer (from l2 [english] to l1 [persian]) in refusals to invitations. it explored participants’ frequency and content of refusal strategies in l1 regarding the status (i.e., power and distance) of interlocutors and the proficiency level of efl learners. the participants were persi...