This study introduces a model of lexical proficiency based on novel computational indices related to word context. The indices come from an updated version of the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Lexical Sophistication (TAALES) and include associative, lexical, and semantic measures of word context. Human ratings of holistic lexical proficiency were obtained for a spoken corpus of 240 transcr...

This study investigated how native language background influences the intelligibility of speech by non-native talkers for non-native listeners from either the same or a different native language background as the talker. Native talkers of Chinese (n = 2), Korean (n = 2), and English (n = 1) were recorded reading simple English sentences. Native listeners of English (n = 21), Chinese (n = 21), K...

This paper proposes an English speech recognition system which can recognize both non-native (i.e. Japanese) and native English speakers’ pronunciation of English speech. The system uses a bilingual pronunciation lexicon in which each word has both English and Japanese phoneme transcriptions. The Japanese transcription is constructed considering typical Japanese pronunciation of English. Japane...

According to Flege's Speech Learning Model, the speech sounds of a bilingual's languages are contained in one common phonological space. This predicts bidirectional influence on the articulation of these speech sounds. We investigated the influence of a late-learned second language (L2) on the first language (L1) in a group of German L1 attriters in Anglophone North America (i.e., long-term emi...

This paper describes the development of the Wildcat Corpus of native- and foreign-accented English,a corpus containing scripted and spontaneous speech recordings from 24 native speakers of American English and 52 non-native speakers of English.The core element of this corpus is a set of spontaneous speech recordings, for which a new method of eliciting dialogue-based, laboratory-quality speech ...

According to Flege's Speech Learning Model, the speech sounds of a bilingual's languages are contained in one common phonological space. This predicts bidirectional influence on the articulation of these speech sounds. We investigated the influence of a late-learned second language (L2) on the first language (L1) in a group of German L1 attriters in Anglophone North America (i.e., long-term emi...

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 ...

This study assessed the effect of English-language experience on nonnative speakers’ production and perception of English vowels. Twenty speakers each of German, Spanish, Mandarin, and Korean, as well as a control group of 10 native English (NE) speakers, participated. The non-native subjects, who were first exposed intensively to English when they arrived in the United States (mean age"25 year...

This paper examines to what extent acoustic similarity between native and non-native vowels predicts non-native vowel perception and whether this process is influenced by listeners' native and other non-native dialects. Listeners with Northern and Southern British English dialects completed a perceptual assimilation task in which they categorized tokens of 15 Dutch vowels in terms of English vo...