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 study aims to investigate native speakers’ perception of prosodic variation of Japanese utterances. The pitch contour above the word level is hard to determine due to individual variation or pragmatic and para-linguistic factors. Nevertheless, native speakers’ intonation is relatively consistent as long as the context and intention of the utterance is predetermined. On the other hand, L2 s...

The development of automatic speech recognition systems poses several known difficulties. One of them concerns the recognizer’s accuracy when dealing with non-native speakers of a given language. Normally a recognizer precision is lower for non-native users, hence our goal is to improve this low accuracy rate when the speech recognition system is confronted with a foreign accent. A typical usag...

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 ...

In this paper, the falling-rising tone in the English of very proficient non-native speakers is discussed. The speech data was collected in connection with MA thesis seminar sessions where the speakers, Finnish university students of English, discussed research methodology. Of the non-native speakers of English, only those who performed at high level of accuracy in a separate proficiency test w...

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...

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 ...

The present study examined email communication practices of two groups of students in Iran and the United States to uncover the probable differences between Iranian and American email communication norms. The study also aimed at investigating how power distance in academic centers influences students’ choices of communication strategies in email writing. The use of two politeness strategies nam...

This study investigates pitch interplay in non-native (L2) speech. Specifically, experiments were conducted to examine how native English speakers perceive and produce Mandarin statements and unmarked questions. Results from the perceptual experiment showed English listeners did not resolve the simultaneous pitch cues from intonation and tone the same way as native Mandarin speakers. They had l...