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Abstract Having a mixed-cultural membership becomes increasingly common in our modern society. It is thus beneficial several ways to create Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) that reflect background as well, e.g., for educational settings. For research with such IVAs, it essential they are classified non-native by members of target culture. In this paper, we focus on variations IVAs’ speech the ...

Both auditory and visual information plays an important role for audiovisual speech perception during face-to-face communication. Several behavioral studies have shown that native English speakers and native Japanese speakers behaved differently in audiovisual speech perception. We hypothesized that there would be differences in neural processing between native English speakers and native Japan...

This paper argues that it would be useful for ergonomists and experienced English Language Teaching (ELT) professionals to collaborate as this would be of substantial interest to both sets of professionals. The ongoing debate in ELT on International English (IE) might usefully help to guide ergonomists if and when they require to judge that English is used at appropriately high levels in the wo...

Despite the importance of interlanguage pragmatic rating (ILP) in the second language teaching and learning context, scant attention has been devoted to it. This study aims to investigate native EFL teachers’ major criteria in assessing the speech act of complaint produced by Iranian EFL learners. To fulfill this end, two groups of experienced native raters, including American (n=47) and Britis...

Recent research suggests that using visual speech in auditory training can improve auditory-only speech perception. The long term aim of our work is to investigate this approach for hearing-impaired users, in particular cochlear-implant users. In the pilot study presented in this paper, we use spectrally-distorted speech to train two different groups of normal hearing subjects: native English a...

This paper compares the effectiveness of n-way (n > 2) classification using a probabilistic classifier to the use of multiple binary probabilistic classifiers. We describe the use of binary classifiers in both Round Robin and Elimination tournaments, and compare both tournament methods and n-way classification when determining the language of origin of speakers (both native and non-native Engli...

This study investigated how speech recognition in noise is affected by language proficiency for individual non-native speakers. The recognition of English and Chinese sentences was measured as a function of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in sixty native Chinese speakers who never lived in an English-speaking environment. The recognition score for speech in quiet (which varied from 15%-92%) was...