The present investigation explored the relation between the amount of language input and neural responses in English monolingual (N=18) and Spanish-English bilingual (N=19) infants. We examined the mismatch negativity (MMN); both the positive mismatch response (pMMR) and the negative mismatch response (nMMR), and identify a relationship between amount of language input and brain measures of spe...

Previous studies have shown improved sensitivity to native-language contrasts and reduced sensitivity to non-native phonetic contrasts when comparing 6-8 and 10-12-month-old infants. This developmental pattern is interpreted as reflecting the onset of language-specific processing around the first birthday. However, generalization of this finding is limited by the fact that studies have yielded ...

Non-native speakers often have difficulties with prosody; stress and intonation patterns that differ from those of native speakers can contribute to “foreign accent,” even at high proficiency levels. Although effects of a listener’s native language on the perception of prosody are well established, few studies have examined non-native prosody production. In particular, it is not known whether t...

The present study examined to what extent proficiency in a non-native language influences speech perception in noise. We explored how English proficiency affected native (Swedish) and non-native (English) speech perception in four speech reception threshold (SRT) conditions, including two energetic (stationary, fluctuating noise) and two informational (two-talker babble Swedish, two-talker babb...

The intelligibility of speech in noisy environments depends not only on the functionality of listeners' peripheral auditory systems, but also on cognitive factors such as their language learning experience. Previous studies have shown, for example, that normal-hearing listeners attending to a non-native language have more difficulty identifying speech targets in noisy conditions than do native ...

Phonological transfer from the native language is a common problem for non-native speakers that has repeatedly been shown to result in perceptual deficits vis-à-vis native speakers. It was hypothesized, however, that transfer could help, rather than hurt, if it resulted in a beneficial bias. Due to differences in pronunciation norms between Korean and English, Koreans in the U.S. were predicted...

Native and non-native use of language differs, depending on the proficiency of the speaker, in clear and quantifiable ways. It has been shown that customizing the acoustic and language models of a natural language understanding system can significantly improve handling of non-native input; in order to make such a switch, however, the nativeness status of the user must be known. In this paper, w...

Perception of charisma, the ability to influence others by virtue of one’s personal qualities, appears to be influenced to some extent by cultural factors. We compare results of five studies of charisma speech in which American, Palestinian, and Swedish subjects rated Standard American English political speech and Americans and Palestinians rated Palestinian Arabic speech. We identify acoustic-...

In the present paper, corpus linguistics becomes a valuable methodological tool for cross-linguistic research on speech and prosody. The inherent complexity of speech analysis and prosodic annotation increases when the object of study is a longitudinal computerized corpus of native and nonnative varieties of English. The lack of generally accepted prosodic transcription systems adds further dif...