The role of visual cues in native listeners' perception of speech produced by nonnative speakers has not been extensively studied. Native perception of English sentences produced by native English and Korean speakers in audio-only and audiovisual conditions was examined. Korean speakers were rated as more accented in audiovisual than in the audio-only condition. Visual cues enhanced word intell...

This study investigated how coda voicing contrast in English would be phonetically encoded in the temporal vs. spectral dimension of the preceding vowel (in vowel duration vs. F1/F2) by Korean L2 speakers of English, and how their L2 phonetic encoding pattern would be compared to that of native English speakers. Crucially, these questions were explored by taking into account the phonetics-proso...

In this study we analyse 18 metrics which were extracted fully automatically from the acoustic signal to describe the melodic characteristics of recordings of English read by L2 Chinese speakers from Shanghai. The metrics were compared to those of native English speakers recording the same material and also to comparable Chinese recordings read by the same speakers from Shanghai and also by oth...

Second languages (L2s) are often learned through spoken and written input, and L2 orthographic forms (spellings) can lead to non-native-like pronunciation. The present study investigated whether orthography can lead experienced learners of EnglishL2 to make a phonological contrast in their speech production that does not exist in English. Double consonants represent geminate (long) consonants i...

Our investigation involves an analysis of the miscues made by both native speakers and non-native speakers of English while reading aloud in English. The results of our miscue analysis support there being one common underlying reading process in both first and second languages involving the active construction of meaning through the application of both top-down and bottom-up strategies. Languag...

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...

This study investigates whether adult L2 learners’ experience with lexical tones and pitch accent in their first language facilitates the acquisition of L2 lexical tones. Three groups of beginning learners of Mandarin with different L1 prosodic experience: native Hmong (a tone language), native Japanese (a pitch and accent language), and native English (a non-tone, non-pitch accent language) sp...

The ability to process the linguistic input in real time is crucial for successfully acquiring a language, and yet little is known about how language learners comprehend or produce language in real time. Against this background, we have conducted a detailed study of grammatical processing in language learners using experimental psycholinguistic techniques and comparing different populations (ma...

This study provides a direct comparison of boundary and prominence perception strategies between Japanese EFL learners and native speakers of English using the Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) method. Although RPT experiments are available for both native English speakers [1], [2], [3] and Japanese EFL learners [4], a direct comparison of the available data is problematic as the stimuli sets u...

The aim of this study was to identify regional structural differences in the brains of native speakers of a tonal language (Chinese) compared to nontonal (European) language speakers. Our expectation was that there would be differences in regions implicated in pitch perception and production. We therefore compared structural brain images in three groups of participants: 31 who were native Chine...