English as the lingua franca of the modern world is spoken by increasing numbers of individuals from various nations and of different linguistic backgrounds. Detection of foreign accents can potentially lead to improvement in the development of ASR systems which have to cope with vast, but, at a certain level of generalization, finite variation of English accents. Samples of Czech English have ...

As the lingua franca of the 21st century, English has become the main language for intercultural communication for those wanting to embrace globalization. In Portugal, it is the second language of most public and private domains influencing its culture and discourses. Language contact situations transform languages by the incorporations they make from other languages and Portugal has...

The world wide web is a natural setting for cross-lingual information retrieval; web content is essentially multilingual, and web searchers are often polyglots. Even though English has emerged as the lingua franca of the web, planning for a business trip or holiday usually involves digesting pages in a foreign language. The same holds for searching information about European culture, sports, ec...

The present study used a sentence verification task to assess the processing cost involved in native Danish listeners’ attempts to comprehend true/false statements spoken in Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and English. Three groups of native Danish listeners heard 40 sentences each which were translation equivalents, and assessed the truth value of these statements. Group 1 heard sentences in Danis...

This paper attempts to quantify differences in speaking rates in first and second languages, in the context of the growth of English as a lingua franca, where more L2 speakers than ever before are using English to perform tasks in their working environments. One such task is the oral presentation. The subjects in this study were fourteen fluent English second language speakers who held the same...