To be understood, non-native speakers must adapt their speech in order to produce contrasts in their second language (L2) that are not present in their first language (L1). Here we examine mechanisms hypothesized to facilitate such adaptation within spoken dialogue: priming, affiliation, and audience design. In two experiments, Korean non-native speakers of English interacted in a referential c...

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between bilingualism and phonological awareness by re-evaluating structural sensitivity theory and expanding cross-language transfer theory. The study was conducted with three groups of 1st and 2nd graders matched in age, SES and non-verbal IQ: a) monolingual English-speaking children from a general education program, b) native Japanese-...

Speaking assessment is still construed as a complicated, under-researched process from the vantage point of tasks and rater characteristics. The present study aimed at investigating if and how English Major and none English Major teachers differ in their perception of the construct of oral proficiency while assessing learners’ L2 oral proficiency.  To this end, 38 male and female non-native EFL...

This study investigated the relative contribution of auditory and visual information to speech perception by looking at the effect of visual and auditory degradation on the weighting given to visual cues for native and non-native speakers. Multiple iterations of /ba/, /da/ and /ga/ by five Australian English and five Mandarin Chinese speakers were presented to Australian English, British Englis...

Thirty-two native American-English speaking children and adults reliably reproduced a non-contrastive segmental length distinction encoded in a set of monomorphemic nonce words. However, participants were unable to explicitly identify the contrast in a same/different judgment task. The results support the view that grammatically irrelevant, lexically specific temporal patterns can be learned an...

Existing speaking tests only require nonnative speakers to engage in dialogue when the assessment is done by humans. This paper examines the viability of using off-the-shelf systems for spoken dialogue and for speech grading to automate the holistic scoring of the conversational speech of non-native speakers of English.

Background: The causal basis of the different patterns of language recovery following stroke in bilingual speakers is not well understood. Our approach distinguishes the representation of language from the mechanisms involved in its control. Previous studies have suggested that difficulties in language control can explain selective aphasia in one language as well as pathological switching betwe...

in this study, we investigated the errors native speakers of farsi commit when rating the esl essays, using a many-facet rasch measurement approach. to that end, two native speakers of farsi rated 56 essays which 28 male and female advanced language learners learning farsi as a second language at persian language centre at imam khomeini international university in qazvin, iran wrote on two topi...

Previous research has shown that anaphor resolution in a non-native language may be more vulnerable to interference from structurally inappropriate antecedents compared to native anaphor resolution. To test whether previous findings on reflexive anaphors generalize to non-reflexive pronouns, we carried out an eye-movement monitoring study investigating the application of binding condition B dur...