•The frequency of prosodic events has an impact on the perception of nativeness and fluency: – Liscombe (2007): distances between high boundary tones correlates with higher pronunciation scores. – Rosenberg (2009): higher rate of pitch accenting for of Mandarin Chinese reading English segments These stuides rely on ToBI annotations. How do these labels apply to non-native speech? •Native/non-na...

We report an experiment that investigates how native and non-native Korean speakers’ interpretation of null pronouns in subject object position is influenced by structural discourse-level factors. compare speakers to L2 learners whose L1, Spanish, only has position. find guided factors as well coherence relations, with nulls being more sensitive relations than nulls. In contrast, our results su...

The involvement of neural motor and sensory systems in the processing of language has so far mainly been studied in native (L1) speakers. In an fMRI experiment, we investigated whether non-native (L2) semantic representations are rich enough to allow for activation in motor and somatosensory brain areas. German learners of Dutch and a control group of Dutch native speakers made lexical decision...

The purpose of the present study is to examine a) how lower-intermediate and upperintermediate level Turkish learners of English-as-a-foreign language (EFL) realize refusals in English, b) the differences between native and non-native speakers of English in the use of refusals, and c) if L2 proficiency affects possible pragmatic transfer or not. The participants in the study included 18 native ...

In this paper, we discuss the design of a database of recorded and transcribed read and spontaneous speech of semiuent, strongly-accented non-native speakers of English. While many speech applications work best with a recognizer that expects native-like usage, others could bene t from a speech recognition component that is forgiving of the sorts of errors that are not a barrier to communication...

In this paper we demonstrate that a psychoacoustic model-based distance measure performs better than a speech signal distance measure in assessing the pronunciation of individual foreign speakers. The experiments show that the perceptualbased method performs not only quantitatively better than a speech spectrum-based method, but also qualitatively better, hence showing that auditory information...