This study was motivated by three factors, which also contribute to its significance for today’s academic writing. First, research articles are the significant means of communication between the writers all over the world. Second, persuasion and organization are crucial notions in academic writing where the authors have to consider the academic audiences and their needs.  Third, some writers ar...

OBJECTIVE Non-native listeners do not recognize English sentences as effectively as native listeners, especially in noise. It is not entirely clear to what extent such group differences arise from differences in relative weight of semantic versus syntactic cues. This study quantified the use and weighting of these contextual cues via Boothroyd and Nittrouer's j and k factors. The j represents t...

In some languages (e.g. Czech), changes in vowel duration affect word meaning, while in others (e.g. Spanish) they do not. Yet for other languages (e.g. Dutch), the linguistic role of vowel duration remains unclear. To reveal whether Dutch represents vowel length in its phonology, we compared auditory pre-attentive duration processing in native and non-native vowels across Dutch, Czech, and Spa...

In this research, we explored the effect of noise interruption rate on speech intelligibility. Specifically, we used the Hearing In Noise Test (HINT) procedure with the original HINT stimuli (English) and Igbo stimuli to assess speech reception ability in interrupted noise. For a given noise level, the HINT test provides an estimate of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) required for 50%-correct sp...

Adult non-native perception is subject to influence from a variety of factors, including native language experience. The present research examines the effect of linguistic experience on non-native tone perception and tone word learning. Native Thai and English-speaking participants completed seven sessions of lexical identification training on words distinguished by Cantonese tones. A tone iden...

The provision of automatic systems that can provide conversational practice for beginners would make a valuable addition to existing aids for foreign language teaching. To achieve this goal, the SCILL (Spoken Conversational Interaction for Language Learning) project is developing a spoken dialogue system that is capable of maintaining interactive dialogues with non-native students in the target...

The rise of bilingual education triggers an important question: which language is preferred for a particular school activity? Our field experiment (n = 120) shows that students (aged 13-15) who process feedback in non-native English have greater self-serving bias than students who process feedback in their native Dutch. By contrast, literature on the foreign-language emotionality effect suggest...

Several recent studies have suggested that deaf children perform more poorly on working memory tasks compared to hearing children, but these studies have not been able to determine whether this poorer performance arises directly from deafness itself or from deaf children's reduced language exposure. The issue remains unresolved because findings come mostly from (1) tasks that are verbal as oppo...

v Regarded as a mismatch problem between the training and test conditions § Training condition: native speech § Testing condition: non-native speech § Widely used methods in speaker or environment adaptation v Research works dedicated to non-native ASR § Acoustic modeling § Pronunciation modeling § Language modeling § Hybrid modeling § Many researches uses a small amount of non-native speech Wh...