Research suggests that the size of the second language (L2) vowel inventory relative to the native (L1) inventory may affect the discrimination and acquisition of L2 vowels. Models of non-native and L2 vowel perception stipulate that naïve listeners' non-native and L2 perceptual patterns may be predicted by the relationship in vowel inventory size between the L1 and the L2. Specifically, having...

This paper presents a novel approach to acoustic model adaptation of a recognizer for non-native spontaneous speech in the context of recognizing candidates’ responses in a test of spoken English. Instead of collecting and then transcribing spontaneous speech data, a read speech corpus is created where non-native speakers of English read English sentences of different degrees of pronunciation d...

As speech recognition systems improve in quality, they become attractive as components in applications which will be used by non-native speakers, both applications designed speciically for language learners and those intended for general use. Recognizer performance on speakers who are not uent in the language they are speaking, however, is often poor. A number of factors contribute to recogniti...

This paper examines to what extent acoustic similarity between native and non-native vowels predicts non-native vowel perception and whether this process is influenced by listeners' native and other non-native dialects. Listeners with Northern and Southern British English dialects completed a perceptual assimilation task in which they categorized tokens of 15 Dutch vowels in terms of English vo...