This study examined whether native English (NE) speakers perceive non-native tones of Mandarin in terms of their English intonational categories (Flat pitch, Question, Uncertainty, and Statement). The results indicated that NE listeners assimilated non-native tones to their native intonational categories, which share phonetic similarities with those ofMandarin tones. Thus, the assumption that a...

Most popular models of narratives and narrative analyses have been drawn on native stories, yet EFL learners’ narratives have not received due narrative analysis. The present study then aims at scrutinizing the structure of personal English stories as told by EFL learners. To this aim, three hundred narratives were collected through classroom discussions and interviews. Qualitative analysis met...

English intonation can be difficult for L2 speakers to learn, particularly for those whose L1 intonation system works differently from English. This study investigates whether Hong Kong English (HKE) speakers whose L1 is Cantonese have knowledge of the appropriate English intonation patterns in specific contexts. Results from an intonation pattern selection tasks indicate that HKE speakers (n =...

This study tested the predictions of the Speech Learning Model (SLM, Flege, 1988) on the case of native Japanese (NJ) speakers' perception and production of English /ɹ / and /l/. NJ speakers' degree of foreign accent, intelligibility of /ɹ -l/ productions, and ability to perceive natural speech /ɹ -l/ were assessed as a function of length of residency in North America, age of arrival in North A...

Native Language Identification (NLI) is the process of identifying the native language of non-native speakers based on their speech or writing. It has several applications namely authorship profiling and identification, forensic analysis, second language identification, and educational applications. English is one of the prominent language used by most of the non-English people in the world. Th...

In this study, we compare the effects of English lexical features on word duration for native and non-native English speakers and for non-native speakers with different L1s and a range of L2 experience. We also examine whether non-native word durations lead to judgments of a stronger foreign accent. We measured word durations in English paragraphs read by 12 American English (AE), 20 Korean, an...

This study examines a classroom-based second-language speaking test that uses picture description tasks and rating scale of functional adequacy (FA) in terms measurement quality. We used four FA scores from 36371 Japanese learners English at two public senior high schools 44 undergraduate graduate students. Each examinee was evaluated by or three raters. many-facet Rasch to stack longitudinal d...

The expanding role of English as the language of international communication has important implications for English language pedagogy. Statistics show that speakers of English as a second and foreign language worldwide largely outnumber the speakers of English as a first language, so that International English can no longer be considered the ‘exclusive property’ of its native speakers (Ferguson...

This work investigates the impact of non-native English accents on the performance of an large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) system. Based on the GlobalPhone corpus [1], a speech corpus was collected consisting of English sentences read by native speakers of Bulgarian, Chinese, German and Indian languages. To accommodate for non-native pronunciations, two directions are follo...