Previous research in cross-language perception has shown that non-native listeners often assimilate both single phonemes and phonotactic sequences to native language categories. This study examined whether associating meaning with words containing non-native phonotactics assists listeners in distinguishing the non-native sequences from native ones. In the first experiment, American English list...

It has been hypothesized that some aspects of a second language (L2) might be learned easier than others if a language is learned late. On the other hand, non-use might result in a loss of language skills in one's native, i.e. one's first language (L1) (language attrition). To study which, if any, aspects of language are affected by either late acquisition or non-use, long-term German immigrant...

This paper describes the development of the Wildcat Corpus of native- and foreign-accented English,a corpus containing scripted and spontaneous speech recordings from 24 native speakers of American English and 52 non-native speakers of English.The core element of this corpus is a set of spontaneous speech recordings, for which a new method of eliciting dialogue-based, laboratory-quality speech ...

a community of practice may shape and reshape the identity of members of the community through providing them with situated learning or learning environment. this study, therefore, is to clarify the salient learning-based features of the language teaching community of practice that might formulate the identity of language teachers. to this end, the study examined how learning situations in two ...

Previous studies have demonstrated that native listeners modify their interpretation of a speech sound when a talker produces an ambiguous sound in order to quickly tune into a speaker, but there is hardly any evidence that non-native listeners employ a similar mechanism when encountering ambiguous pronunciations. So far, one study demonstrated this lexically-guided perceptual learning effect f...

We present experiments that show the influence of native language on lexical choice when producing text in another language – in this particular case English. We start from the premise that non-native English speakers will choose lexical items that are close to words in their native language. This leads us to an etymologybased representation of documents written by people whose mother tongue is...

It is possible to comprehend speech and discriminate languages by viewing a speaker's articulatory movements. Transcranial magnetic stimulation studies have shown that viewing speech enhances excitability in the articulatory motor cortex. Here, we investigated the specificity of this enhanced motor excitability in native and non-native speakers of English. Both groups were able to discriminate ...

Listeners usually adjust rapidly to unfamiliar regional and foreign accents in their native (L1) language. Non-native (L2) listeners, however, usually struggle when confronted with unfamiliar accents in their non-native language. The present study asks how native language background of L2 speakers influences lexical adjustments in a novel accent of German, in which several vowels were systemati...

A speech recognition system is subjected to the speech of non-native speakers, using both native and non-native acoustic phone models. The problems involved with the mapping of phoneset from the nonnative to native language are investigated, and a detailed analysis of phone confusions is made. For Dutch speakers, British English acoustic models give the best word recognition results.