Learning the syntax of a second language (L2) often represents a big challenge to L2 learners. Previous research on syntactic processing in L2 has mainly focused on how L2 speakers respond to "objective" syntactic violations, that is, phrases that are incorrect by native standards. In this study, we investigate how L2 learners, in particular those of less than near-native proficiency, process p...

Best practice eyewitness interviewing mnemonics have not been tested with linguistically diverse samples. Cognitively complex may overload non-native speakers’ cognitive resources, which are already engaged in speaking a language. Social facilitation help speakers, who might be hesitant to report details. The current study the reverse order mnemonic (cognitively complex) and set of introductory...

Models for English The majority of ‘Outer Circle’ (Kachru 1985, 1992) speakers of English speak English as a second language: that is, they have not grown up speaking English from infancy, and they use it with people from their own country. In Outer Circle countries, there are also substantial numbers of native speakers of English, people who have learnt English from infancy. The English of the...

This study investigates the non-native production of rhotics by Mandarin speakers learning Persian as L3 and it compares the results with that of native speakers. In the light of the findings, one of the predictions made by the Speech Learning Model was tested. According to this model, speech acquisition happens at a position-sensitive allophonic level. A series of informal /casual interviews w...

The present study investigates the prosodic differences of English mild imperative sentences between native American English speakers and Chinese EFL (learning English as foreign language) learners within the framework of AM Theory. The study found out that prosodic native speakers and Chinese EFL learners exhibit the following prosodic differences: (i) phonological patterns of sentence-stress ...

With more and more non-native speakers speaking in English, the fast and efficient adaptation to non-native English speech becomes a practical concern. The performance of speech recognition systems is consistently poor on non-native speech. The challenge for non-native speech recognition is to maximize the recognition performance with small amount of non-native data available. In this paper we ...

This article presents preliminary results indicating that speakers have a different pitch range when they speak a foreign language compared to the pitch variation that occurs when they speak their native language. To this end, a learner corpus with French and German speakers was analyzed. Results suggest that speakers indeed produce a smaller pitch range in the respective L2. This is true for b...

This paper examines the use of glottal stops in English as a second language and Polish by Polish native speakers and in English by native speakers. The study compares glottal stop frequency in utterance-initial accented and unaccented positions. The major finding is that Polish native speakers use more glottal stops in English in unaccented than in accented syllables. This tendency is compared...

Many vehicles today are equipped with navigation systems, and all of these systems use speech or a combination of speech and graphics to provide drivers with directions to their destinations. This study investigates the effect of gender of voice when providing driving instructions in English to drivers that are non-native speakers of English. In a 2(native/non-native) by 2(gender of voice) betw...

Are speakers sensitive to the frequency with which phrases occur in language? The authors report an eye-tracking study that investigates this by examining the processing of multiword sequences that differ in phrasal frequency by native and proficient nonnative English speakers. Participants read sentences containing 3-word binomial phrases (bride and groom) and their reversed forms (groom and b...