The conventional view is that perceptual/cognitive development is an incremental process of acquisition. Several striking findings have revealed, however, that the sensitivity to non-native languages, faces, vocalizations, and music that is present early in life declines as infants acquire experience with native perceptual inputs. In the language domain, the decline in sensitivity is reflected ...

PURPOSE To investigate the effect of listener's native language (L1) and the types of noise on English vowel identification in noise. METHOD Identification of 12 English vowels was measured in quiet and in long-term speech-shaped noise and multi-talker babble (MTB) noise for English- (EN), Chinese- (CN) and Korean-native (KN) listeners at various signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). RESULTS Compa...

In this work, we present a generic methodology for converting transliterated text (native language written with a non-native alphabet) to phonetic sequences. The goal is to create the same phonetic result that would be produced if a native speaker uttered the original text in native alphabet. In our work, we implemented the specific methodology as a front-end to a Text-to-Speech (TTS) server. T...

Infants under six months are able to discriminate native and non-native consonant contrasts equally well, but as they learn the phonological systems of their native language, this ability declines. Current explanations of this phenomenon agree that the decline in discrimination ability is linked to the formation of native-language phonemic categories. The goal of this study was to evaluate the ...

Every language manifests casual speech processes, and hence every second language too. This study examined how listeners deal with second-language casual speech processes, as a function of the processes in their native language. We compared a match case, where a second-language process (/t/-reduction) is also operative in native speech, with a mismatch case, where a second-language process (/r/...

An eye tracking experiment explored the gaze behavior of deaf individuals when perceiving language in spoken and sign language only, and in sign-supported speech (SSS). Participants were deaf (n = 25) and hearing (n = 25) Spanish adolescents. Deaf students were prelingually profoundly deaf individuals with cochlear implants (CIs) used by age 5 or earlier, or prelingually profoundly deaf native ...

This research investigated whether acoustic-phonetic knowledge of the mother tongue of a non-native speaker can be used to adapt an existing target language phoneme HMM recognizer. For this purpose three sets of phoneme HMMs were generated, one representing the target language (German), one the mother tongue of the non-native speaker (Turkish), and the third the foreign-accented pronunciation o...

onveying a strong message within a language stems from not only a linguistically appropriate utterance but also a pragmatically appropriate discourse. Broadly considering various facets of pragmatics, pragmatic assessment has not been potentially brought into perspective. To address this discourse gap, this study, guided by the principles of mixed-method design, pursued three purposes: ...

Pragmatic rating is considered as one of the novel and crucial aspects of second language education which has not been maneuvered upon in the literature. To address this gap, the current study aimed to inspect the matches and mismatches, to explore rating variations, and to assess the rater consistency between the holistic and analytic rating methods of the speech act of agreement in L2 by non-...