The paper explores the accuracy of feedback provided to non-native learners English by a pronunciation module included in Microsoft Reading Progress. We compared assessment offered Progress against two university teachers. Recordings from students who aim for native-like were assessed independently and human raters. output was standardized as negative binary assigned orthographic words, which m...

Perception of charisma, the ability to influence others by virtue of one’s personal qualities, appears to be influenced to some extent by cultural factors. We compare results of five studies of charisma speech in which American, Palestinian, and Swedish subjects rated Standard American English political speech and Americans and Palestinians rated Palestinian Arabic speech. We identify acoustic-...

Previous research [9] suggests that Dutch learners of (British) English are not able to express sarcasm prosodically in their L2. The present study investigates whether explicit training on the prosodic markers of sarcasm in English can improve learners’ realisation of sarcasm. Sarcastic speech was elicited in short simulated telephone conversations between Dutch advanced learners of English an...

BACKGROUND Chinese is the second most common language spoken by limited English proficiency individuals in the United States, yet there are few public health materials available in Chinese. Previous studies have indicated that use of machine translation plus postediting by bilingual translators generated quality translations in a lower time and at a lower cost than human translations. OBJECTI...

The current project investigated the extent to which several lexical aspects of second language (L2) speech—appropriateness, fluency, variation, sophistication, abstractness, sense relations— interact to influence native speakers’ judgements of comprehensibility (ease of understanding) and accentedness (linguistic nativelikeness). Extemporaneous speech elicited from 40 French speakers of Englis...

BACKGROUND The advent of global clinical trials has necessitated the use of English-based rating instruments in diverse cultures where English is clearly not the primary language. The cross-cultural applicability of rating instruments developed in one language with only one cultural group is an important issue in both research and clinical settings where these instruments might be used. We exam...

In a previous study, Dodane and Bijeljac-Babic (2017) found that French/AmericanEnglish children aged 3;6 to 6;0, bilingual from birth, produced disyllabic words which had acoustic properties for lexical stress (f0, syllable duration intensity) differed those of monolingual peers, showing cross-linguistic influences. order check whether these differences between the productions their French- or...

Among topics in the field of pragmatics, some seem to be in a more rigorous need of investigation. Pragmatic assessment and specifically the issue of pragmatic rating are among issues which deserve more thorough consideration. The purpose of this study was to examine rater criteria and its consistency and variability in the assessment of Iranian EFL learners’ production of compliments based on ...