This study investigated whether Chinese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL learners hereafter) could use prosodic cues to resolve syntactically ambiguous sentences in English. 8 sentences with 3 types of syntactic ambiguity were adopted. They were far/near PP attachment, left/right word attachment and wide/narrow scope. In the production experiment, 15 Chinese college students who p...

How the properties of a first language (Mandarin, Korean) influence the comprehension of sentences in a second language (English) was investigated in a series of self-paced reading time studies. Native Mandarinand Korean-speaking learners of English were compared with native English speakers on how they resolved a temporary ambiguity about the relationship between a verb and the noun following ...

Previous studies in interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit (ISIB) did not separate the effects of shared knowledge of L1 in non-native talkers from those of listeners through extensive exposure to accented L2 speech, which is crucial to the mechanism underlying ISIB. This preliminary study attempts to tease apart the two by comparing perception accuracy of Mandarin-accented English words ...

This study investigates beginning level adult Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) learners’ difficulties with Mandarin Chinese tones. Twenty CFL learners enrolled in a first semester CFL course in a U.S. university participated as speakers. Their productions of Mandarin phrases and sentences were judged by native Mandarin listeners for pronunciation and tone problems and were also rated by nati...

Article History The paper received on: 07/07/2014 Accepted after peer-review on: 24/08/2014 Published on: 01/09/2014 Of the four major language skills, speaking is regarded as the most crucial and central one as it enables the learner to establish successful communication in that language, which is often the main aim of learning any foreign language. That is why it forms the focus of att...

This study investigated EFL teachers’ and students’ perspectives towards Audiotaped Oral Dialogue Journals (ATODJs), as a computer-mediated communication (CMC) and a Mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) task. The data came from 202 entries of ATODJs, gathered from15 female Iranian intermediate EFL learners. Teachers and students’ evaluations of the whole program comprised of the qualitative...

This work investigated crosslinguistic perception of Mandarin utterances conveying six classes of attitudes, i.e., dominant/ submissive, friendly/hostile, polite/rude, serious/joking, praising/blaming, and sincere/insincere. Five groups of subjects were tested: native Mandarin speakers, Japanese L2 learners of Mandarin, French L2 learners of Mandarin, naïve Japanese without Mandarin ability, an...