pragmatic assessment and consistency in rating are among the subject matters which are still in need of more profound investigations. the importance of the issue is highlighted when remembering that inconsistency in ratings would surely damage the test fairness issue in assessment and lead to much diversity in ratings. our principal concern in this study was observing the criteria that american...

In this study we evaluate the ability of a state-of-the-art speechto-speech machine translation system, Skype Translator, to preserve the communicative effectiveness of its input speech. Specifically, we elicited Spanish spoken responses from 24 native speakers of Spanish in the following two scenarios: academic speaking (in the context of 6 questions from a standardized assessment of academic ...

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 ...

A large number of non-native English speakers may be found in American classrooms, both as listeners and talkers. Little is known about how this population comprehends speech in realistic adverse acoustical conditions. A study was conducted to investigate the effects of background noise level (BNL), reverberation time (RT), and talker foreign accent on native and non-native listeners' speech co...

this study set out to investigate the distribution of the syntactic properties associatedwith the prodrop parameter by persian-speaking l2 learners of english in an attemptto examine the (un)attainability of native-like knowledge and (in)accessibility of ugin adult sla. to do so, 92 participants were assigned into different levels of l2knowledge based on their performances on the oxford placeme...

This study investigates how native prosodic systems as well as L2 learning experience shape non-native tone production in terms of tone movement, a primary cue to tone identity. In an imitation task, the six Cantonese tones were produced by four speaker groups: native Mandarin speakers (tonal), native English speakers (non-tonal), native English speakers with Mandarin learning experience (L2 to...