This paper presents a preliminary investigation of the differences in pitch range in English spoken as L1 and L2. In this study, the productions of 5 English sentences read by 18 native (American) English speakers and 18 non-native (Italian) English speakers are compared. The hypothesis being tested is that Italian speakers of English have a narrower pitch range and less pitch variation that na...

Are speakers equipped with preferences concerning grammatical structures that are absent in their language? We examine this question by investigating the sensitivity of English speakers to the sonority of onset clusters. Linguistic research suggests that certain onset clusters are universally preferred (e.g., bd>lb). We demonstrate that such preferences modulate the perception of unattested ons...

Visual information about lip and facial movements plays a role in audiovisual (AV) speech perception. Although this has been widely confirmed, previous behavioural studies have shown interlanguage differences, that is, native Japanese speakers do not integrate auditory and visual speech as closely as native English speakers. To elucidate the neural basis of such interlanguage differences, 22 na...

Do the languages we speak shape the ways we think? Boroditsky, (2001) demonstrated that speakers of English and Mandarin think differently about time. This work has recently been brought into question (January & Kako, 2007; Chen, 2007). Here I present new evidence that again demonstrates a difference between English and Mandarin speakers’ construals of time. Both languages use horizontal and ve...

Conventional rhythmic distinctions such as \stress-timing" vs. \syllable-timing" were investigated using a novel technique whereby speakers produced a phrase repeatedly along with a metronome. When stable rhythmic productions of phrases in Arabic, English, and Japanese were compared, Japanese speakers preferred to place the phrase-nal syllable at \simple harmonic phases", such as halfway betwee...

This paper describes statistical analyses for identifying certain inherent ambiguities on pitch patterns of sentence utterances in English spoken by Japanese (Japanese English, henceforth). Statistical significance of pitch pattern differences between Japanese English and native English speakers is evaluated depending on the word position in a sentence and the word class, such as content word a...

In this research, we explored the effect of noise interruption rate on speech intelligibility. Specifically, we used the Hearing In Noise Test (HINT) procedure with the original HINT stimuli (English) and Igbo stimuli to assess speech reception ability in interrupted noise. For a given noise level, the HINT test provides an estimate of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) required for 50%-correct sp...

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...

We investigate how second language learning affects ‘thinking for speaking’ in the first and second language by examining the semantic effects of grammatical gender (present in Italian but absent in English). In an error-induction experiment we first establish a baseline, showing that gender affects the semantic substitution errors made by monolingual Italian speakers compared to monolingual En...