We analyze the efficacy of a small crowd of naı̈ve human raters in rating engagement during human–machine dialog interactions. Each rater viewed multiple 10 second, thin-slice videos of non-native English speakers interacting with a computerassisted language learning (CALL) system and rated how engaged and disengaged those callers were while interacting with the automated agent. We observe how t...

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...

Foreign accent is judged by the degree to which the non-native (L2) production is perceived differently from production patterns by native speakers (NL) [1]. Both segmental and suprasegmental features are shown influential in accent perception by NL speakers or L2 learners [2]-[4]. However, roles of prosodic cues in the process are not well known yet. Our study aims to investigate effects of in...

This study investigates a variety of rhythm metrics on two corpora of non-native spontaneous speech and compares the nonnative distributions to values from a corpus of native speech. Several of the metrics are shown to differentiate well between native and non-native speakers and to also have moderate correlations with English proficiency scores that were assigned to the non-native speech. The ...

Previous studies have shown improved sensitivity to native-language contrasts and reduced sensitivity to non-native phonetic contrasts when comparing 6-8 and 10-12-month-old infants. This developmental pattern is interpreted as reflecting the onset of language-specific processing around the first birthday. However, generalization of this finding is limited by the fact that studies have yielded ...

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...

French speaking learners of English encounter persistent difficulty acquiring English [h], thus confusing words like eat and heat in both production and perception. We assess the hypothesis that the acoustic properties of [h] may render detection of this segment in the speech stream insufficiently reliable for second language acquisition. We use the mismatch negativity (MMN) in event-related po...

the present study investigated learners’ interlanguage pragmatic development through analysis of 99 requestive emails addressed to a faculty member over a period of up to two years. most previous studies mainly investigated how non-native english speaking students’ (nness) pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic competence differed from native english speaking students (ness) and compared learners ...