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...

We motivate and present a corpus of scripted and spontaneous speech in both the native and the non-native language of talkers from various language backgrounds. Using corpus recordings from 11 native English and 11 late Mandarin-English bilinguals we compared speech timing across native English, native Mandarin, and Mandarin-accented English. Findings showed similarities across native Mandarin ...

In contrast to many languages (like Russian or French), modern English does not distinguish formal and informal (“T/V”) address overtly, for example by pronoun choice. We describe an ongoing study which investigates to what degree the T/V distinction is recoverable in English text, and with what textual features it correlates. Our findings are: (a) human raters can label English utterances as T...

This study analyzes lexical proficiency in oral and written texts produced by second language (L2) learners of English. The purpose of the study is to examine relationships between analytic scores of depth of lexical knowledge, breadth of lexical knowledge, and access to core lexical items and holistic scores of lexical proficiency. A corpus of 240 spoken texts and 240 written texts produced by...

This study examines the factors that influence Mandarin and Korean speakers’ understanding of English pitch accent placement. The results show that both groups have difficulty determining whether a native English speaker is using the correct prosody for a particular discourse context. Participants’ ability to do this task improved with greater English proficiency, as measured by the Versant Eng...

In view of the paucity of evidence on teachers’ conceptions of teaching English an International Language (EIL), the present study used panel discussions to investigate the beliefs of 10 native and 10 non-native English-speaking teachers about their roles in teaching English in the EIL contexts and the perceptions of EIL. The findings revealed that some aspects of teachers’ beliefs about their ...

The study of compliment speech act has been under investigation on many occasions in recent years. In this study, an attempt is made to explore appraisals performed by native English speakers and Iranian EFL learners to find out how these two groups diverge or converge from each other with regard to complimenting patterns and norms. The participants of the study were 60 advanced Iranian EFL lea...

This study examined contributions of lexical factors to native-speaking raters’ assessments of comprehensibility (ease of understanding) of second language (L2) speech. Extemporaneous oral narratives elicited from 40 French speakers of L2 English were transcribed and evaluated for comprehensibility by 10 raters. Subsequently, the samples were analyzed for 12 lexical variables targeting diverse ...

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 ...