some scholars have argued that there is a negative correlation between the onset age of l2 acquisition and performance on different measures of l2 knowledge. a kind of biological scheduling is assumed to be responsible for this maturational constraint on language development. the present study asks whether and to what extent critical period effects can be found for universal properties of langu...

We examined the possible relationship between perception and production of /r–l/ by native Japanese speakers. Little evidence of a relationship between the cues used for perception and those for production was found for native Japanese and native English speakers. However, we found evidence of a shift from a reliance on conjunctive cues to single cues as listeners progressed from relatively naï...

Non-native speakers often face difficulty in pronouncing like the native speakers. This paper proposes to model pronunciation variation in non-native speaker’s speech using only acoustics models, without the need for the corpus. Variation in term of context and language will be modeled. The combination of both modeling resulted in the reduction of absolute WER as much as 16% and 6% for native V...

We examined the possible relationship between perception and production of /r–l/ by native Japanese speakers. Little evidence of a relationship between the cues used for perception and those for production was found for native Japanese and native English speakers. However, we found evidence of a shift from a reliance on conjunctive cues to single cues as listeners progressed from relatively naï...

The present study investigates linguistic relativity. Do form differences between Dutch and English influence the interpretations which speakers have? The Dutch element en in noun-noun compounds, for example in aardbeienjam ‘strawberry jam’ is homophonous and homographic with the regular plural suffix -en. English, in contrast, has no such typical linking elements in compounds. We therefore inv...

At present, the population of non-native speakers is twice that of native speakers. It is necessary to explore the text generation strategies for non-native users. However, little has been done in this field. This study investigates the features that affect the placement (where to place a cue) of because for non-native speakers. A machine learning program – C4.5 was applied to induce the classi...

In this study, we compare the effects of English lexical features on word duration for native and non-native English speakers and for non-native speakers with different L1s and a range of L2 experience. We also examine whether non-native word durations lead to judgments of a stronger foreign accent. We measured word durations in English paragraphs read by 12 American English (AE), 20 Korean, an...

There are two common ways to assign relative importance in spoken language: tonic prominence and thematization. The former is expressing the main points of information units in speech (Halliday, 1994), and the latter is putting an element at the beginning of a clause. This study explores how relative importance is realized in English and Persian. It also investigates how advanced Persian learne...

English intonation can be difficult for L2 speakers to learn, particularly for those whose L1 intonation system works differently from English. This study investigates whether Hong Kong English (HKE) speakers whose L1 is Cantonese have knowledge of the appropriate English intonation patterns in specific contexts. Results from an intonation pattern selection tasks indicate that HKE speakers (n =...