This study investigated the effects of synchronous and asynchronous CMC on the development of linguistic features of learners’ speech in Japanese. Using learners from fourth-semester Japanese classes, the following research questions were examined: (a) Does CMC have positive effects on the development of oral proficiency among learners of Japanese? and (b) Are there any relationships between la...

The automatic grading of oral language tests has been the subject of much research in recent years. Several obstacles lie in the way of achieving this goal. Recent work suggests a testing technique called elicited imitation (EI) that can serve to accurately approximate global oral proficiency. This testing methodology, however, does not incorporate some fundamental aspects of language, such as ...

Prosody has been demonstrated to be a key component in second language acquisition and assessment. This study analyzes raters’ ability to distinguish different levels of L1 and L2 prosody when listening to filtered speech. The goal of this study is to investigate how many levels of prosodic proficiency can be made when it is isolated in a filtered speech condition. An experiment was conducted w...

Second language learners perform worse than native speakers under adverse listening conditions, such as speech in noise (SPIN). No data are available on heritage language speakers' (early naturalistic interrupted learners') ability to perceive SPIN. The current study fills this gap and investigates the perception of Russian speech in multi-talker babble noise by the matched groups of high- and ...

Twenty ten-minute oral presentations made by Swedish students speaking English have been analyzed with respect to the standard deviation of F0 over long stretches of speech. Values have been normalized by division with the mean. Results show a strong correlation between proficiency in English and pitch variation for male speakers but not for females. The results also identify monotone and disfl...