this study set out to investigate the distribution of the syntactic properties associatedwith the prodrop parameter by persian-speaking l2 learners of english in an attemptto examine the (un)attainability of native-like knowledge and (in)accessibility of ugin adult sla. to do so, 92 participants were assigned into different levels of l2knowledge based on their performances on the oxford placeme...

This paper presents an initial effort in the area of nonnative children’s speech recognition by exploiting two children databases, one consisting of speech collected from native English children, the other one consisting of English sentences read by Italian learners of English in the same age range of the native speakers. First, a baseline speech recognizer for British English was trained on th...

This paper describes the collection of a bilingual database of Finnish/English and German/English data. In addition, the accents of the talkers in the database have been rated. English, German and Finnish listeners assessed the English, German and Finnish talkers’ degree of foreign accent in English. Native English listeners showed higher inter-listener agreement than non-native listeners. Furt...

the present study intended to investigate the processing behavior of 2 groups of l2 learners of english (high and mid in proficiency) and a group of english native speakers on english active and passive reduced relative clauses. three sets of tasks, an offline task, and 2 online tasks were conducted. results revealed that the high-proficiency group’s performance was the same as that of the nati...

AbstractThe interference of the native language in acquiring a foreign language is unavoidable. In an attempt to explore the phenomenon why this occurs, the study was conducted in English as a foreign language writing. The study also investigated how the native language interference occurred in the writing process. In fact, this qualitative study explored the reasons and the process of na...

This study aimed to examine the effect of rater training on differential function (rater error) in process assessing academic writing skills higher education students. The was conducted with a pre-test and post-test control group quasi-experimental design. research consisted 45 raters, whom 22 came from experimental, 23 groups. raters were pre-service teachers who did not participate any before...

This study investigates how native prosodic systems as well as L2 learning experience shape non-native tone production in terms of tone movement, a primary cue to tone identity. In an imitation task, the six Cantonese tones were produced by four speaker groups: native Mandarin speakers (tonal), native English speakers (non-tonal), native English speakers with Mandarin learning experience (L2 to...

this paper reports the results of an experimental study on non-native production of english vowels. two groups of persian efl learners varying in language proficiency were tested on their ability to produce the nine plain vowels of american english. vowel production accuracy was assessed by means of acoustic measurements. ladefoged and maddison’s (1996) f1 f2 measurements for american english v...

In this paper, we propose a statistical method of evaluating the pronunciation proficiency for presentation in English. We statistically analyze the utterances to find a combination that has a high correlation between an English teacher’s score and some acoustic features. We found that ratio of the likelihoods of free phoneme recognition by using native English HMMs and nonnative English HMMs w...