Native speakers of Mandarin Chinese have difficulty producing native-like English stress contrasts. Acoustically, English lexical stress is multidimensional, involving manipulation of fundamental frequency (F0), duration, intensity and vowel quality. Errors in any or all of these correlates could interfere with perception of the stress contrast, but it is unknown which correlates are most probl...

The suprasegmental characteristics of non-native speech are generally described as differing from those of native speech. Recent work has shown that in addition to speaking at overall slower rates, non-native speakers in a reading task are more variable than native speakers in their speaking rate across utterances [1]. However, read speech may contain sources of variability that are specific to...

This study explored whether the sound structure of Indian English (IE) varies with the divergent native languages of its speakers or whether it is similar regardless of speakers' native languages. Native Hindi (Indo-Aryan) and Telugu (Dravidian) speakers produced comparable phrases in IE and in their native languages. Naïve and experienced IE listeners were then asked to judge whether different...

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...

the current research is based on comprehensive studies in the field of arabic dictionaries compilations as well as experiences of authors in imparting the arabic language education in iran for years. as any language learning requires a dictionary, and since researchers in the area of second language teaching always suggest using monolingual dictionaries, it seems necessary to discuss the merits...

the present study attempts to investigate parsing preferences (early vs. late closure) of native and l2 learners of both english and persian when they read ambiguous relative clauses. the purpose is to find out if l2 learners process l2 linguistic input in the way monolingual speakers of that language do. the participants took tests including 10 test sentences plus 10 distractors, each followed...

In this paper, we show how acoustic variance within lexical tones in disyllabic Mandarin Chinese pseudowords affects discrimination abilities in both native and non-native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. Within-category acoustic variance did not hinder native speakers in discriminating between lexical tones, whereas it precludes Dutch native speakers from reaching native level performance. Furthe...