This paper reports the results of two experiments aimed at assessing the perceived similarity between a set of English and Catalan vowels from the perspective of native speakers of both languages. Two groups of 27 listeners, a group of native English speakers and a group of native Catalan speakers, used a 9-point scale to rate the degree of similarity between two stimuli. Crucial stimuli consis...

The development of English language learners (ELLs) was explored from kindergarten through eighth grade within a nationally representative sample of first-time kindergartners (N = 19,890). Growth curve analyses indicated that, compared to native English speakers, ELLs were rated by teachers more favorably on approaches to learning, self control, and externalizing behaviors in kindergarten and g...

This study provides a direct comparison of boundary and prominence perception strategies between Japanese EFL learners and native speakers of English using the Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) method. Although RPT experiments are available for both native English speakers [1], [2], [3] and Japanese EFL learners [4], a direct comparison of the available data is problematic as the stimuli sets u...

This paper proposes a supervised speaker adaptation method that is effective for both non-native (i.e. Japanese) and native English speakers’ pronunciation of English speech. This method uses English and Japanese phoneme acoustic models and a pronunciation lexicon in which each word has both English and Japanese phoneme transcriptions. The same utterances are used for adaptation of both acousti...

This paper reports on a initial research activity in the area of non-native children’s speech recognition that was carried out 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. By exploiting the corpus of native spee...

This study investigates the process of generalizing a learned sub-lexical contrast across speakers of different non-native accents of English. We examine the generalization of a novel cue (voicing-cued release) that is non-contrastive in English, but contrastive in the manipulated speech of our L2 speakers of English, to a speaker with the same or different L1 as our training speakers (Exp. 1)....

Using fMRI, we compared the patterns of fusiform activity produced by viewing English and Chinese for readers who were either English speakers learning Chinese or Chinese-English bilinguals. The pattern of fusiform activity depended on both the writing system and the reader's native language. Native Chinese speakers fluent in English recruited bilateral fusiform areas when viewing both Chinese ...

Native speakers of Japanese and Korean assessed perceived similarity between American English vowels and vowels of their L1, and native speakers of American English performed the same task. The results revealed no significant main effects of listener groups, but a significant interaction of vowels by listener groups was confirmed. The results indicate that listeners’ L1 phonology as well as pho...

As is well known, Japanese adults who have just begun to learn English often err in producing /r/ and /l/ because their native language does not possess such liquid consonants. The aim of this study was to determine if Japanese adults eventually learn to produce /r/ and /l/ accurately in words like read and lead. Liquids spoken by 12 native Japanese speakers who had lived in the United States f...