BACKGROUND Masking release for an English sentence-recognition task in the presence of foreign-accented English speech compared with native-accented English speech was reported in Calandruccio et al (2010a). The masking release appeared to increase as the masker intelligibility decreased. However, it could not be ruled out that spectral differences between the speech maskers were influencing th...

_______________ This study investigated the performance of native and non native speakers of Modern Greek language on morphology and syntax tasks. Non-native speakers of Greek whose native language was English, which is a language with strict word order and simple morphology, made more errors and answered more slowly than native speakers on morphology but not syntax tasks. It seems that Greek f...

We are investigating unsupervised phone modeling. This paper describes a derivation method of VQ codebook sequences of variable length segments from spoken word samples, and also describes evaluation results by applying the method to mixed-lingual speech recognition tasks which include non-native speakers. The VQ codebook is generated based on a piecewise linear segmentation method which includ...

The ability to learn second language speech sound categories declines during development. We examined this phenomenon by studying the mismatch negativity (MMN) to the /r/ - /l/ distinction in native English speakers and learners of English as a second language who are native speakers of Japanese. Previous studies have suggested that the MMN is remarkably plastic when evaluated as a waveform at ...

Perceptual voice judgment is a standard procedure in voice quality evaluation. However, the cultural and linguistic backgrounds of the judges often affect its reliability. Use of anchors has been shown to improve the reliability of the procedure. Therefore, this study aimed to develop female synthesized anchors in Cantonese, English, and Putonghua and investigate the reliability of perceptual v...

We investigated articulatory movements of native Japanese speakers’ productions of non-native consonant clusters, using the WAVE system (NDI Corp.). Four Japanese male speakers pronounced “blat”, “bnat”, “btat”, and “pnat” 10 times each in a carrier sentence. Tongue tip displacement from the first to the second consonant varied greatly among the speakers. An ANOVA with two factors, Speaker and ...

The present study investigates the prosodic differences of English mild imperative sentences between native American English speakers and Chinese EFL (learning English as foreign language) learners within the framework of AM Theory. The study found out that prosodic native speakers and Chinese EFL learners exhibit the following prosodic differences: (i) phonological patterns of sentence-stress ...

This study attempts to compare the Inter-Stress Interval (ISI) patterns of English between the native speakers of English and Korean. One of the invariable results of the experiments about English speech rhythm has been that the strict concept of isochronism did not seem to exist at least in the surface phonetic level. However, the remarkable difference shown from the production experiment of t...

Speakers of all languages gesture, but there are differences in the gestures that they produce. Do speakers learn language-specific gestures by watching others gesture or by learning to speak a particular language? We examined this question by studying the speech and gestures produced by 40 congenitally blind adult native speakers of English and Turkish (n = 20/language), and comparing them wit...