OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to develop an Arabic articulation test using familiar and visually transparent words in order to be used as a criterion for comparing phonemes of both normal and phonologically disordered Arabic-speaking children. MATERIAL AND METHODS A picture-naming test was designed for the Mansoura Arabic Articulation Test (MAAT) to elicit spontaneous single-word respon...

Listening conditions affect bilinguals’ speech perception, but relatively little is known about the effect of the combination of several degrading listening conditions. We studied the combined effect of speech rate and background noise on bilinguals’ speech perception in their L1 and L2. Speech perception of twenty Israeli university students, native speakers of Arabic (L1), with Hebrew as L2, ...

Practicing the spoken language is important to language learners in critical parts of the United States military. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is a technology that promises to provide self-paced practice opportunities to language learners. We propose to improve ASR in computer assisted language learning (CALL) applications by modeling the speech behavior of language learners. ASR systems ...

We present our correction annotation guidelines to create a manually corrected nonnative (L2) Arabic corpus. We develop our approach by extending an L1 large-scale Arabic corpus and its manual corrections, to include manually corrected non-native Arabic learner essays. Our overarching goal is to use the annotated corpus to develop components for automatic detection and correction of language er...

Closing educational gaps between sub-populations in Israel, particularly between students in Hebrew-speaking and Arabic-speaking schools, persists to be one of the priorities of Israel’s education system. In the field of information and communication technology (ICT), this goal refers to infrastructure as well as practice, i.e. teaching and learning. A secondary analysis of Second Information T...

This paper presents a study on learners' level of anxiety when a podcast was used in developing their public speaking skills. This study employs a quasi-experimental, pretest-posttest nonequivalent control group design where the control group was taught using the traditional method whilst a podcast was used as a teaching aid on the treatment group. The podcast makes it possible for the learners...

Compared to children, adults are bad at learning language. This is counterintuitive; adults outperform children on most measures of cognition, especially those that involve effort (which continue to mature into early adulthood). The present study asks whether these mature effortful abilities interfere with language learning in adults and further, whether interference occurs equally for aspects ...

Anecdotally, concerns are often expressed about the varying infant feeding decisions among women from different cultural groups. This paper reports the early infant feeding decisions and duration of breastfeeding in 986 women from English, Chinese and Arabic-speaking backgrounds in Sydney during 1997 and 1998. Data were collectedfrom an audit of medical records and through a questionnaire at ei...