To find a pleasant voice for speech synthesis is of vital importance to the system. In this study we investigated the influence of prosodic parameters on voice preference from a cross-linguistic perspective. We conducted two voice preference tests. 24 German and 50 Chinese listeners took part in the first test on German speaker selection; while 25 Chinese and 10 German listeners participated in...

This study was an attempt to investigate the effect of metacognitive strategies (MS) on speakingability of the learners and also what MS are specifically employed by learners when it comes todifferent task types. To this end, running a quasi-experimental study, 60 students at advancedlevel (female) from Shenia Language Institute in Sanandaj were randomly selected and given anOxford Placement Te...

Recent studies of argument structure distinguishes non-core (applied) arguments from core arguments in the sense that non-core ones do not belong to the basic argument structure of verbs and that they enter argument structures through Applicative Operations (AO) introduced by functional heads such as Low Applicative-source (LA-source) or Low Applicative-goal (LA-goal) heads (Pylkkänen, 2000; 20...

In this paper, we describe a Web-based spoken translation game aimed at providing language learners with an easily accessible and fun environment to practice speaking the foreign language. Our prototype centers on the task of translating flight domain sentences from English to Chinese. The system presents English sentences as stimuli to elicit Chinese utterances from a user. It tracks a user’s ...

Previous studies suggest that Chinese topic structures, especially basegenerated structures, are difficult for L1 English L2 Chinese learners, and only at the very advanced stage do learners perform at the target-like level. Yuan (1995) hypothesizes that non-advanced L2 learners may have difficulty adding a topic node to the subject-predicate structure and that they tend to interpret the topic ...

Whether non-native speakers’ on-line processing can be native-like remains a hot issue. Recently many have shown that qualitatively native-like processing is attainable, especially for learners with high proficiency. However, most of the studies recruited learners who had been immersed to the English-speaking country. The current study investigated processing of fillergap dependency and island ...

This study was an attempt to investigate what metacognitive strategies are specifically employed by English learners when it comes to different speaking task types.60 students at advanced level (female) were randomly selected and given an OPT as a test of homogeneity. They were assigned to experimental and control groups. The MS questionnaire (Oxford, 1990) was also administered to see what MS ...

This paper investigates what voice features (e.g., speech rate and pitch-formants) make a teacher’s voice preferable for second language learners to imitate, when they practice sentence pronunciation using Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) systems. The CAPT system employed in our investigation uses a single teacher’s voice as the source to automatically resynthesize several sample...

Collocations, i.e., recurrent word combinations such as take advantage (of), strong tea, and deeply absorbed, are receiving increasing attention in SLA research because of their importance to “native-like” production of language. Previous studies suggest that collocations pose a serious challenge to language learners and that learners’ L1 plays a crucial role in this respect. My paper aims to s...