This study investigated how coda voicing contrast in English would be phonetically encoded in the temporal vs. spectral dimension of the preceding vowel (in vowel duration vs. F1/F2) by Korean L2 speakers of English, and how their L2 phonetic encoding pattern would be compared to that of native English speakers. Crucially, these questions were explored by taking into account the phonetics-proso...

Automatic evaluation of non-native speech accentedness has potential implications for not only language learning and accent identification systems but also for speaker and speech recognition systems. From the perspective of speech production, the two primary factors influencing the accentedness are the phonetic and prosodic structure. In this paper, we propose an approach for automatic accented...

Existing regimes on training Japanese learners of English to acquire the nonnative contrast /l/ and /r/ in English focus on having the learners attend to differences in acoustics cues. Such training does show a certain amount of improvement in /l/-/r/ discrimination among Japanese learners, yet the level of achievement is not equivalent to the performance of native speakers. In light of the fac...

This study tested the predictions of the Speech Learning Model (SLM, Flege, 1988) on the case of native Japanese (NJ) speakers' perception and production of English /ɹ / and /l/. NJ speakers' degree of foreign accent, intelligibility of /ɹ -l/ productions, and ability to perceive natural speech /ɹ -l/ were assessed as a function of length of residency in North America, age of arrival in North A...

Non-native speakers of English far outnumber native speakers; English is the main language of books, newspapers, airports, air-traffic control, international business, academic conferences, science, technology, diplomacy, sports, international competitions, pop music, and advertising (British Council 2014). Online education in the form of massive online open courses is also primarily in English...

With more and more non-native speakers speaking in English, the fast and efficient adaptation to non-native English speech becomes a practical concern. The performance of speech recognition systems is consistently poor on non-native speech. The challenge for non-native speech recognition is to maximize the recognition performance with small amount of non-native data available. In this paper we ...

This study investigated what factors are used by native speakers and Japanese learners of English when they determine the position of stress in producing and perceiving disyllabic English nonwords. Syllable structure (vowel length and number of consonants) and lexical class affected both groups, but in different ways. Phonotactic legality of intervocalic consonants influenced native speakers al...

This study investigated the processing of lexical stress in native and non-native speakers of English. Specifically, we examined stress typicality effects (where typicality is defined on the basis of grammatical category) in disyllabic words using two on-line tasks. Our grammatical classification experiment showed an overall effect of stress typicality in non-native speakers but no overall effe...