This paper presents an acoustic analysis of the three corner vowels in the Diapix Foreign Language corpus (DIAPIX-FL) which contains material from English and Spanish native speakers from both their L1 and L2. We investigated how L1 vowel characteristics influence the production of L2 vowels, and to what extent a current sound change in one of the languages is reflected in the other. We find th...

In this paper, we propose a statistical evaluation method of pronunciation proficiency and intelligibility for presentations made in English by native Japanese speakers. We statistically analyzed the actual utterances of speakers to find combinations of acoustic and linguistic features with high correlation between the scores estimated by the system and native English teachers. Our results show...

Previous literature has argued that proficient bilingual speakers often demonstrate monolingual-equivalent structural processing of language (e.g., the processing of structural ambiguities; Frenck-Mestre, 2002). In this paper, we explore this thesis further via on-line examination of the processing of syntactically complex structures with three populations: those who classify as monolingual nat...

An analysis of word duration in English sentences uttered by native speakers of Japanese is made, in which the difference in prosodic patterns between the English and Japanese languages is taken into account. The durations of Japanese speakers are compared with those of English speakers in regard to a percentage distribution of an individual word relative to all words in a sentence. The results...

Four experiments, all of which focused on vowel duration, assessed Chinese subjects' production and perception of the contrast between /t/ and /d/ in the final position of English words. Vowel duration was measured in minimal pairs in the first experiment. The stimuli in natural-edited beat-bead and bat-bad continua in which vowel duration varied in 20-ms steps were then presented to native Eng...

The study examines a number of acoustic properties of non-native speech directed to a native speaker, a non-native speaker with a shared first language background, and a non-native speaker with a different first language. Results demonstrate that the interlocutor condition interacts with the language attitudes factor: Participants with more positive attitudes towards their second language (Engl...

English contains many nominals that would be absent in Chinese because Chinese makes greater use of "zero anaphora," which is an empty grammatical slot in a sentence standing for a previously mentioned referent. Native Chinese and native English speakers were compared in comprehending modified English passages from a standardized reading test with nominals deleted that would be absent in Chines...

Does the language you speak affect how you think about the world? This question is taken up in three experiments. English and Mandarin talk about time differently--English predominantly talks about time as if it were horizontal, while Mandarin also commonly describes time as vertical. This difference between the two languages is reflected in the way their speakers think about time. In one study...

This study aims at investigating whether Persian native speakers highly advanced in English as a second language (L2ers) can switch to optimal processing strategies in the languages they know and whether working memory capacity (WMC) plays a role in this respect. To this end, using a self-paced reading task, we examined the processing strategies 62 Persian speaking proficient L2ers used to read...