Phonological transfer from the native language is a common problem for non-native speakers that has repeatedly been shown to result in perceptual deficits vis-à-vis native speakers. It was hypothesized, however, that transfer could help, rather than hurt, if it resulted in a beneficial bias. Due to differences in pronunciation norms between Korean and English, Koreans in the U.S. were predicted...

This study examined the influence of the L1 phonetic system on the acquisition of Swedish quantity distinctions. The aim was to test the hypothesis that difficulty in acquiring an L2 contrastive category is related to the role in the L1 of the phonetic feature upon which the L2 category is based. Twenty native speakers each of American English, Latin American Spanish and Estonian participated. ...

Analyzing writing styles of non-native speakers is a challenging task. In this paper, we analyze the comments written in the discussion pages of the English Wikipedia. Using learning algorithms, we are able to detect native speakers’ writing style with an accuracy of 74%. Given the diversity of the English Wikipedia users and the large number of languages they speak, we measure the similarities...

Typical grammar checking software use some form of natural language parsing to determine if errors exist in the text. If a sentence is found ungrammatical, the grammar checker usually seeks a single grammatical error as an explanation. For non-native speakers of English, it is possible that a given sentence contain multiple errors and grammar checkers may not adequately explain these mistakes. ...

This study examined production of /b, d, g/ and /p, t, k/ in the initial .position of English and Spanish words by two groups of native Spanish adults and native Spanish 9-10 year-olds who began learning English as a second language (L2) by the age of 5-6 years. It also examined identification by the same subjects of a VaT continuum ranging from /da/ to /ta/. The subjects in all three groups pr...

A speech recognition system is subjected to the speech of non-native speakers, using both native and non-native acoustic phone models. The problems involved with the mapping of phoneset from the nonnative to native language are investigated, and a detailed analysis of phone confusions is made. For Dutch speakers, British English acoustic models give the best word recognition results.

In this paper we present a new spell-checking system that utilizes contextual information for automatic correction of non-word misspellings. The system is evaluated with a large corpus of essays written by native and nonnative speakers of English to the writing prompts of high-stakes standardized tests (TOEFL and GRE). We also present comparative evaluations with Aspell and the speller from Mic...

This article reports on a perception study that was carried out with Zulu-English bilinguals in order to investigate how suprasegmental aspects differ in Black South African English compared to White English-speaking South African English. Two prosodic phenomena were investigated: prosodic focus marking on noun phrases (NPs) and prosodic boundary marking. The results support existing claims in ...

The processing of English noun-noun compounds (NNCs) was investigated to identify the extent and nature of differences between the performance of native speakers of English and advanced Spanish and German non-native speakers of English. The study sought to establish whether the word order of the equivalent structure in the non-native speakers' mothertongue (L1) had an influence on their process...

Three experiments investigated 5- to 6-year-old monolingual English-speaking American children's sociolinguistic evaluations of others based on their accent (native, foreign) and social actions (nice, mean, neutral). In Experiment 1, children expressed social preferences for native-accented English speakers over foreign-accented speakers, and they judged the native-accented speakers to be "Amer...