The purpose of the present study was to compare the speech performance of four types of alaryngeal phonation-electrolaryngeal (EL), pneumatic artificial laryngeal (PA), tracheoesophageal (TE), and standard esophageal (SE) speech-by adult Cantonese-speaking laryngectomees. Subjective ratings of (1) voice quality, (2) articulation proficiency, (3) quietness of speech, (4) pitch variability, and (...

This study introduces and evaluates a computerized approach to measuring Japanese L2 oral proficiency. We present a testing and scoring method that uses a type of structured speech called elicited imitation (EI) to evaluate accuracy of speech productions. Several types of language resources and toolkits are required to develop, administer, and score responses to this test. First, we present a c...

PURPOSE This study examined whether English-only vocabulary instruction or English vocabulary instruction enhanced with Spanish bridging produced greater word learning in young Spanish-speaking children learning English during a storybook reading intervention while considering individual language characteristics. METHOD Twenty-two Spanish-speaking children learning English (ages 4-6) who part...

Corpus linguistic analysis has been increasingly applied to the studies of variation in surface linguistic features of second language writing. Previous research found that nonnative English speaking (NNS) writers at higher levels of proficiency produced larger quantity (measured by the number of words) and greater quality (measured by the number of varieties of lexical items used in the texts)...

This work reports on the construction of a rated database of spontaneous speech produced by second language (L2) learners of English. Spontaneous speech was collected from 28 L2 speakers representing six language backgrounds and five different proficiency levels. Speech was elicited using formats similar to that of the TOEFL iBT and the Speaking Proficiency English Assessment Kit (SPEAK) test. ...

Hispanics will constitute a growing part of the older population well into the 21st century. Accompanying this growth, we can expect that challenges associated with a large bilingual and non-English speaking older population may become more pronounced. The purpose of this research was to examine the level and determinants of English proficiency among older Hispanics in the United States. Data f...

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 ...

OBJECTIVE Identify differences in the early treatment of acute chest pain patients with regard to the language proficiency of patients and thus identify opportunities for improving equity in cardiac care. DESIGN Retrospective cross-sectional study comparing care delivered to Swedish-speaking (SS) and non-Swedish-speaking (NSS) patients. SETTING A Swedish university hospital that provides hi...

We investigated using structural events, e.g., clause and disfluency structure, from transcriptions of spontaneous non-native speech, to compute features for measuring speaking proficiency. Using a set of transcribed audio files collected from the TOEFL Practice Test Online (TPO), we conducted a sophisticated annotation of structural events, including clause boundaries and types, as well as dis...

This study provides a method that identifies problematic responses which make automated speech scoring difficult. When automated scoring is used in the context of a high stakes language proficiency assessment, for which the scores are used to make consequential decisions, some test takers may have an incentive to try to game the system in order to artificially inflate their scores. Since many a...