In this study, Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) were used to evaluate pronunciation. Native and non-native speakers were asked to pronounce ten Dutch words. Each word was subsequently evaluated by an expert listener. Her main task was to decide whether a word was spoken by a native or a non-native speaker. For each word type, two versions of prototype HMMs were defined: one to be trained on tokens p...

This study examines the coda voicing effect in English on production of preceding vowel by comparing L1 and L2 speech. Particular attention is paid to how coda voicing contrast is encoded in temporal vs. spectral dimensions, how the effect interacts with information structure (with varying focus types), and how the use of information structure differs in L1 vs. L2. Both English (native) and Kor...

Neuropsychological studies in brain-injured patients with aphasia and children with specific language-learning deficits have shown the dependence of language comprehension on auditory processing abilities, i.e. the detection of temporal order. An impairment of temporal-order perception can be simulated by time reversing segments of the speech signal. In our study, we investigated how different ...

Abstract The present study aimed at discovering the practices and strategies autonomous EFL learners pursue in their endeavor to master English. It thus set out in the Iranian context, with 60 EFL learners, both autonomous and non-autonomous, as participants. The gathered data through a questionnaire and an interview were subjected to content and descriptive analysis. The results showed that bo...

Abstract The present study aimed at discovering the practices and strategies autonomous EFL learners pursue in their endeavor to master English. It thus set out in the Iranian context, with 60 EFL learners, both autonomous and non-autonomous, as participants. The gathered data through a questionnaire and an interview were subjected to content and descriptive analysis. The results showed that bo...

In the present paper, corpus linguistics becomes a valuable methodological tool for cross-linguistic research on speech and prosody. The inherent complexity of speech analysis and prosodic annotation increases when the object of study is a longitudinal computerized corpus of native and nonnative varieties of English. The lack of generally accepted prosodic transcription systems adds further dif...

This paper compares the articulation rate of 4 varieties of French: Parisian French (PA); Swiss French spoken in Neuchâtel (NE) and French spoken by Swiss German speakers (BE and ZH) who have been living in a French-speaking environment (in Neuchâtel) for 20 years at least. The objective is twofold: to assess the differences in articulation rate between native French speakers of a standard vari...

Models for English The majority of ‘Outer Circle’ (Kachru 1985, 1992) speakers of English speak English as a second language: that is, they have not grown up speaking English from infancy, and they use it with people from their own country. In Outer Circle countries, there are also substantial numbers of native speakers of English, people who have learnt English from infancy. The English of the...