In this paper, we empirically explore the relationship between native language and use of the Internet. The ultimate economic and social questions we explore are: (1) how native language affects use of the Internet, both in total and by type of Web site; (2) whether English is likely to retain its “first-mover advantage” on the Web in terms of the language employed by Web sites; and (3) whether...

The suprasegmental characteristics of non-native speech are generally described as differing from those of native speech. Recent work has shown that in addition to speaking at overall slower rates, non-native speakers in a reading task are more variable than native speakers in their speaking rate across utterances [1]. However, read speech may contain sources of variability that are specific to...

When learning to speak English, non-native speakers may pronounce some English phonemes differently from native speakers. These pronunciation variations can degrade an automatic speech recognition system’s performance on accented English. This paper is a first attempt to find common pronunciation variations in Spanishaccented English as spoken by young children. The analysis of pronunciation va...

This study is intended to describe and analyze the durational patterns of native Japanese speakers learning English, with a focus on two major prosodic effects: phrase-final lengthening and stresstimed shortening. To investigate the relative contribution of these effects, a production experiment was conducted, adapting the methodological framework of Beckman and Edwards (1990). The effects of t...

We recorded non-native English productions of 55 speakers; a subset of these productions was assessed by 60 native English speakers as for their quality w. r. t. intelligibility, rhythm, etc. Applying multiple linear regression on a large prosodic feature vector – modelling approaches known from the literature as well as generic prosody – we can automatically predict the listener’s assessments ...

Complex word identification (CWI) is an important task in text accessibility. However, due to the scarcity of CWI datasets, previous studies have only addressed this problem on Wikipedia sentences and have solely taken into account the needs of non-native English speakers. We collect a new CWI dataset (CWIG3G2) covering three text genres (NEWS, WIKINEWS, and WIKIPEDIA) annotated by both native ...

In this paper we describe our participation in the Interactive Social Book Search task at CLEF 2015. We focus our analysis on differences in search behaviour between native and non-native speakers of English. The analysis is based on both questionnaire and log data. 49 participants out of the 192 total participants are native speakers and the remaining 143 participants are nonnative speakers. I...

We report three user studies in which the Lexical Simplification needs of non-native English speakers are investigated. Our analyses feature valuable new insight on the relationship between the non-natives’ notion of complexity and various morphological, semantic and lexical word properties. Some of our findings contradict long-standing misconceptions about word simplicity. The data produced in...

The present study examines cross-linguistic articulation rates in read speech among 28 native speakers (14 English and 14 Japanese) and 14 Japanese-English near-balanced bilinguals. The results show that: (1) articulation rates are comparable between the native speakers and the bilinguals; (2) there was a significant difference of articulation rates in Japanese and English among the bilinguals;...

This study investigates topical Theme choices in Chinese and Swedish English learners’ English writing and aims to find out how topical Theme choices in Chinese English learners’ English writings are different from those in Swedish English learners’ English writings with native speakers as the research baseline. The corpus consists of comparable written data of Chinese English learners, Swedish...