literature is the aesthetic manifestation of language. it is ‘as old as human language and as new as tomorrow’s sunrise.’ this paper explores the interrelationships between language and literature from 600 ad to the present day.  the grammar of present-day english is closely related to that of old english with the same tense formation and word orders. the verse unit is a single line and its org...

Automatic systems for practice and exams are essential to support the growing worldwide demand for learning English as an additional language. Assessment of spontaneous spoken English is, however, currently limited in scope due to the difficulty of achieving sufficient automatic speech recognition (ASR) accuracy. ”Off-the-shelf” English ASR systems cannot model the exceptionally wide variety of...

This study evaluated the critical period hypothesis for second language (L2) acquisition. The participants were 240 native speakers of Korean who differed according to age of arrival (AOA) in the United States (1 to 23 years), but were all experienced in English (mean length of residence 5 15 years). The native Korean participants’ pronunciation of English was evaluated by having listeners rate...

it is argued that language learning is regarded as the cornerstone of human existence. the widespread use of english as an international language makes it highly important in the world. it is no more working as the status of language of the elite class or the educated class of the society such as professors, rather it is working as an instrument to bring success in life. nowadays, teachers need...

The para-linguistic information in a speech signal includes clues to the geographical and social background of the speaker. This paper is concerned with recognition of the 14 regional accents of British English. For Accent Identification (AID), acoustic methods exploit differences between the distributions of sounds, while phonotactic approaches exploit the sequences in which these sounds occur...

This paper presents an HMM-based method and experimental results for voice conversion between UK and US accented English. Phonetic-tree based tiedstate triphone HMMs are used to map equivalent states of the source and target spectra. Then a linear transformation method is incorporated to estimate the most likely target spectra for a given input. The mapping is between two different sets of phon...

A perceptual experiment was designed to determine to what extent naïve French listeners are able to identify foreign accents in French: Arabic, English, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. They succeed in recognizing the speaker’s mother tongue in more than 50% of cases (while rating their degree of accentedness as average). They perform best with Arabic speakers and worst with Portuguese ...