Although vowel quality is an important cue to the perception of English lexical stress, few studies have examined the role this cue plays for non-native speakers. Previous research found that Mandarin speakers had problems using vowel reduction as a cue in English lexical stress production. Assuming native-like perception is a prerequisite to native-like production for non-native speech, this s...

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 study investigates grammatical gender and number processing marked on clitic pronouns in native Spanish speakers and in late English-Spanish bilinguals using ERPs. Spanish clitic pronouns were chosen as a critical grammatical structure which is absent in English, and which encodes both grammatical gender and number. Number, but not grammatical gender, is present in English, making this str...

PURPOSE To assess the influence of second language (L2) proficiency on production characteristics of rhythmic sequences in the L1 (Bengali) and L2 (English), with emphasis on linguistic transfer. One goal was to examine, using kinematic evidence, how L2 proficiency influences the production of iambic and trochaic words, focusing on temporal and spatial aspects of prosody. A second goal was to a...

L2 English speech produced by Mandarin Chinese speakers is usually perceived to be intermediate between stress-timed and syllable-timed in rhythm. However, previous studies seldom employed comparable data of target language, source language and L2 interlanguage in one investigation, which may lead to discrepant results. Thus, in this study we conducted a contrastive investigation of 10 Chinese ...

Metaphors suffuse language and affect how people think. A meta-analysis of metaphor framing studies conducted between 1983 and 2000 concluded that metaphors are about 6% more persuasive than literal language (Sopory & Dillard, 2002). However, each of these studies was conducted in English with samples drawn from populations of native English speakers. Here, we test whether and how language prof...

So far, applied research aiming at computer-assisted pronunciation training has normally concentrated on segmental aspects. Here, we present a database with realizations of nonnative English speakers with German, French, Spanish, and Italian as native language. We concentrate on the acoustic-prosodic modelling of word accent position and use a large prosodic feature vector to automatically reco...

Our investigation involves an analysis of the miscues made by both native speakers and non-native speakers of English while reading aloud in English. The results of our miscue analysis support there being one common underlying reading process in both first and second languages involving the active construction of meaning through the application of both top-down and bottom-up strategies. Languag...

In two self-paced reading experiments we asked whether late, highly proficient, English-Spanish bilinguals are able to process language-specific morpho-syntactic information in their second language (L2). The processing of Spanish clitic pronouns' word order was tested in two sentential constructions. Experiment 1 showed that English-Spanish bilinguals performed similarly to Spanish-English bil...