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...

This study investigates how similarly present and absent English phonemes behind noise are perceived by native and non-native speakers. Participants were English native speakers and Japanese native speakers who spoke English as a second language. They listened to English words and non-words in which a phoneme was covered by noise (added; phoneme + noise) or replaced by noise (replaced; noise on...

The purpose of the present study is to examine a) how lower-intermediate and upperintermediate level Turkish learners of English-as-a-foreign language (EFL) realize refusals in English, b) the differences between native and non-native speakers of English in the use of refusals, and c) if L2 proficiency affects possible pragmatic transfer or not. The participants in the study included 18 native ...

This study investigated perception by non-native listeners of English fricatives produced in clear and conversational speaking styles. We measured babble thresholds for fricative voicing and place of articulation contrasts by Standard German and Swabian German and native American English speakers. Overall, Swabian German speakers performed worse than both native English and Standard German spea...

Relatively little is known about differences in English-administered, clinical neuropsychological test performance between native versus non-native English speakers, with prior literature yielding mixed findings. The purpose of this study was to examine the performance of native and non-native English speakers with similar age and educational backgrounds on a variety of cognitive tests. Partici...

This study examines the phonetic properties of lexical stress in English produced by Persian speakers learning English as a foreign language. The four most reliable phonetic correlates of English lexical stress, namely fundamental frequency, duration, intensity, and vowel quality were measured across Persian speakers’ production of the stressed and unstressed syllables of five English disyllabi...

The purpose of this study was to examine Cook’s (2003) ‘multiple competence’ by investigating backward pragmatic transfer (from L2 [English] to L1 [Persian]) in refusals to invitations. It explored participants’ frequency and content of refusal strategies in L1 regarding the status (i.e., power and distance) of interlocutors and the proficiency level of EFL learners. The participants were Persi...

Experiments investigating phonetic convergence in conversation often focus on interlocutors with similar phonetic inventories. Extending these experiments to those with dissimilar inventories requires understanding the capacity of speakers to imitate native and non-native phones. In the present study, we tested native Spanish and native English speakers to determine whether imitation of non-nat...

In this paper, the falling-rising tone in the English of very proficient non-native speakers is discussed. The speech data was collected in connection with MA thesis seminar sessions where the speakers, Finnish university students of English, discussed research methodology. Of the non-native speakers of English, only those who performed at high level of accuracy in a separate proficiency test w...

Visual information about lip and facial movements plays a role in audiovisual (AV) speech perception. Although this has been widely confirmed, previous behavioural studies have shown interlanguage differences, that is, native Japanese speakers do not integrate auditory and visual speech as closely as native English speakers. To elucidate the neural basis of such interlanguage differences, 22 na...