Listeners perceptually assimilate nonnative phones to native phonemes, but do they do so with unfamiliar accents of their own language? We assessed Australian (Aus) listeners’ assimilation of vowels in two unfamiliar English accents, and whether prior short-term exposure to the other accent would yield any adaptation to its vowels. Participants categorized the vowels of nonce words spoken in Au...

Accented speech poses a challenge for listeners, particularly those with limited knowledge of their language. In a series of studies, we explored the possibility that experience with variability, specifically the variability provided by multiple accents, would facilitate infants' comprehension of speech produced with an unfamiliar accent. 15- and 18-month-old American-English learning infants w...

The purpose of the present study is to compare the ASR performance when Swedish people speaking Swedish and English under time-stress and due-task performance. Fifteen university students (20 to 40 years of age, native Swedish language speaking) participated in the experiment. Three factors were studied: time-stress, which was manipulated by PWSP program. Two models of presenting the commands, ...

Native Language Identification (NLI) is the process of identifying the native language of non-native speakers based on their speech or writing. It has several applications namely authorship profiling and identification, forensic analysis, second language identification, and educational applications. English is one of the prominent language used by most of the non-English people in the world. Th...

Languages differ widely in the conventions they use to signal named entities. Spanish, French, and English use the case distinction of the modern Roman alphabet to indicate proper names, and upper case is a fairly good indicator of a proper name. The situation is quite different in German, where upper case is a poor cue. In traditional Chinese scholarly works, certain proper names are indicated...

Models of cross-language perception suggest that listeners’ native language plays a significant role in perceiving another language, and propose that listeners assimilate non-native speech sounds to similar sounds in their native language. In this study, the effect of native language on the perception of Mandarin tones by Swedish learners is examined. Swedish learners participated in an identif...