Aims and objectives: The study provides new insights into how bilingual speakers process semantically complex novel meanings in their native (L1) non-native language (L2). Methodology: employs an EEG method with a semantic decision task to nominal metaphors, similes, as well literal anomalous sentences presented participants’ L1 L2. Data analysis: In total, 29 of Polish who were highly proficie...

Designing green infrastructure in cities requires vegetation that has multiple outcomes and functions, particularly using plants have both attractive visual or aesthetic features high biodiversity values. Plantings appeal are more highly valued by people increase their feeling of wellbeing. Increasing is one the major challenges facing urban planning design. However, balancing planting design c...

Native and non-native use of language differs, depending on the proficiency of the speaker, in clear and quantifiable ways. It has been shown that customizing the acoustic and language models of a natural language understanding system can significantly improve handling of non-native input; in order to make such a switch, however, the nativeness status of the user must be known. In this paper, w...

The Degree of Nativeness Sub-Challenge consists in the automatic grading of the pronunciation quality of non-native English utterances. In this paper, we investigate the phrase accentuation and the phonetic acoustic variability for the prediction of the grades. Two prediction systems have been developed: the Extended Baseline System (EBS) and the Pronunciation Feature based System (PFS). The EB...

This paper investigates whether the advanced Korean learners of standard Chinese produce Chinese with specific voice quality, and which voice quality parameters have significant difference. The study includes comparative analysis between the Korean and Chinese vowel /a/ for Korean speakers. It can be made certain by measuring voice quality parameters by means of EGG (electroglottalgraphy). The ...

In this paper, we conduct experiments using F0 contour features to assess the nativeness of responses provided by speakers from India and China to a Sentence Repeat task in an assessment of English speaking proficiency for non-native speakers. The results show that the coefficients from polynomial models of the pitch contours help distinguish between native and non-native speakers, especially a...

This study investigated the prosodic features of non-native spoken English. Sixteen recordings were extracted from an in-progress test-based learner corpus, each consisted of read-aloud and question-and-answer parts by a learner who had received a grade of 3 (passing) or 5 (highest) on a five-point scale. A group of 8 native speakers was recruited and recorded under the same test scenario as a ...

One of the challenges in automatic speech recognition is how to handle pronunciation variation. The main causes for pronunciation variation are the speaker (voice characteristics, accent, non-nativeness etc.) and the speaking style (reading, spontaneous responses, conversation etc.). An ASR system has basically two options for modelling the variation on the word and sub-word level: lexical mode...