An ongoing issue of interest in second language research concerns what transfers from a speaker's first language to their second. For learners of a sign language, gesture is a potential substrate for transfer. Our study provides a novel test of gestural production by eliciting silent gesture from novices in a controlled environment. We focus on spatial relationships, which in sign languages are...

Childhood experience with a language seems to help adult learners speak it with a more native-like accent. Can analogous benefits be found beyond phonology? This study focused on adult learners of Spanish who had spoken Spanish as their native language before age 7 and only minimally, if at all, thereafter until they began to re-learn Spanish around age 14 years. They were compared with native ...

Learner-centered education becomes more and more popular. One way of offering learner-centered education is to have assignments where learners can select from a pool of learning tasks with different difficulty levels (e.g., many easy tasks, few challenging tasks, etc.). However, a problem that learners can face in such assignments is to select the tasks that are most appropriate for them. In th...

Abstract Precise auditory perception at a subcortical level (neural representation and encoding of sound) has been suggested as form implicit L2 aptitude in naturalistic settings. Emerging evidence suggests that such explains some variance speech production among adult learners with different first language backgrounds immersion experience. By examining 46 Chinese English, the current study lon...

With the increasing importance of technology in our lives, incidences of adults experiencing anxiety about technology (`technophobia') are on the increase. The eld of technology that has advanced most rapidly in the last 40 years is that of computers and microelectronics. Thus, `com-puterphobia' (or`computer anxiety') is a particularly striking example of the eeects of the rapid growth of our t...

In many markets, it can be beneficial for competing firms to coordinate their actions. However, such arrangements usually have the problem that nobody has an incentive to adhere to the agreement. In this paper we investigate a way for two companies to communicate together and agree on a coordinated strategy in such a way that both participants have an incentive to keep to the agreement. We prov...

This paper presents a phonological feature based computer aided pronunciation training system for the learners of a new language (L2). Phonological features allow analysing the learners’ mispronunciations systematically and rendering the feedback more effectively. The proposed acoustic model consists of a multi-task deep neural network, which uses a shared representation for estimating the phon...