PURPOSE The main aim of this experiment was to investigate the perception of Foreign Accent Syndrome in comparison to speakers with an authentic foreign accent. METHOD Three groups of listeners attributed accents to conversational speech samples of 5 FAS speakers which were embedded amongst those of 5 speakers with a real foreign accent and 5 native speaker controls. The listening panels diff...

Speakers of all languages gesture, but there are differences in the gestures that they produce. Do speakers learn language-specific gestures by watching others gesture or by learning to speak a particular language? We examined this question by studying the speech and gestures produced by 40 congenitally blind adult native speakers of English and Turkish (n = 20/language), and comparing them wit...

This study examines the synchronisation of voicing and VOT in German fortis and lenis stops being produced by native German speakers imitating a French accent as well as by native French speakers speaking German. The results show that native German speakers use variation of glottal activity during French accent imitation, i.e. reduction of VOT in fortis plosives and variation of voicing in leni...

Several recent theories have suggested that an increase in the number of non-native speakers in a language can lead to changes in morphological rules. We examine this experimentally by contrasting the performance of native and non-native English speakers in a simple Wug-task, showing that non-native speakers are significantly more likely to provide non -ed (i.e., irregular) past-tense forms for...

Native speakers of non-tonal languages, such as American English, frequently have difficulty accurately producing the tones of Mandarin Chinese. This paper describes a corpus of Mandarin Chinese spoken by non-native speakers and annotated for tone quality using a simple good/bad system. We examine interrater correlation of the annotations and highlight the differences in feature distribution be...

We introduce a general method for automatic diagnostic evaluation of the pronunciation of individual non-native speakers based on a model of the human auditory system trained with native data stimuli. For each phoneme class, the Euclidean geometry similarity between the native perceptual domain and the non-native speech power spectrum domain is measured. The problematic phonemes for a given sec...

This paper compares the articulation rate of 4 varieties of French: Parisian French (PA); Swiss French spoken in Neuchâtel (NE) and French spoken by Swiss German speakers (BE and ZH) who have been living in a French-speaking environment (in Neuchâtel) for 20 years at least. The objective is twofold: to assess the differences in articulation rate between native French speakers of a standard vari...

metadiscourse is a widely used term in current discourse analysis and language education, referring to an interesting, and relatively new approach to conceptualizing interaction between text producers and their texts and between text producers and users. despite the growing importance of the term, however, it is often understood in different ways and used to refer to different aspects of langua...

The reiterant speech of ten native speakers of French was analyzed to develop baseline measures for syllable and consonant/vowel timing for a series of two-, three-, four-, and five-syllable French words spoken in isolation. Ten native speakers of English, who learned French as a second language, produced reiterant versions of both the French words and a comparable set of English words. The nat...