The staggering amounts of content readily available to us via digital channels can often appear overwhelming. While much research has focused on aiding people at selecting relevant articles to read, only few approaches have been developed to assist readers in more efficiently reading an individual text. In this paper, we present HiText, a simple yet effective way of dynamically marking parts of...

A speech production experiment was conducted to investigate how well native Japanese speakers can produce a non-contrastive sound in American English, namely, intervocalic alveolar flaps, and how their production varies as a function of language experience. Native Japanese speakers who have prior experience living in the US produced English sentences containing potentially flappable segments. R...

This work reports on the construction of a rated database of spontaneous speech produced by second language (L2) learners of English. Spontaneous speech was collected from 28 L2 speakers representing six language backgrounds and five different proficiency levels. Speech was elicited using formats similar to that of the TOEFL iBT and the Speaking Proficiency English Assessment Kit (SPEAK) test. ...

This paper presents the first version of the SpeechRater system for automatically scoring non-native spontaneous high-entropy speech in the context of an online practice test for prospective takers of the Test of English as a Foreign Language internet-based test (TOEFL iBT). The system consists of a speech recognizer trained on non-native English speech data, a feature computation module, using...

This study was an attempt to explore the reading strategy use of Iranian M.A. students across three different fields of study. Eighty-two M.A. students of power engineering, physics, and communicationwere selected by a Nelson test and the reading comprehension section of a TOEFL. The reading comprehension section of the TOEFL served also as a specific task which helped participants report their...