This is an acoustic study of the production of English /l/ by Standard German speakers. Previous research categorized these speakers as either non-proficient or proficient with regard to their phonetic abilities. Coarticulation differences might be one of several reasons for less proficient speakers not to be able to overcome their foreign accent. The pattern of consonantal velarization influen...

The number of Americans with limited English proficiency (LEP) is growing, and legal protections mandate that LEP individuals have equal access to health care services. The aim of this study was to determine the availability of interpretation services in U.S. dental school clinics and the kinds of instruction dental students are given regarding treatment of LEP patients. A survey was distribute...

INTRODUCTION 26 million Americans have limited English proficiency (LEP). It is well established that language barriers adversely affect health and health care. Despite growing awareness of language barriers, there is essentially a void in the medical literature regarding the influence of language disparity on pediatric surgery patients. This study was designed to assess the impact of patient-p...

English language learning in a non-native environment is always challenge. This especially so among limited proficiency (LEP) learners. Despite having eleven years of instructions primary and secondary school, there are still quite number LEP learners entering the university. may be attributed to lack exposure language, as classroom instruction alone not sufficient for mastery second language. ...

We describe a technique for learning pronunciation rules based on the Version Space algorithm. In particular, we describe how to learn pronunciation rules for a representative subset of the English graphemes. We present a learning procedure called LEP-G.1 (learning to pronounce English graphemes) that learns English pronunciation rules from examples in the form of word-pronunciation pairs. With...

The benefit of publishing research in English is obvious, but so is the problem: authors with a limited knowledge of English find it difficult to compete with their proficient colleagues. In this note, we offer suggestions for improving the English of papers in the biological sciences. The suggestions aim to help authors enhance writing skills, are based on our experiences as language corrector...