The present study investigates the extent of word-final devoicing in Russian for three groups of speakers: monolingual native Russian speakers (4 Ss), native Russian speakers with knowledge of English (7 Ss), and American English learners of Russian (9 Ss). Thirty-four minimal pairs of Russian words differing in the underlying voicing of word-final obstruents were recorded. Acoustic analysis fo...

Native-like production of intonational prominence is important for spoken language competency. Non-native speakers may have trouble producing prosodic variation in a second language (L2) and thus, problems in being understood. By identifying common sources of production error, we will be able to aid in the instruction of L2 speakers. In this paper we present results of a production study design...

It has been claimed that Dutch listeners use suprasegmental cues (duration, spectral tilt) more than English listeners in distinguishing English word stress. We tested whether this asymmetry also holds in production, comparing the realization of English word stress by native English speakers and Dutch speakers. Results confirmed that English speakers centralize unstressed vowels more, while Dut...

The unprecedented growth of English and arrival of English as an International Language (EIL) has generated a new fledged argument about English language teachers’ role and status around the world. To date, much of the debate on the native/non-native distinction in EIL settings and factors contributing to sharpen distinctions has remained unsettled. This gap motivated this study on the English ...

Production and perception of syllables in a second language (L2) that has relatively complex syllable structure, such as English, is expected to be difficult for native speakers of a language with relatively simple syllable structure, such as Japanese. A series of experiments investigated the perception, production, and learning of English syllables by native Japanese speakers. Results showed t...

The development of automatic speech recognition systems poses several known difficulties. One of them concerns the recognizer’s accuracy when dealing with non-native speakers of a given language. Normally a recognizer precision is lower for non-native users, hence our goal is to improve this low accuracy rate when the speech recognition system is confronted with a foreign accent. A typical usag...

The dynamics of spoken word recognition are acutely sensitive to competition among similar-sounding words. Here, we take advantage of this sensitivity to examine the manner in which native Italian speakers who are late learners of English perceive English vowels. Native Italian speakers and native English speakers listened to recordings of naturally produced words (”pin,” ”pen,” and ”pan”) and ...

This study investigates whether adult L2 learners’ experience with lexical tones and pitch accent in their first language facilitates the acquisition of L2 lexical tones. Three groups of beginning learners of Mandarin with different L1 prosodic experience: native Hmong (a tone language), native Japanese (a pitch and accent language), and native English (a non-tone, non-pitch accent language) sp...

This paper presents an initial effort in the area of nonnative children’s speech recognition by exploiting two children databases, one consisting of speech collected from native English children, the other one consisting of English sentences read by Italian learners of English in the same age range of the native speakers. First, a baseline speech recognizer for British English was trained on th...