Extreme overall divergence and high extinction rates are typical of insular endemics. Thus, detecting and understanding nativeness is critical on islands. Resilience to extinction is explored through a mechanistic approach focusing on midwife toads (Anura: Alytidae: Alytinae), an ancient lineage that includes continental and insular species. All alytines need urgent conservation action, includi...

Due to various difficulties in pronunciation, utterances by nonnative speakers may be lacking in fluency. The Japanese pronunciation is said to have mora-synchronism, and, therefore, we assume that the disfluency may cause larger variations in vowel durations. Analyses of vowel (and CV) durations were conducted for Japanese sentence utterances by 2 non-Japanese speakers and one Japanese speaker...

Training L2 learners’ pronunciation by using a controlled perception procedure has long been the mainstream of L2 speech pedagogy research. However, endeavors have also been done to explore more communicative teaching methods. The current study presents a paradigm that tests both communicative teaching methods’ renderings of pronunciation pedagogy and a form-focused instruction which is less us...

PURPOSE To assess the influence of second language (L2) proficiency on production characteristics of rhythmic sequences in the L1 (Bengali) and L2 (English), with emphasis on linguistic transfer. One goal was to examine, using kinematic evidence, how L2 proficiency influences the production of iambic and trochaic words, focusing on temporal and spatial aspects of prosody. A second goal was to a...

In recent years, there has been much debate about the concept of digital natives, in particular the differences between the digital natives’ knowledge and adoption of digital technologies in informal versus formal educational contexts. This paper investigates the knowledge about educational technologies of a group of undergraduate students studying the course Introduction to eLearning at a univ...

The task of native language (L1) identification from nonnative language (L2) can be thought of as the task of identifying the common traits that each group of L1 speakers maintains while speaking L2 irrespective of the dialect or region. Under the assumption that speakers are L1 proficient, non-native cues in terms of segmental and prosodic aspects are investigated in our work. In this paper, w...

Minding your p's and q's has become as important to protein-folding theorists as it is for those being instructed in the rules of etiquette. To assess the quality of structural reaction coordinates in predicting the transition-state ensemble (TSE) of protein folding, we benchmarked the accuracy of four structural reaction coordinates against the kinetic measure P(fold), whose value of 0.50 defi...

In this paper we describe two unsupervised representations of prosodic sequences based on k-means and Dirichlet Process Gaussian Mixture Model (DPGMM) clustering. The clustering algorithms are used to infer an inventory of prosodic categories over automatically segmented syllables. A tri-gram model is trained over these sequences to characterize speech. We find that DPGMM clusters show a greate...

Current psycholinguistic theory proffers prediction as a central, explanatory mechanism in language processing. However, widely-replicated prediction effects may not mean that prediction is necessary in language processing. As a case in point, C. D. Martin et al. [2013. Bilinguals reading in their second language do not predict upcoming words as native readers do. Journal of Memory and Language...

Nonnative speech poses a challenge to speech perception, especially in challenging listening environments. Audiovisual (AV) cues are known to improve native speech perception in noise. The extent to which AV cues benefit nonnative speech perception in noise, however, is much less well-understood. Here, we examined native American English-speaking and native Korean-speaking listeners' perception...