The study explores the difficulties of native English speakers in acquiring the Chinese word order, aiming to relate it to the markedness theories. According to the Differential Markedness Hypothesis (DMH), the degrees of learner difficulty in second language acquisition can be predicted according to the degrees of typological markedness between learners’ first language (L1) and their second la...

In this paper we present a computer assisted language learning (CALL) system that is developed to practice grammar in spoken language. To enable this, the system uses Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to process the L2 learner’s responses. We investigate the possibility of providing corrective feedback (CF) on learner errors, and compare that with self-monitored language learning through outpu...

It is notoriously difficult to evaluate L2 prosody objectively, since there is little consensus as to what constitutes a correct prosody for a given utterance. This presentation describes an automatic procedure which consists in comparing a non-native speakers production with 10 instances of the same utterance, taken from the OMProDat database, and read by native speakers. The pitch and relativ...

We present the first application of Native Language Identification (NLI) to nonEnglish data. Motivated by theories of language transfer, NLI is the task of identifying a writer’s native language (L1) based on their writings in a second language (the L2). An NLI system was applied to Chinese learner texts using topicindependent syntactic models to assess their accuracy. We find that models using...

This study introduces and evaluates a computerized approach to measuring Japanese L2 oral proficiency. We present a testing and scoring method that uses a type of structured speech called elicited imitation (EI) to evaluate accuracy of speech productions. Several types of language resources and toolkits are required to develop, administer, and score responses to this test. First, we present a c...

This thesis investigates the production and perception of optional liaison consonants by Anglophone learners of French. While second/foreign language (L2) phonology has long been recognized as an area of learner difficulty, there have been few studies on the acquisition of liaison by L2 learners of French. The two studies contained in this thesis hope to expand our understanding of liaison as i...