Perceptual narrowing is a highly significant development associated with the first year of life. It conventionally refers to an orientation toward nativeness whereby infant's perceptual sensitivities begin to align with the phonetic properties of their native environment. Nativeness effects, such as perceptual narrowing, have been observed in several domains, most notably, in face discriminatio...

Predicting the degree of nativeness of a student's utterance is an important issue in computer-aided language learning. This task has been addressed by many studies focusing on the segmental assessment of the speech signal. To achieve improved correlations between human and automatic nativeness scores, other aspects of speech should also be considered, such as prosody. The goal of this study is...

The central aim of this study was to clarify whether sign language (SL) nativeness is a significant factor in determining prelingually deaf individuals' reading skills and whether its contribution is modified by the reader's orthographic background. A second aim was to elucidate similarities and differences between native and nonnative signers in processing written information at different proc...

The Internet and digital media have forced many individuals to change their attitudes and behaviours in nearly all aspects of life, including work and consumption. Other individuals, often younger, have grown up with digital media and seem not to have undergone changes in attitudes and behaviours. This research suggests, however, that age should not be used as the criterion to differentiate bet...

This paper describes the effect of deviance in focus marking by means of pitch accent distributions in Dutch on L1 perceptions of accentedness, nativeness and comprehensibility in L1 and L2 speech. On a rating task Dutch natives demonstrate that they have unambiguous intuitions concerning L2 speech by Spanish learners of Dutch by categorically rating it as more accented, more difficult to compr...

Giving feedback on the degree of nativeness of a student’s speech is an important aspect of computer-aided language learning. This task has been addressed by many studies focusing on the segmental assessment of the speech signal. To better model human nativeness scores, other aspects of speech should also be considered, such as prosody. This study examines the use of prosodic information to eva...

Automatically evaluating pronunciation quality of non-native speech has seen tremendous success in both research and commercial settings, with applications in L2 learning. In this paper, submitted for the INTERSPEECH 2015 Degree of Nativeness Sub-Challenge, this problem is posed under a challenging crosscorpora setting using speech data drawn from multiple speakers from a variety of language ba...

Differentiating intrinsic language words from transliterable words is a key step aiding text processing tasks involving different natural languages. We consider the problem of unsupervised separation of transliterable words from native words for text in Malayalam language. Outlining a key observation on the diversity of characters beyond the word stem, we develop an optimization method to score...

We present a novel approach to discriminating native and nonnative utterances based on suprasegmental features extracted at the Accent Group (AG) level. Past studies have shown modeling a set of shared intonation patterns across AGs to be effective in predicting local f0 contour shapes. Here we demonstrate that AG level prosodic features are also effective in nativeness classification. The prop...

Paul Warren, Irina Elgort, David Crabbe Victoria University of Wellington In the context of a project developing software for pronunciation practice and feedback for Mandarin-speaking learners of English, a key issue is how to decide which features of pronunciation to focus on in giving feedback. We used naïve and experienced native speaker ratings of comprehensibility and nativeness to establi...