Groups Of Non-native Speakers Research Articles

The role of vowel inherent spectral change in the intelligibility of English vowels spoken by English-, Chinese-, and Korean-native speakers

This study is designed to investigate the relationship between Vowel Inherent Spectral Change (VISC) and vowel intelligibility of native and non-native speakers of English. VISC refers to the relatively slow varying changes in formant frequencies associated with each vowel category (Neary and Assman, 1986). Such spectral change has been known to be a major factor in the perception of both the phonetic and phonemic English vowels. In the previous research projects conducted in our lab, we recorded 12 English vowels in /hVd/ format spoken by English native (EN), Chinese native (CN) and Korean native (KN) speakers and examined vowel intelligibility. Overall, vowel intelligibility was significantly higher for native talkers than for non-native talkers. Within non-native speaker groups, CN had slightly higher intelligibility than KN speakers. In this study, we are going to analyze an acoustic feature of the vowels, VISC, spoken by these native and non-native speakers. It is hypothesized that the acoustic differences of vowels spoken by different groups of speakers can account for the variances in vowel intelligibility.

Production of English vowels by speakers of Mandarin Chinese with prolonged exposure to English

Previous studies of non-native production of English vowels have demonstrated that a native-like attainment of certain distinctions is not guaranteed for all speakers, despite prolonged exposure to the target (e.g., Munro et al. 1996, Flege et al. 1997). The current study examines the applicability of this finding to a group of non-native speakers from the same L1 background (Mandarin Chinese) who are all long-term residents in the USA (7 years minimum) and adult arrivals (> age 18). These non-native speakers (N=36) and a control group of native speakers (N=22) were recorded reading two sets of materials: the Stella paragraph (Weinberg 2012) and five sentences from Flege et al. (1999). Vowel formant measurements were extracted for all tokens from the following three pairs of vowels: [i] ~ [ɪ], [e] ~ [ɛ], and [a] ~ [ʌ]. Euclidean distances between the z-normalized (F1, F2) mean values for the two vowels in each pair for each speaker show that the non-native speakers produce each of the three pairs significantly less distinctly than the native speakers. This finding corroborates previous similar findings and suggests that a speaker's L1 continues to have a strong influence on vowel production, despite long-term exposure to the target.

Collocational Links in the L2 Mental Lexicon and the Influence of L1 Intralexical Knowledge

This article assesses the influence of L1 intralexical knowledge on the formation of L2 intralexical collocations. Two tests, a primed lexical decision task (LDT) and a test of receptive collocational knowledge, were administered to a group of non-native speakers (NNSs) (L1 Swedish), with native speakers (NSs) of English serving as controls on the LDT. The tests assessed collocations in three critical conditions: (i) collocations with translation equivalents in Swedish and English (L1–L2), (ii) collocations that were acceptable in English but not in Swedish (L2-only), and (iii) unrelated items for baseline data. Our results showed that the L1 may have considerable influence on the development of L2 collocational knowledge. NNSs both processed [with faster reaction times (RTs) on the LDT] and recognized (with higher receptive scores) L1–L2 collocations more effectively than L2-only collocations. However, the results of the LDT also showed considerable variability for the L2-only condition, suggesting that the overall slower RTs in this condition might have been linked more to a lack of priming for individual items rather than slower RTs for this condition as a whole.

Rewriting the ‘Duchess of Malfi’

This article addresses issues of text adaptation in full-scale ESL drama production. After choosing to present Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, participants in the English Drama Workshop at Padua University set about the task of adapting the play in order to make it more suitable for a group of non-native speakers of English acting in front of an audience made up predominantly of non-native speakers. Substantial changes were made during the adaptation process: as well as cutting and simplifying the text, certain characters were eliminated while others were doubled (or rather tripled) and one scene was totally rewritten. When implementing these changes, the group had to take account of both the student-actors’ linguistic competence and the size and composition of the cast, most of the members of which were female. It is argued that text adaptation in ESL drama is not only a way of creating a more appropriate product, but also greatly enriches the process leading up to the performance. The students gained deeper insights into the text and were also able to achieve a strong sense of ownership of the final production. This article addresses issues of text adaptation in full-scale ESL drama production. After choosing to present Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, participants in the English Drama Workshop at Padua University set about the task of adapting the play in order to make it more suitable for a group of non-native speakers of English acting in front of an audience made up predominantly of non-native speakers. Substantial changes were made during the adaptation process: as well as cutting and simplifying the text, certain characters were eliminated while others were doubled (or rather tripled) and one scene was totally rewritten. When implementing these changes, the group had to take account of both the student-actors’ linguistic competence and the size and composition of the cast, most of the members of which were female. It is argued that text adaptation in ESL drama is not only a way of creating a more appropriate product, but also greatly enriches the process leading up to the performance. The students gained deeper insights into the text and were also able to achieve a strong sense of ownership of the final production.

Mitigation and politeness in Greek invitation refusals: Effects of length of residence in the target community and intensity of interaction on non-native speakers’ performance

This paper investigates the politeness strategies and mitigation devices used by native and non-native speakers (advanced learners) of Greek when refusing an invitation from an intimate and their consequences for the expression of politeness. Furthermore, it examines whether length of residence or intensity of interaction with native speakers affect non-native speakers’ performance. The data are drawn from role plays performed by native speakers and non-native speakers of two different groups: one with extended length of residence but limited opportunities for social interaction with native speakers and one with less extended length of residence but considerably more frequent opportunities for social interaction. On the basis of these data, it is argued that with regard to the speech act of declining an invitation from a friend, length of residence can be an insufficient measure whereas intensity of interaction can guarantee better results as regards pragmatic appropriateness and politeness. The significant deviations observed between native speakers and non-native speakers with limited opportunities for intimate interaction are attributed to the fact that the latter being economic migrants, who suffer from social seclusion, cannot rely on length of residence alone, in order to acquire sociocultural norms and develop pragmatic ability in the use of speech acts like the one investigated here. This fact combined with the finding that both groups of non-native speakers displayed an underdeveloped pragmatic ability in relation to mitigation devices, such as lexical/phrasal downgraders highlights the need for pedagogical intervention which aims at providing learners with metapragmatic information and meaningful opportunities for interaction that may promote their pragmatic development.

Making sense of phrasal verbs

Phrasal verbs (PVs) have recently been the object of interest by linguists given their status as phraseological units whose meaning is non-compositional and opaque. They constitute a perfect case for theories of language processing and language acquisition to be tested. Cognitive linguists have participated in this debate and shown a certain interest for PVs, although their research on this topic stems in most of the cases from their central interest on prepositions and the language of spatiality. In this paper, I aim to make a comprehensive and critical summary of the cognitive linguistics (CL) literature on PVs with particular attention to its connection with usage-based approaches, especially in Second Language Acquisition (SLA), and to the concept of (meaning) motivation, which has proven to be useful in teaching. I will also present a CL analysis of the out-PVs (i.e., those containing the particle out) used by 3 groups of non-native speakers of English whose L1 respectively belongs to a Germanic satellite-framed (S-) language (Swedish and Dutch), a non-Germanic S-language (Russian and Bulgarian) and a verb-framed (V-) language (Spanish and Italian). The results obtained from this analysis show: (1) that both Germanic and Non-Germanic S-language learners use a greater number of out-PVs than V-language learners, not only when these verbs have a motional meaning but also when they express other meanings; and (2) that S-language learners also use a greater elaboration of path (Slobin 1996) when non-motional out-PV meanings are involved. These findings suggest that ‘the thinking for speaking hypothesis’ (Slobin 1996, 1997; Cadierno 2004), which has been shown to work for the domain of manner and path of motion, may in part be extended to the acquisition of PVs by L2 learners.

Ist Patientenzufriedenheit in der stationären Depressionsbehandlung von der Qualität sprachlicher Deutschkenntnisse abhängig?

To analyze patient satisfaction in inpatient depression treatment depending on German language proficiency. Documentation of patients in 24 psychiatric hospitals in Baden-Württemberg (South Germany). The following three groups were matched according to age, gender, and education: native German speakers, non-native speakers with good German proficiency, and non-native speakers with limited German proficiency (67 in each group). The number of unsatisfied patients was four times higher in the group of non-native speakers with limited German proficiency (24 %) than in the native German speakers group (6,5 %) and more then twice as high as in the group of non-native speakers with good German proficiency (10.2 %). Patient satisfaction was lower in the group of non-native speakers with limited German proficiency independent of treatment outcome than in both other groups, whereas in both groups with good German proficiency, satisfaction was associated with treatment outcome. Good linguistic understanding is more important for patient satisfaction in inpatient depression treatment than treatment outcome.

Patients' Language Proficiency and Inpatient Depression Treatment in Baden-Württemberg (South Germany)

Patients' Language Proficiency and Inpatient Depression Treatment in Baden-Württemberg (South Germany)

Oral Cavity Awareness in Nonnative Speakers Acquiring English

This investigation assessed awareness of the oral cavity of nonnative speakers acquiring English. University students (60 men, 60 women) were placed into three equal-size groups. The Less Experienced group lived in the USA less than 6 mo. (M = 3.3 mo., SD = 2.4). The More Experienced group lived in the United States 3 or more years (M = 5.0 yr., SD = 1.9). Native English speakers were the control group. Participants were recruited from undergraduate general education classes and passed a speech screening in English including accurate production of the seven English syllables tested, namely, suh, luh, tuh, kuh, ruh, shuh, and thuh. Participants answered four multiple-choice questions about lingual contact for each of the syllables imitated. Total test mean scores were significantly higher for the More Experienced group. Native speakers performed the task best. Findings support the effects of amount of time speaking the language. Training methods employed to teach English and slight dialectal variations may account for the significant differences seen in the two groups of nonnative speakers. Further study is warranted.

Automatic pronunciation scoring of words and sentences independent from the non-native’s first language

This paper describes an approach for automatic scoring of pronunciation quality for non-native speech. It is applicable regardless of the foreign language student’s mother tongue. Sentences and words are considered as scoring units. Additionally, mispronunciation and phoneme confusion statistics for the target language phoneme set are derived from human annotations and word level scoring results using a Markov chain model of mispronunciation detection. The proposed methods can be employed for building a part of the scoring module of a system for computer assisted pronunciation training (CAPT). Methods from pattern and speech recognition are applied to develop appropriate feature sets for sentence and word level scoring. Besides features well-known from and approved in previous research, e.g. phoneme accuracy, posterior score, duration score and recognition accuracy, new features such as high-level phoneme confidence measures are identified. The proposed method is evaluated with native English speech, non-native English speech from German, French, Japanese, Indonesian and Chinese adults and non-native speech from German school children. The speech data are annotated with tags for mispronounced words and sentence level ratings by native English teachers. Experimental results show, that the reliability of automatic sentence level scoring by the system is almost as high as the average human evaluator. Furthermore, a good performance for detecting mispronounced words is achieved. In a validation experiment, it could also be verified, that the system gives the highest pronunciation quality scores to 90% of native speakers’ utterances. Automatic error diagnosis based on a automatically derived phoneme mispronunciation statistic showed reasonable results for five non-native speaker groups. The statistics can be exploited in order to provide the non-native feedback on mispronounced phonemes.

Prosodic transfer in Vietnamese acquisition of English contrastive stress patterns

This paper reports a study of prosodic transfer effects in the production and perception of three English stress patterns (broad-focus noun phrase, narrow-focus noun phrase and compound) at the level of word and phrase prosody by Vietnamese learners of English. The experiments examined the acoustic features and the perceptual strategies that native Australian English speakers and different groups of non-native speakers (Vietnamese beginning learners and advanced speakers of English) use to distinguish the three stress patterns. The results showed that native speakers and non-native speakers differ in their use of acoustic patterns which are optimally suited to their respective first language phonologies for realizing the three English stress patterns. Native speakers of English employed a combination of syntagmatic f 0 (and correlated intensity) contrasts and duration in distinguishing the three stress patterns. Vietnamese speakers had no problem in manipulating contrastive levels of f 0 and intensity on accent-bearing syllables but failed to realize the timing contrast between compound words and phrases and the syntagmatic contrast of accent in larger units such as polysyllabic words or phrases, as evidenced by their failure to deaccent the second element of the compound and narrow-focus patterns. Nevertheless, the advanced speakers’ ability to compress the constituents of the compounds and to deaccent the final nouns shows the effect of language learning/experience on prosodic acquisition. Possible mechanisms that underlie the transfer effects involved in three stress patterns are also discussed.

The influence of first language on the processing of wh-movement in English as a second language

Adult learners of English as a second language who speak Chinese ( n = 30), Japanese ( n = 28) or Spanish ( n = 46) as a first language (L1), and a comparison group of native speakers ( n = 22) read sentences that contain: (a) ungrammatical wh-extractions that violate island constraints; and (b) grammatical long-distance Subject and Object extractions from finite and nonfinite clauses. Word-by-word reading times for each sentence were collected using the self-paced reading technique. Results suggest that the presence or absence of wh-movement in the L1 and the headedness of the verb phrase in the L1 are unable to explain all of the variation between the nonnative speaker groups. Severe garden path effects were observed in Subject extractions from finite clauses, but not in extractions from nonfinite clauses, suggesting that two finite verbs next to one another may be an important factor in causing parsing break-down. Individual variation in reading time was not predictable from measures of reading span or word span in either the first or second language.

Gender and stylistic variation in second language phonology

Communicative competence comprises many things, including the ability to use the appropriate pronunciation, based on gender and style. Previous L2 research in phonology has focused on the frequency of nativelike and nonnative forms and variation within nonnative forms, rather than variation within nativelike forms. This study, however, examines variation in nativelike forms by investigating gender and stylistic differences in the English of native speakers and native speakers of Japanese and Spanish. The results of the native speakers demonstrated that there were significant differences based on gender and style. Both groups of nonnative speakers exhibited significant gender differences but only one group showed significant stylistic differences. The results suggest that gender differences are acquired before stylistic differences.Different versions of this article were delivered at the following conferences: EUROSLA, June 1999 in Lund, Sweden; NWAVE, October 1999 in Toronto, Canada; and SLRF, October 2003 in Tucson, Arizona.

Vocabulary and neural networks in the computational assessment of texts written by second-language learners

This paper explores the potential of a neural network in language assessment. Many examination systems rely on subjective judgments made by examiners as a way of grading the writing of non-native speakers. Some research (e.g. Engber, 1995. The relationship of lexical proficiency to the quality of ESL compositions. Journal of Second Language Writing 4(2), 139–155) has shown that these subjective judgements are influenced to a very large extent by the lexical choices made by candidates. We took Engber's basic model, but automated the evaluation of lexical content. A group of non-native speakers of French were asked to produce a short text in response to a picture stimulus. The texts were graded by French native speaker teachers. We identified a number of words which occurred in about half the texts, and coded each text for the occurrence and non-occurrence of each word. We then trained a neural network to grade the texts on the basis of these codings. The results suggest that it might be possible to teach a neural network to mimic the judgements made by human markers.

Politeness strategies in business letters by native and non-native English speakers

While politeness has been the focus of several studies of the speech of non-native speakers of English, the area of politeness in writing has, until now, largely been ignored. For this study, business letters written by a group of native speakers of English were compared to those written by a group of non-native speakers. The results indicate striking differences in the politeness strategies used by each group. Although the non-native speaker data showed an awareness of various types of politeness strategies, the language used to express politeness tended to be less formal and more direct than that of the native speaker group. In addition, the non-native speakers avoided using certain politeness strategies and relied more heavily upon others than did the native speakers. These findings suggest that business writing in English by non-native speakers, even that which is grammatically flawless, may be perceived negatively by the reader because of the inappropriate use of politeness strategies.

Reiterant speech as a test of non-native speakers’ mastery of the timing of French

The reiterant speech of ten native speakers of French was analyzed to develop baseline measures for syllable and consonant/vowel timing for a series of two-, three-, four-, and five-syllable French words spoken in isolation. Ten native speakers of English, who learned French as a second language, produced reiterant versions of both the French words and a comparable set of English words. The native speakers of English were divided into two groups on the basis of their second language experience. The first group consisted of four university-level teachers, who were relatively experienced learners of French, and the second group of six less experienced learners of French. The French reiterant imitations of the two groups of native speakers of English were compared to the native French speakers' productions. The timing patterns of the experienced group of non-native speakers did not differ significantly from those of the native French speakers, whereas there was a significant difference between these two groups and the group of six less experienced second-language learners. Deviations from the French baseline measures produced by the less experienced group are discussed in terms of the influence of the timing patterns of English and the literature on a sensitive period for second language acquisition.

What the Eye Doesn't See: Cross-Cultural Problems in the Comprehension of Video Material

Video is frequently used in second language teaching, the most common reason given being its ability to illustrate language use in context, teachers having assumed that the visual channel provides support for the verbal message. However, little research has been carried out on the relationship of the visual and verbal channels in video material and particularly whether the information available in the visual channel is exploited differently by native speakers and non- native speakers. This paper reports on an experiment designed to test differences in story comprehension of an ELT video played silent sequence to one group of British native speakers of English and to three groups of non-native speakers of English from different cultural backgrounds. Comprehension was measured by the use of summary writing and comprehension questions. Results showed that the native speakers were significantly better able to infer the story line and related background information than the non-native speaker groups. The results indicate that although native speakers are able to derive benefit from the visual channel in video, non-native speakers, par ticularly from cultures further removed from that of the target video material, are less able to recognise and exploit the facilitative poten tial of the visual cues present in this channel.

Aspects of final consonant production in American English by nonnative speakers.

This paper describes the production of word-final, utterance-medial /t, d/ in American English by native speakers and by three groups of nonnative speakers of English. Twenty-four nonnative subjects, whose native languages include Arabic, Korean, Spanish, and Thai, were rated by native English speakers as having no accent, a mild accent, or a medium to heavy accent in English. Measurement of five tokens each of /t/ and /d/ for each speaker and for 6 native English speakers were compared. Neither the Americans nor any of the nonnative groups significantly differentiated /t/ from /d/ by closure duration. As strength of accent rating increased, mean closure duration tended to increase. Also, as strength of accent rating increased, implementation of manner of stop consonant production (including flapping and aspirated versus nonaspirated release) tended to change. Results suggest that both duration and the ability to produce a number of durationally different release options in English may affect the degree of perceived foreignness.