L1 English Speakers Research Articles

How rhythmic cues influence perception of accent distance across L1 and L2 English speakers

Segmental and suprasegmental cues can both contribute to listeners’ accent strength and distance judgments. This study examined the influence of a suprasegmental cue—rhythm—on listeners’ judgments of accent distance. Rhythm was quantified using two measures of variability in vocalic interval duration: normalized pairwise variability index (nPVI) and VarcoV. Thirty adults ranked productions from female and male speakers from six L1 and six L2 English varieties (24 speakers) across six sentences based on their perceived distance from Midland American English (the local dialect). Linear mixed effect models predicted accent distance ratings from rhythm measures—specifically, differences in nPVI and VarcoV between the L1/L2 speakers and Midland speakers, with speaking rate and sentence length as covariates. Differences between L1/L2 speakers’ and Midland speakers’ nPVI and VarcoV scores did not significantly predict accent distance rankings. However, significant interactions between nPVI and certain accents (e.g., Irish, Southern American, Cantonese-accented English) suggest that rhythmic properties may significantly impact accent distance judgements for some accent varieties. These results provide further insight into how rhythmic cues contribute to accent perception. [Work supported by NSF grants 1941691 and 1941662].

Real-time magnetic resonance imaging of velopharyngeal port posture during long pauses in naturalistic speech

Velum’s behavior as a postural substrate in naturalistic speech is not well understood and is largely based on studies of inter-utterance velopharyngeal port posture (VPP). While existing literature [e.g., Gick et al., 2004 Phonetica, 61(4); Ramanarayanan, 2013 JASA, 134(1)] describes posture variations based on rest positions, ready positions, and inter-speech pauses, a less explored aspect is the behavior of the velum during extended pauses in naturalistic speech. Addressing this gap, the present study analyzes velum posture during naturalistic speech to characterize VPP during prolonged pauses. This study draws from a corpus of real-time magnetic resonance imaging (rtMRI) videos of L1 English speakers including those engaging in unstructured speech tasks. Results based on sequences corresponding to long pauses in naturalistic speech will be reported, outlining VPP characteristics, and quantifying findings in terms of time spent in and shifts between velum positions. Implications for motor control differences in naturalistic and elicited speech data will be discussed.

Collecting non-native English speech through a web-and mobile-based application

The motivation behind this study is to collect non-native English speech recordings seamlessly. Even though numerous corpora containing non-native English speakers exist, there are not so many resources of Polish speakers uttering sentences in English. That is why a web-based application is built to record L2 English speakers. The same application is also developed in the mobile form as it provides easy access to the software created and, at the same time, built-in microphones ensure sufficient quality of recordings. A set of sentences is prepared, including four main types, i.e., declarative, imperative, interrogative, and exclamatory. Recordings are saved in WAV audio format. Local data are first saved in the memory of the device on which the application is installed, and then, the user may listen to the recordings and then send them to the server using FTP (File Transfer Protocol). The user interface allows for English language level selection, by choosing one of the four possible options, i.e., basic, intermediate, advanced, and fluent. A group of volunteers provided speech samples, resulting in the collection of utterances from more than 600 speakers, available in the created corpus. Future development envisions adding additional modules that will allow for speech signal analyses.

Sand, Sandpaper, and Sandwiches: Evidence From a Masked Compound Priming Task in L1 and L2 Speakers of English.

This study follows the footsteps of Jonathan Grainger and colleagues by investigating compound processing in English monolinguals and Chinese-English bilinguals using the masked primed lexical decision paradigm. First language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers responded to a semantically transparent compound (e.g., snowball-SNOW), a semantically opaque compound (honeymoon-HONEY), and an orthographic control condition (e.g., sandwich-SAND). Results revealed significantly larger L1 priming effects in transparent and opaque compared to the control condition (Experiment 1A), whereas no significant differences across conditions were observed in L2 speakers (Experiment 1B). We argue that L1 populations are sensitive to morphological structure during the early stages of compound processing, whereas L2 speakers, in particular those with lower levels of language proficiency, employ a form-based type of analysis. Findings are interpreted within the framework of recent monolingual and bilingual models of complex word recognition.

“Let’s Move on to the Recommendations.” The Use of Phrasal Verbs in Business Presentations of University Students in Hong Kong

Phrasal verbs (PVs), as a notoriously difficult L2 feature, have attracted the attention of applied linguists for a few decades. Empowered by corpus linguistics, the current study explored the quantity and quality of PVs in business presentations of university students in Hong Kong, to investigate nuances of the PV production of students in contexts. The learner corpus consists of twenty business case study presentations by 36 mixed-L1 students. Quantitative results showed that students used a sizeable number of PVs accurately. The most common lexical verbs showed a different pattern compared with native speakers of English, while the most common adverbial particles were mostly identical to those used by native speakers. International students seemed to use more PVs than Chinese L1 students and the avoidance phenomenon was observed on a few PVs. The unnatural PV use mostly stemmed from misuse of the adverbial particles due to negative L1 transfer and two instances of creative PV use were observed on English L1 speakers. We advise language teachers to incorporate more comprehensive instruction of PVs in business English courses (including common collocations, syntactic particularities, and polysemy) as well as more authentic L2 exposure.

Corrective Feedback and Learner Uptake Between L2 English Speakers

Corrective Feedback and Learner Uptake Between L2 English Speakers

An exploratory study of intonational variation in L1 and L2 English speakers’ pragmatic production of high imposition requests and refusals

Abstract This exploratory study examined the intonational patterns and corresponding speech act strategies in L1 and L2 English speakers’ production of high imposition requests and refusals that were elicited using video-based multiple turn discourse completion tasks (DCTs). The participants, 34 L1 American English speakers and 14 high-proficiency L2 English speakers, recorded their oral responses to 10 multiple-turn video-based DCTs. Using Brazil’s (1997) framework, the collected speech samples were analyzed for tone choices in each tone unit. Pragmatic strategies in the produced speech acts were analyzed by adapting the existing coding frameworks (Beebe et al., 1990; Blum-Kulka et al., 1989). The extracted tone choices and lexico-mathematical strategies were compared between the two language groups. The results preliminarily revealed differences in the use of tones by L1 and L2 English speakers in performing requests and refusals. Moreover, while the employed speech act strategies were largely similar between the two speaker groups, the associated tone choices showed contrasting usage patterns.

The Acquisition of Inalienable Possession in L2 and Heritage Spanish

Abstract The present study examines the production and interpretation of inalienable possession in dative constructions with body-part nouns in Spanish by 25 English-speaking L2 learners and 25 heritage speakers of Spanish born and raised in the United States. Twenty Spanish-dominant speakers served as baseline group. The results showed significant divergencies with inalienable NPs among the L2 learners compared to the heritage speakers and Spanish-dominant speakers. The L2 learners produced few instances of clitic se and a definite determiner and favored the use of a possessive determiner with or without a clitic instead. The heritage speakers and baseline group behaved similarly in their use of a clitic and a definite determiner. We argue for age of onset of acquisition and crosslinguistic influence effects in the acquisition of inalienable possession in Spanish.

Disentangling cues of different domains in transfer and development in L3 acquisition: An investigation of L2/L3 Mandarin yes-no questions

Abstract This empirical study aims to shed light on L3 initial-stage transfer and later development by investigating Q-operations in L1 English–L2 Cantonese and L1 Cantonese–L2 English bilinguals’ L3 Mandarin and L1 English speakers’ L2 Mandarin at low and high proficiency levels. Data from an online cross-modal priming task and an offline acceptability judgement task found that structural similarity determines transfer source selection. Adopting a de-compositional approach to cues of different domains, we have found both facilitative and detrimental transfer effects from Cantonese, with the latter triggered by orthographic and phonological cues. Our data also suggest that detrimental transfer effects can persist at an advanced stage and that L3 development and acquisition results can be affected by various factors such as word frequency and the nature of learning situations.

Formant dynamics in second language speech: Japanese speakers' production of English liquids.

This article reports an acoustic study analysing the time-varying spectral properties of word-initial English liquids produced by 31 first-language (L1) Japanese and 14 L1 English speakers. While it is widely accepted that L1 Japanese speakers have difficulty in producing English /l/ and /ɹ/, the temporal characteristics of L2 English liquids are not well-understood, even in light of previous findings that English liquids show dynamic properties. In this study, the distance between the first and second formants (F2-F1) and the third formant (F3) are analysed dynamically over liquid-vowel intervals in three vowel contexts using generalised additive mixed models (GAMMs). The results demonstrate that L1 Japanese speakers produce word-initial English liquids with stronger vocalic coarticulation than L1 English speakers. L1 Japanese speakers may have difficulty in dissociating F2-F1 between the liquid and the vowel to a varying degree, depending on the vowel context, which could be related to perceptual factors. This article shows that dynamic information uncovers specific challenges that L1 Japanese speakers have in producing L2 English liquids accurately.

Affective and sensory–motor norms for idioms by L1 and L2 English speakers

AbstractIn the present study, we developed affective (valence and arousal) and sensory–motor (concreteness and imageability) norms for 210 English idioms rated by native English speakers (L1) and English second-language speakers (L2). Based on internal consistency analyses, the ratings were found to be highly reliable. Furthermore, we explored various relations within the collected measures (valence, arousal, concreteness, and imageability) and between these measures and some available psycholinguistic norms (familiarity, literal plausibility, and decomposability) for the same set of idioms. The primary findings were that (i) valence and arousal showed the typical U-shape relation, for both L1 and L2 data; (ii) idioms with more negative valence were rated as more arousing; (iii) the majority of idioms were rated as either positive or negative with only 4 being rated as neutral; (iv) familiarity correlated positively with valence and arousal; (v) concreteness and imageability showed a strong positive correlation; and (vi) the ratings of L1 and L2 speakers significantly differed for arousal and concreteness, but not for valence and imageability. We discuss our interpretation of these observations with reference to the literature on figurative language processing (both single words and idioms).

Dialect-specificity and learners’ L2 perceptual resilience after study abroad

Abstract The present study examined the perception of two regional variants of Spanish (theta /Ɵ/ and zheísmo/sheísmo [ʒ, ʃ]) by nonnative speakers of Spanish with and without study abroad experience. The study’s goals were to determine whether learners who study abroad accept regional variants more frequently than at-home learners, and whether this effect is limited to cues participants are exposed to while abroad. Participants were L1 English speakers asked to determine whether they considered real and nonce word pairs with matching and mismatching regional variants to be instances of the same word. The findings reveal higher acceptance rates of mismatching variants by L2 learners who had studied abroad than of classroom learners but results for specific location of study abroad that suggest learners likely build perceptual resilience while abroad that goes beyond the specific cues they are exposed to.

Is a quantifier mismatch a problem for L1 Japanese learners of English?

After identifying a linguistic difference between the English quantifier most and the Japanese quantifier hotondo ‘most’ we set out to find if the semantic difference between the two would constitute a learning problem for Japanese second language (L2) learners of English. The difference we hypothesized between the two is that English most is considered “more than half,” while hotondo is “nearly all.” As this semantic difference is not explicitly taught in a classroom environment, acquisition by learners would need to take place through experiencing most in contexts where they might receive contextual clues. An examination of a corpus indicated that contextual clues towards such a semantic difference would be unavailable or rarely available. Two sets of experiments (Experiments 1 and 2) were conducted using the Truth Value Judgment Task methodology. The results of Experiment 1 showed that L2 speakers treated most as meaning “nearly all” but that the level of learner proficiency has an effect. The upper intermediate L2 learner group (Experiment 1a) behaved more like the L1 English speaker group (Experiment 1b) than the lower proficiency L2 group (Experiment 1c). Experiment 2, testing Japanese L1 speakers on their interpretation of Japanese hotondo ‘most,’ revealed that while a majority of participants treated hotondo as “almost all,” there was, somewhat unexpectedly, a group of speakers who interpreted hotondo to mean “more than half.” Therefore, although the possibility cannot completely be eliminated that the result of Experiment 1a is due to L1 transfer, if some Japanese learners of English can unlearn the incorrect meaning, then some prior, if not innate, knowledge that makes the process possible must be available to them.

Gestural Timing Patterns of Nasality in Highly Proficient Spanish Learners of English: Aerodynamic Evidence.

Segment-to-segment timing overlap between Vowel-Nasal gestures in /VN/ sequences varies cross-linguistically. However, how bilinguals may adjust those timing gestures is still unanswered. Regarding timing strategies in a second language (L2), research finds that native (L1) strategies can be partially transferred to the L2, and that higher L2 proficiency promotes a more successful phonetic performance. My goal is to answer whether bilingual speakers can adjust their L1 coarticulatory settings in their L2 and to observe whether their L2 accentedness plays a role in ultimate attainment. Ten native speakers of Spanish (L1Sp) who were highly proficient L2 English speakers participated in Spanish and English read-aloud tasks. A control group of 16 L1 English speakers undertook the English experiment. Aerodynamic data were collected using pressure transducers. Each participant produced tokens with nasalized vowels in CVN# words and oral vowels in CV(CV) words. Four linguistically trained judges (two per target language) evaluated a set of pseudo-randomized sentences produced by the participants containing words with nasalized vowels and rated the speech on a 1 (heavily accented) to 9 (native-like) Likert-type scale. Measurements for onset and degree of overall nasality were obtained. Results indicate the L1Sp group can accommodate gestural timing strategies cross-linguistically as they exhibit an earlier nasality onset and increment nasality proportion in L2 English in a native-like manner. In addition, a positive correlation between greater vowel nasality degree and native-like accentedness in the L2 was found, suggesting L2 timing settings might be specified in higher spoken proficiency levels.

Investigating syntactic priming cumulative effects in MT-human interaction.

A question that deserves to be explored is whether the interaction between English language learners and the popular Google neural machine translation (GNMT) system could result in learning and increased production of a challenging syntactic structure in English that differs in word order between speakers first language and second language. In this paper, we shed light on this issue by testing 30 Brazilian Portuguese L2 English speakers in order to investigate whether they tend to describe an image in English with a relation of possession between nouns using a prepositional noun phrase (e.g. the cover of the book is red) or re-use the alternative syntactic structure seen in the output of the GNMT (e.g. the book cover is red), thus manifesting syntactic priming effects. In addition, we tested whether, after continuous exposure to the challenging L2 structure through Google Translate output, speakers would adapt to that structure in the course of the experiment, thus manifesting syntactic priming cumulative effects. Our results show a robust syntactic priming effect as well as a robust cumulative effect. These results suggest that GNMT can influence L2 English learners linguistic behaviour and that L2 English learners unconsciously learn from the GNMT with continuous exposure to its output.

The effect of test format on productive recall of derivatives

Abstract This study investigated the extent to which two recall test formats – contextualized and decontextualized tests – affected productive recall of derivatives, and how the effects of token frequencies of derivatives and L2 receptive vocabulary knowledge on recalling derivatives was moderated by test format. Mixed effects logistic regression models examined the derivatives elicited from L1 (n = 21) and L2 English speakers’ (n = 107) on the two recall tests. Results indicated that contextual cues significantly facilitated recalling derivatives, while such facilitative effects were larger for native speakers and L2 learners with greater vocabulary knowledge. Furthermore, token frequency affected the responses on the decontextualized test to a greater degree compared to the contextualized test. Results suggest that test format influences test-takers’ ability to recall knowledge to produce derivatives.

First and second language speakers’ sensitivity to the distributional properties of wh-clauses

Abstract The present study investigates L1 and L2 English speakers’ knowledge of the wh-clausal construction along the parameters of (a) conventionality, distinguishing between high-frequency conventional and low-frequency unconventional formulations (I asked him why they agreed/why did they agree), and (b) proposition type, differentiating between interrogative versus non-interrogative proposition types (I asked / told him why they agreed). We also consider the extent to which L2 speakers’ constructional knowledge is influenced by learners’ target language experience, such as L2 proficiency, context of L2 learning (ESL or EFL), and target language exposure. Results from a judgment task revealed nuances in L1-L2 discriminatory capacities, and more importantly, differences in sensitivity to proposition type between the ESL and EFL group, but no L2 differences in sensitivity to conventionality. L2 proficiency, speakers’ length of target immersion experience, and classroom exposure were shown to also impact linguistic sensitivity, highlighting a moderating effect of target language exposure and an important role for classroom instruction.

Features of lexical complexity: insights from L1 and L2 speakers

We discover sizable differences between the lexical complexity assignments of first language (L1) and second language (L2) English speakers. The complexity assignments of 940 shared tokens without context were extracted and compared from three lexical complexity prediction (LCP) datasets: the CompLex dataset, the Word Complexity Lexicon, and the CERF-J wordlist. It was found that word frequency, length, syllable count, familiarity, and prevalence as well as a number of derivations had a greater effect on perceived lexical complexity for L2 English speakers than they did for L1 English speakers. We explain these findings in connection to several theories from applied linguistics and then use these findings to inform a binary classifier that is trained to distinguish between spelling errors made by L1 and L2 English speakers. Our results indicate that several of our findings are generalizable. Differences in perceived lexical complexity are shown to be useful in the automatic identification of problematic words for these differing target populations. This gives support to the development of personalized lexical complexity prediction and text simplification systems.

Lexically-specific syntactic restrictions in second-language speakers

In two structural priming experiments, we investigated the representations of lexically-specific syntactic restrictions of English verbs for highly proficient and immersed second language (L2) speakers of English. We considered the interplay of two possible mechanisms: generalization from the first language (L1) and statistical learning within the L2 (both of abstract structure and of lexically-specific information). In both experiments, L2 speakers with either Germanic or Romance languages as L1 were primed to produce dispreferred double-object structures involving non-alternating dative verbs. Priming occurred from ungrammatical double-object primes involving different non-alternating verbs (Experiment 1) and from grammatical primes involving alternating verbs (Experiment 2), supporting abstract statistical learning within the L2. However, we found no differences between L1-Germanic speakers (who have the double-object structure in their L1) and L1-Romance speakers (who do not), inconsistent with the prediction for between-group differences of the L1-generalization account. Additionally, L2 speakers in Experiment 2 showed a lexical boost: There was stronger priming after (dispreferred) non-alternating same-verb double-object primes than after (grammatical) alternating different-verb primes. Such lexically-driven persistence was also shown by L1 English speakers (Ivanova, Pickering, McLean, Costa, & Branigan, 2012) and may underlie statistical learning of lexically-dependent structural regularities. We conclude that lexically-specific syntactic restrictions in highly proficient and immersed L2 speakers are shaped by statistical learning (both abstract and lexically-specific) within the L2, but not by generalization from the L1.

Comparing the effects of intelligent personal assistant-human and human-human interactions on EFL learners’ willingness to communicate beyond the classroom

This study explored the effects of out-of-class interactions with intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) versus human interlocutors on EFL learners' willingness to communicate (WTC) in English. A total of 92 first-year college students were recruited to participate in interactive out-of-class activities, which were held in 10-min sessions twice a week for 12 weeks. The participants were divided into three groups: an IPA group, who interacted with Alexa or Google Assistant through a smartphone; an EL1 group, who interacted with L1 English speakers; and an EL2 group, who interacted with L2 English speakers. WTC questionnaires and focus-group interviews were used to evaluate WTC. Significant differences in WTC were discovered between the three groups. The IPA group had greater WTC than did the EL1 or EL2 group. The intergroup differences were attributable to the interaction of contextual (interlocutor and time), individual (L2 self-confidence, anxiety, and proficiency), and sociopolitical (Taiwan's K-12 education) factors. The participants in the IPA group emphasized that the mobility, convenience, interactivity, multifunctionality, and familiarity of IPAs on smartphones enabled them to practice speaking English anywhere, anytime, and at their own pace. IPAs, as supportive and patient learning partners, enhanced the learners' engagement, confidence, and thus WTC.