ESL learners’ intra-speaker variability in producing American English tense and lax vowels

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce L. Smith ◽  
Eric Johnson ◽  
Rachel Hayes-Harb
Keyword(s):  
English Learners ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
American English ◽  
Nonnative Speakers ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Speaker Variability ◽  
Production Variability ◽  
Vowel Formants ◽  
Esl Learners

Abstract Nonnative (L2) English learners are often assumed to exhibit greater speech production variability than native (L1) speakers; however, support for this assumption is primarily limited to secondary observations rather than having been the specific focus of empirical investigations. The present study examined intra-speaker variability associated with L2 English learners’ tense and lax vowel productions to determine whether they showed comparable or greater intra-speaker variability than native English speakers. First and second formants of three tense/lax vowel pairs were measured, and Coefficient of Variation was calculated for 10 native speakers of American English and 30 nonnative speakers. The L2 speakers’ vowel formants were found to be native-like approximately half of the time. Whether their formants were native-like or not, however, they seldom showed greater intra-speaker variability than the L1 speakers.

The effect of implicit causality and consequentiality on nonnative pronoun resolution

2016 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
WEI CHENG ◽  
AMIT ALMOR
Keyword(s):  
English Learners ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Nonnative Speakers ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
Sentence Completion ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Pronoun Resolution ◽  
Implicit Causality ◽  
Psychological Verbs

ABSTRACTWe report two sentence-completion experiments investigating how nonnative speakers use universal semantic and discourse information, which are implicit causality and consequentiality biases associated with psychological verbs, to resolve pronouns. The results indicate that intermediate-advanced and advanced Chinese-speaking English learners show weaker implicit causality and consequentiality biases than native English speakers in pronoun resolution. Instead, nonnative speakers exhibit a general subject or first-mention bias. These findings suggest that nonnative speakers do not use semantic and discourse information in comprehension as effectively as native speakers.

Complex Structures in the Child-Directed Speech of Native and Nonnative Speakers

2018 ◽  
pp. 127-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aslı Altan ◽  
Erika Hoff
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Nonnative Speakers ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Complex Structures ◽  
Child Interaction ◽  
Mother Child Interaction ◽  
Bilingual Communities

Children in bilingual communities are frequently exposed to speech from nonnative speakers, but little research has described how that input might differ from the input of native speakers. There is evidence that input from nonnative speakers might be less useful to language learning children, but little research has asked why. This chapter analyzes the frequency of complex structures in the child-directed speech of 30 native English speakers and 36 nonnative speakers who were late learners of English, all speaking English to their two-and-a-half-year-old children. All instances of nine categories of complex structures were coded in transcripts of mother-child interaction. The frequency of all but one category was greater in the speech of native speakers. These findings suggest that input provided by native speakers provides more frequent models of complex structures than nonnative input.

scholarly journals Speech Segmentation by Native and Non-Native Speakers

2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 519-530 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa D. Sanders ◽  
Helen J. Neville ◽  
Marty G. Woldorff
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Nonnative Speakers ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
Stress Pattern ◽  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
Speech Segmentation ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Lexical Information ◽  
Segmentation Task ◽  
Pattern Information

Varying degrees of plasticity in different subsystems of language have been demonstrated by studies showing that some aspects of language are processed similarly by native speakers and late-learners whereas other aspects are processed differently by the two groups. The study of speech segmentation provides a means by which the ability to process different types of linguistic information can be measured within the same task, because lexical, syntactic, and stress-pattern information can all indicate where one word ends and the next begins in continuous speech. In this study, native Japanese and native Spanish late-learners of English (as well as near-monolingual Japanese and Spanish speakers) were asked to determine whether specific sounds fell at the beginning or in the middle of words in English sentences. Similar to native English speakers, late-learners employed lexical information to perform the segmentation task. However, nonnative speakers did not use syntactic information to the same extent as native English speakers. Although both groups of late-learners of English used stress pattern as a segmentation cue, the extent to which this cue was relied upon depended on the stress-pattern characteristics of their native language. These findings support the hypothesis that learning a second language later in life has differential effects on subsystems within language.

scholarly journals A Corpus-Based Comparative Study of Malaysian ESL Learners and Native English Speakers in Compliment Patterns

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 232
Author(s):  
Paramasivam Muthusamy ◽  
Atieh Farashaiyan
Keyword(s):  
Language Learners ◽  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Esl Students ◽  
Authentic Language ◽  
Learner Language ◽  
Esl Learners

Even though many language learners are concerned with to master target proficiency, owing to years of meticulous studies, immersion in TL environments, access to multimedia and educational amenities, in addition to availability of affluent sources or merely thanks to God-given language talents, many will seldom take off from conspicuous learner-language and might never produce authentic language either in speech or in writing. In recent years, however, with corpus linguistics gaining currency in academia, a new light has begun to glimmer at the end of the tunnel that corpus-based materials and data-driven language instructions can actively and consciously engage learners and acquaint them with what authentic language is rather than what the text books prescribe it to be. Already, a growing body of research has been dedicated to data-driven learning across the world to survey the effectiveness of incorporating corpora in ELT. As such, the purpose of this research is to investigate the patterns of compliments in writings of the Malay ESL students and compare the findings with native English speakers.  The results showed that the Malay ESL learners used a rather different number of syntactic patterns compared to the English native speakers and their frequency of patterns outgrew those of the natives.

Do you hear it now? A native advantage for sarcasm processing

2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 400-414 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARA PETERS ◽  
KATHRYN WILSON ◽  
TIMOTHY W. BOITEAU ◽  
CARLOS GELORMINI-LEZAMA ◽  
AMIT ALMOR
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
English Learners ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Relative Weight ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Spoken Discourse ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Arabic Speakers ◽  
Prosodic Cues

Context and prosody are the main cues native-English speakers rely on to detect and interpret sarcastic irony within spoken discourse. The importance of each type of cue for detecting sarcasm has not been fully investigated in native speakers and has not been examined at all in adult English learners. Here, we compare the extent to which native-English speakers and Arabic-speaking English learners rely on contextual and prosodic cues to identify sarcasm in spoken English, situating these findings within current cross-linguistic effects literature. We show Arabic speakers utilize the cues to a different extent than native speakers: they tend not to utilize prosodic information, focusing on contextual semantic information. These results help clarify the relative weight of contextual and prosodic cues in native-English speakers and support theories that suggest that prosody and emotion could transfer separately in second language learning such that one could transfer while the other does not.

A reading-time study of the main verb versus reduced relative clause ambiguity resolution by English learners in Taiwan

2012 ◽  
Vol 34 (6) ◽  
pp. 1109-1133 ◽  
Author(s):  
PI-LAN YANG ◽  
SU-CHIN SHIH
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Processing ◽  
English Learners ◽  
Relative Clause ◽  
Reading Time ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Pragmatic Information ◽  
Main Verb ◽  
Processing Mechanism

ABSTRACTUsing a self-paced reading task, the study aimed to investigate (a) whether English learners in Taiwan immediately resolve main verb versus reduced relative clause ambiguities in a similar way as native English speakers and (b) whether the learners at various English proficiency levels show diverse profiles. With analyses and syntheses of reading times for critical segments, results showed that different proficiency groups of Taiwanese English learners resolved such ambiguities in a way similar to native speakers to varying extents. The findings suggest that the sentence-processing mechanism of human language is subject to sufficient facility with syntactic access and/or with a network of lexical, semantic, and pragmatic information of individual speakers.

scholarly journals Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis of Discourse Markers Used by Nonnative and Native English Speakers

2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kazunari Shimada
Keyword(s):  
English Learners ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Discourse Markers ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Learner Corpus ◽  
Japanese Learners Of English ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
Japanese Learners ◽  
Qualitative Analyses

In this study, the use of discourse markers (DMs) in the speech of Japanese learners of English was investigated. To explore the features of their DM use, corpora of nonnative and native English speakers’ speech were analysed using the methodology called Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis. A frequency analysis of DMs revealed significant differences between Japanese learners’ and native speakers’ speech, supporting earlier findings. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of the learner corpus data suggest that Japanese learners may use the marker so more frequently than other nonnative English learners, while also using certain interpersonal or cognitive function markers such as you know, I mean, and just less frequently. The findings suggest the need for language instructors and materials writers to understand the characteristics of Japanese learners’ interlanguage and to provide them with appropriately designed DM input. 本研究は、日本人英語学習者の話し言葉における談話標識（discourse markers: DMs）の使用を調べたものである。日本人英語学習者のDMs使用の特徴を探るために、対照中間言語分析の手法に基づき、非英語母語話者と英語母語話者の話し言葉コーパスを分析した。まず、日本人英語学習者と英語母語話者の話し言葉におけるDMsの使用頻度を分析したところ、先行研究と同じく、大きな差が見られた。次に、非英語母語話者の話し言葉を量的・質的の両面で分析した結果、日本人英語学習者が、他の非英語母語話者に比べてsoを多く使用し、you know, I mean, justなどの対人関係的、認知的機能をもつDMsをあまり使用しないことが明らかになった。その結果は、教師や教材作成者が日本人英語学習者の中間言語の特徴を理解し、学習者に対して慎重にDMsをインプットしていく必要性があることを示唆している。

The cognitive saliency of word associations of verbs of speech in English as a Lingua Franca interactions

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 417-443
Author(s):  
Yang Pang
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
Target Language ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Word Associations ◽  
Similar Word ◽  
Speech Communities

AbstractBuilding on the theoretical insights into the socio-cognitive approach to the study of interactions in which English is used as a lingua franca (ELF)), this paper reports on the idiosyncratic phenomenon that ELF speakers do not adhere to the norms of native speakers, but instead create their own particular word associations during the course of the interaction. Taking the verbs of speech talk, say, speak, and tell as examples, this study compares word associations from three corpora of native and non-native speakers. The findings of this study reveal that similar word associative patterns are produced and shared by ELF speech communities from different sociocultural backgrounds, and these differ substantially from those used by native English speakers. Idiom-like constructions such as say like, how to say, and speakin are developed and utilized by Asian and European ELF speakers. Based on these findings, this paper concludes that ELF speakers use the prefabricated expressions in the target language system only as references, and try to develop their own word associative patterns in ELF interactions. Moreover, the analysis of the non-literalness/metaphorical word associations of the verbs of speech in the Asian ELF corpus suggests that ELF speakers dynamically co-construct their shared common ground to derive non-literal/metaphorical meaning in actual situational context.

Speech Rate Is No Simple matter

1990 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 303-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracey M. Derwing
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Speech Rate ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
Pause Time ◽  
Short Film ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Articulation Rate ◽  
Simple Matter ◽  
Communicative Success

Speech rate (articulation rate and pauses) was examined for its relation to communicative success. Native English speakers (NSs) were paired with other NSs and with non-native speakers (NNSs). The subjects viewed a short film, the content of which they were to relay to their two partners independently. Communicative success was measured through comprehension questions addressed to the listeners at the completion of the task. Analyses indicated that although a slight majority of NSs slowed their speech rate for NNSs, they did not adjust articulation rate, but did significantly increase pause time. Neither speech rate nor articulation rate varied over the course of the narrations. Contrary to intuition, the subjects who successfully communicated the story to NNSs did not adjust their speech rate, while those who had difficulty communicating with NNSs increased pause time significantly. The implications of the findings are discussed, and suggestions for further research are made.

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