Effect of Visual Cuing on Synthetic Speech Intelligibility: A Comparison of Native and Nonnative Speakers of English

1997 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 695-698 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary E. Reynolds ◽  
Donald Fucci ◽  
Z. S. Bond
Keyword(s):  
Background Noise ◽  
Speech Intelligibility ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Nonnative Speakers ◽  
Synthetic Speech ◽  
Signal To Noise ◽  
Noise Condition ◽  
Nonnative Speakers Of English

This study compared the effect of visual cuing on the intelligibility of DECtalk for native and nonnative speakers of English in both ideal listening conditions and in the presence of background noise at a signal to noise (S/N) ratio of + 10dB. Visual cuing improved DECtalk's intelligibility for normative speakers more than for native speakers, especially in the background noise condition. Implications of these findings and the need for further research are discussed.

Perception of Synthetic Speech by Nonnative Speakers of English

1986 ◽  
Vol 30 (13) ◽  
pp. 1340-1343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth G. Greene
Keyword(s):  
Standardized Tests ◽  
English Language ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Nonnative Speakers ◽  
Natural Speech ◽  
Synthetic Speech ◽  
Language Background ◽  
Male Speaker ◽  
Nonnative Speakers Of English ◽  
Positive Correlations

Nonnative speakers of English listened to natural and synthetic speech materials. All natural speech material was spoken by a native male speaker of American English. The synthetic speech was produced by the MITalk-79 system for the first experiment and by the Prose 2000 V2.1 text-to-speech system for the second experiment. Results from Experiment 1 indicated that nonnative speakers show higher levels of performance when listening to natural speech than when listening to synthetic speech. However, nonnative speakers did not reach the level of performance of native speakers for either natural or synthetic speech. Experiment 2 provided further evidence that nonnative speakers fail to reach the same level of performance when listening to synthetic speech as native speakers. Performance of nonnative speakers on a dictation task showed high positive correlations with their general English language ability as measured by two standardized tests. Results indicate the importance of language background and experience in the perception of speech, particularly synthetic and digitally encoded speech.

Perception of Speech Acts Categories in Donald Trump’s Tweets by Native and Nonnative Speakers of English

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-82
Author(s):  
Davood Souri ◽  
Ali Merç
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Nonnative Speakers ◽  
Background Knowledge ◽  
English Teachers ◽  
Large Majority ◽  
Contextual Variables ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Nonnative Speakers Of English

Twitter plays an important role in today’s world. Its role among politicians and those who are interested in politics is more obvious. Due to its importance and special characteristics such as character limits, it has drawn the attention of many researchers including linguists and ELT researchers. This study aimed to compare the perceptions of native and nonnative speakers in identifying speech acts in Donald Trump’s tweets. The subjects of this study were nine English native speakers and twenty nonnative English teachers who were Turkish citizens. Thirty- seven tweets of Donald Trump over the course of a week were selected and the participants were asked to identify the speech acts of the tweets based on the speech acts taxonomy by Searle (1976). The analysis of the data revealed that both native and nonnative speakers of English identified the speech acts of the large majority of the tweets very differently. These differences were partly due to lack of enough political as well as background knowledge and partly due to lack of contextual variables.

scholarly journals Processing reflexives in a second language: The timing of structural and discourse-level constraints

2011 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 571-603 ◽  
Author(s):  
CLAUDIA FELSER ◽  
IAN CUNNINGS
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
First Language ◽  
Nonnative Speakers ◽  
Binding Condition ◽  
Reflexive Pronouns ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
Nonnative Speakers Of English ◽  
Language Influence

ABSTRACTWe report the results from two eye-movement monitoring experiments examining the processing of reflexive pronouns by proficient German-speaking learners of second language (L2) English. Our results show that the nonnative speakers initially tried to link English argument reflexives to a discourse-prominent but structurally inaccessible antecedent, thereby violating binding condition A. Our native speaker controls, in contrast, showed evidence of applying condition A immediately during processing. Together, our findings show that L2 learners’ initial focusing on a structurally inaccessible antecedent cannot be due to first language influence and is also independent of whether the inaccessible antecedent c-commands the reflexive. This suggests that unlike native speakers, nonnative speakers of English initially attempt to interpret reflexives through discourse-based coreference assignment rather than syntactic binding.

Poor Listening Conditions Impair Memory for Intelligible Lectures: Implications for Acoustic Classroom Standards

2009 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Ljung ◽  
Patrik Sörqvist ◽  
Anders Kjellberg ◽  
Anne-Marie Green
Keyword(s):  
University Students ◽  
Background Noise ◽  
Speech Intelligibility ◽  
Broadband Noise ◽  
Speech Signals ◽  
Reverberation Time ◽  
Signal To Noise ◽  
Memory And Learning ◽  
What Is Said ◽  
Degraded Speech

This paper reports two experiments on the effects of degraded speech signals on memory for spoken lectures. Experiment 1 showed that broadband noise impairs university students' memory for a spoken lecture, even though the participants heard what was said. Experiment 2 showed that reverberation has detrimental effects to school adolescents' memory for spoken lectures, similar to broadband noise. The results suggest that poor listening conditions (resulting from background noise and/or long reverberation time) impair memory and learning, even if the conditions allow the listeners to hear what is said. Since the goal for students and pupils attending to lectures is to remember the lecture rather than just hearing what is said, the results presented here indicate that standards for acceptable signal-to-noise ratios and reverberation times in buildings designed for learning should consider the distinction between speech intelligibility and memory. Standards should be based on memory criteria instead of intelligibility criteria.

scholarly journals Disagreement: a speech act analysis and classroom implications

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 24-35
Author(s):  
Panha Song
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Nonnative Speakers ◽  
Pragmatic Competence ◽  
Self Image ◽  
Native Speakers Of English ◽  
Nonnative Speakers Of English ◽  
Authentic Data ◽  
Speech Act Analysis

Disagreement has been widely regarded as one of the most interesting speech acts in EFL context since the way the speaker expresses her or his opposing view can affect the addressee’s self-image and view of the addressor. This article attempted to identify various strategies native speakers of English realized this speech act through a qualitative method by analyzing two sets of authentic data from two half-hour interviews. Next, it investigated the lack of emphasis on disagreement in EFL materials before offering possible suggestions to equip non-native learners of English with pragmatic competence to disagree effectively. The findings and recommendations had implications for EFL teachers, course designers, and materials developers in how and why speech acts and pragmatic competence should be emphasized in order to ensure that nonnative speakers of English could communicate effectively without being perceived as pragmatically inferior.

scholarly journals An Examination of Relative Clauses in Argumentative Essays Written by EFL Learners

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 87-97
Author(s):  
Hesamoddin Shahriari ◽  
Farzaneh Shadloo ◽  
Ahmad Ansarifar
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Second Language Writing ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Nonnative Speakers ◽  
Writing Classroom ◽  
Grammatical Structure ◽  
Language Writing ◽  
Nonnative Speakers Of English ◽  
Argumentative Essays

Syntactic complexity has received a great deal of attention in the literature on second language writing. Relative clauses, which function as a kind of noun phrase post-modifier, are among those structures that are believed to increase the complexity of academic prose. This grammatical structure can pose difficulties for EFL writers even at higher levels of proficiency, and it is therefore important to determine the frequency and accuracy with which relative clauses are used by L2 learners; understanding learners’ strengths and weaknesses in using these structures can inform the process of their instruction in the writing classroom. This paper reports on a corpus-based comparison of relative clauses in a number of argumentative essays written by native and nonnative speakers of English. To this end, 30 argumentative essays were randomly selected from the Persian sub-corpus of the ICLE and the essays were analyzed with respect to the relative clauses found in them. The results were then compared to a comparable corpus of essays by native speakers. Different dimensions regarding the structure of relative clauses were investigated. The type of relative clause (restrictive/non-restrictive), the relativizer (adverbial/pronoun), the gap (subject/non-subject), and head nouns (both animate and non-animate) in our two sets of data were manually identified and coded. The Findings revealed that Iranian EFL writers tend to use a greater number of relative clauses compared to their native-speaker counterparts.

Effects of Speech Rate, Background Noise, and Simulated Hearing Loss on Speech Rate Judgment and Speech Intelligibility in Young Listeners

2009 ◽  
Vol 20 (01) ◽  
pp. 028-039 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth M. Adams ◽  
Robert E. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Hearing Loss ◽  
Research Design ◽  
Background Noise ◽  
Speech Intelligibility ◽  
Signal To Noise Ratio ◽  
Speech Rate ◽  
Normal Hearing ◽  
Moderate Correlation ◽  
Signal To Noise ◽  
Noise Ratio

Purpose: To study the effect of noise on speech rate judgment and signal-to-noise ratio threshold (SNR50) at different speech rates (slow, preferred, and fast). Research Design: Speech rate judgment and SNR50 tasks were completed in a normal-hearing condition and a simulated hearing-loss condition. Study Sample: Twenty-four female and six male young, normal-hearing participants. Results: Speech rate judgment was not affected by background noise regardless of hearing condition. Results of the SNR50 task indicated that, as speech rate increased, performance decreased for both hearing conditions. There was a moderate correlation between speech rate judgment and SNR50 with the various speech rates, such that as judgment of speech rate increased from too slow to too fast, performance deteriorated. Conclusions: These findings can be used to support the need for counseling patients and their families about the potential advantages to using average speech rates or rates that are slightly slowed while conversing in the presence of background noise.

Effects of speech rate, phonetic background and gender on vowel reduction in the speech of nonnative speakers of English

2014 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bogna Brzezicha ◽  
Małgorzata Kul
Keyword(s):  
Acoustic Analysis ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Speech Rate ◽  
Nonnative Speakers ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Vowel Reduction ◽  
Native Speakers Of English ◽  
Nonnative Speakers Of English ◽  
And Gender

AbstractThe paper reports the results of a study investigating vowel reduction in the speech of non-native speakers of English. The aim was to unravel the links between reduction and speech rate, phonetic training and gender. We hypothesized that (i) Polish speakers of English reduce vowels; (ii) they speak slower than native speakers; (iii) the higher the rate, the higher the reduction degree; (iv) speakers with phonetic training reduce less than those lacking it; (v) male subjects reduce more than the female ones. In order to realize these aims, an acoustic analysis of vowels was performed on 2 hrs 42 mins of speech produced by 12 Polish speakers of English. The subjects were di-vided into an experimental group consisting of 6 students of English and a control group with 6 speakers who had no phonetic training. The obtained results positively verify that non-native speakers reduce vowels and cast some doubts on whether they speak slower than native speakers. The role of rate and gender could not be established due to statistical and methodological issues. The group with no phonetic training outperformed the group which underwent phonetic training, pointing instead to the role of exposure and perhaps music training in acquiring native-like reduction patterns.

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