This study investigated how adult second language (L2) learners of Mandarin Chinese use knowledge of phonological and lexical statistical regularities when acoustic information is insufficient for word recognition. A gating task was used to test intermediate L2 learners at two time points across a semester of classroom learning. Native Mandarin…

This article examines one of the ways in which matters of truth, appropriateness, and acceptability are raised and managed within the course of everyday conversation. Using the methodology of conversation analysis, we show that by repeating what another participant has said and doing so with a high rise-fall intonation contour, a speaker claims…

In this article we report two studies: a detailed longitudinal analysis of errors in "wh"-questions from six German-learning children (age 2 ; 0-3 ; 0) and an analysis of the prosodic characteristics of "wh"-questions in German child-directed speech. The results of the first study demonstrate that German-learning children…

This dissertation explores the second language acquisition of Mandarin Chinese tones by speakers of non-tonal languages within the framework of Optimality Theory. The effects of three L1s are analyzed: American English, a stress-accent language; Tokyo Japanese, a lexical pitch accent language; and Seoul Korean, a non-stress and non-pitch accent…

Describes how to use intonation and dialog context to improve the performance of an automatic speech-recognition system. Experiments utilized the DCIEM Maptask corpus, using a separate bigram language model for each type of move and showing that, with the correct move-specific language model for each utterance in the test set, the recognizer's…

Certain simplification and reduction processes used by Arabs in learning English as a second language are examined, such as: (1) simplification of syllables, (2) deletion of English articles, and (3) generation of English questions by using only intonation and leaving word order intact. The study is made from the perspective of two theories of…