This dissertation examines native speakers' word recognition of, differentiation between, and social attitudes toward varieties of Arabic. It is a particularly interesting test case because of the Arabic unique regional variation situation and the available literature lacks data on how Arabic speakers perceive different accents, with a particular…

Bringing to the field of third language (L3) research a new population of speakers, namely heritage speaker (HS) L3 learners, this study investigates the accents of 19 German-Italian HSs in L3 English. In an accent rating experiment, the speech samples of the HSs and three control groups (monolingual speakers of English, Italian, and German) were…

This study addresses the issue of automatic pronunciation assessment (APA) and its contribution to the teaching of second language (L2) pronunciation. Several attempts have been made at designing such systems, and some have proven operationally successful. However, the automatic assessment of the pronunciation of short words in segmental…

As there is a growing population of non-native speakers worldwide, facilitating communication involving native and non-native speakers has become increasingly important. While one way to help communication involving native and non-native speakers is to help non-native speakers improve proficiency in their target language, another way is to help…

Accent recognition refers to the problem of inferring the native language of a speaker from his foreign-accented speech. Differences in accent are due to both articulation and prosodic characteristics. The automatic identification of foreign accents is valuable for different speech systems, such as speech recognition, speaker identification or…

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to examine normative nasalance values in Vietnamese adult speakers with Southern dialect and to investigate the effects of vowels and tones on . Previous studies examining nasalance have been mainly conducted with Indo-European languages. Limited information on nasalance is available in tone languages…

This paper discusses levels of access in language archives and their implications for assessment. In the absence of well-established criteria, part of the evaluation of language archives is often based on accessibility; roughly, the more "unrestricted" or "open access" content, the better the archive. In this paper, I argue…

This study examines L2 speakers' accent attitudes in relation to their linguistic profile and current practices, recruiting 107 multilingual postgraduate students of 34 different nationalities enrolled in leading research universities in Japan. The participants completed a survey regarding their perceptions of different English varieties in…

The internationalization of Anglophone universities could allow English-dominant students to benefit from experience with English speakers from a wide variety of backgrounds, but US students have often complained of difficulty communicating with such instructors, especially International Teaching Assistants (ITAs). Research has largely focused on…

In this study, we problematize the notion that Black immigrant youth be designated as high achieving or new model minority when comparing their literate success with that of their Black American peers. We draw from ideological and autonomous views regarding literacies while recognizing notions such as languaging informed by personhood, monoglossic…

The current study takes a bidialectal perspective for the conceptualization of pragmatic competence and its development through illuminating the need for the field to move forward and overcome the standard language ideology in research on L2 pragmatic competence. To this end, it brings bidialectal practices to the forefront to investigate L2…

This study explored the development of L2 learners' interactional competence in Arabic when making requests. Combining a longitudinal and cross-sectional design, it closely examined how learners' language proficiency affected their use of multiple requests in daily-life interactions. Participants included L2 learners (n = 40) and Saudi Arabic…

This dissertation examines how L2 Japanese speaker international students experience their subjectivity (Harre & Gillett, 1994), that is, how their language use and actions convey their thoughts and feelings, their sense of self, and how they relate to the world around them, in casual conversations with L1 Japanese speaker peers. In order to…