Chinese Native Speakers' Counterfactuals Revisited

This paper examines whether or not Chinese native speakers (CNSs) have difficulties in understanding English counterfactuals, whether CNSs have counterfactual reasoning problems in their own language, what the causes of these difficulties may be, and the problems in teaching English subjunctives. It also proposes on how to improve CNSs’ English counterfactual comprehension.

Language Teaching and Intercultural Communication:Teaching Korean Grammar to Non-native Speakers

Grounded upon the interactive relationship between intercultural communication(IC)and foreign language education and the recent gradual salience of communicative language teaching(CLT)in foreign language grammar learning sectors,the study reported in this paper deals with the issue of teaching Korean grammar to non-native speakers in terms of teaching Korean as a foreign language(TKFL).This paper attempts to examine and analyze several Korean language textbooks prepared for foreign learners of Korean,which is used overseas,especially in Hong Kong(HK).It is also attempted to evaluate the textbooks in terms of CLT and communicative competence.By doing so,we can further understand the methods of Korean grammar instruction provided to foreigners as a second language or a foreign language.

A Critique of Ali Shehadeh's Non-native Speakers'Production of Modified Comprehensible Output and Second Language Learning

This study examined the NNSs' ability of modifying their interlanguage utterances in modified comprehensible output to give response to other-initiation and self-initiation,which was studied in both NS-NNS and NNS-NNS interactions.It was the qualitative study by using two different tasks which were picture-dictation task and opinion-exchange task to collect the data.There were 32 participants whose age ranged of 22 to 37.The author proposed two hypotheses based on his expectation that NNS-NNS interactions would provide more opportunities for NNS participants to give comprehensible output for other-initiated clarification requests and self-initiated clarification attempts than NS-NNS interactions.The author was good at using numbers to illustrate and describe the data in his writing.

Analysis of Deaf Speakers’ Speech Signal for Understanding the Acoustic Characteristics by Territory Specific Utterances

An important concern with the deaf community is inability to hear partially or totally. This may affect the development of language during childhood, which limits their habitual existence. Consequently to facilitate such deaf speakers through certain assistive mechanism, an effort has been taken to understand the acoustic characteristics of deaf speakers by evaluating the territory specific utterances. Speech signals are acquired from 32 normal and 32 deaf speakers by uttering ten Indian native Tamil language words. The speech parameters like pitch, formants, signal-to-noise ratio, energy, intensity, jitter and shimmer are analyzed. From the results, it has been observed that the acoustic characteristics of deaf speakers differ significantly and their quantitative measure dominates the normal speakers for the words considered. The study also reveals that the informative part of speech in a normal and deaf speakers may be identified using the acoustic features. In addition, these attributes may be used for differential corrections of deaf speaker’s speech signal and facilitate listeners to understand the conveyed information.

著名的海德公园一角——Speakers’Corner

在英国伦敦的繁华市区,坐落着著名的海德公园。园内绿草如茵,鲜花缤纷;令人心驰神往的石雕掩映在花草树木丛中。空气清新,景色宜人,碧空如洗,白云悠闲,给人宽松敞亮之感。19世纪以来,在公园的东北角,形成了一块热闹的“自由论坛”——Speakers’Corner(演讲者之角)。每个星期天的下午,人们站在装肥皂用的木箱上发表演说。

The Intelligibility of Thai Speakers’ Pronunciation from Chinese Listeners’ Perspective

The intelligibility of Thai speakers’English pronunciation from Chinese listeners’perspectives have not been analyzed deeply in current researches.As is known to all,the interconnection between China and Thailand is greatly developed with the sup⁃port of‘One Belt and One Road initiative’.However,it is inevitable for non-native English speakers to encounter some pronuncia⁃tion problems,which would affect them to communicate with each other.As for Chinese English learners,Thai accent to some ex⁃tent would be a great challenge during the conversation with Thai speakers.In order to promote a better communication,it is neces⁃sary to analyze the origin of Thai speakers’English pronunciation problems.Therefore,this research based on the previous studies to categorize the common pronunciation problems among Thai speakers.However,there are numerous English learners in Thailand that have various language proficiency.In this respect,two Thai speakers with different IELTS scores have been selected for com⁃parison,and six postgraduate students in the Education University of Hong Kong are invited to serve as a listener.As a result,this research will base on the listeners’feedback to highlight some suggestions to enhance the intelligibility of Thai speakers’pronun⁃ciation.

Native/Non-native English Speakers’Attitudes:Addressing Learners’Goals and Needs Towards Pronunciation Issues

The study attempts to explore native and non-native English speakers’attitudes towards accents and pronunciation-related issues.The sample group surveyed is composed of non-native English speakers,specifically,Italian students studying at the University of Calabria(Italy)and native English speakers from Alberta University(Canada)and Florida Atlantic University(USA).An online link to a questionnaire was sent via email to all participants and was used as a research instrument to collect quantitative data.The research questions will investigate learners’attitudes in relation to the following aspects:accent and identity,beliefs about native/non-native accents,impact of pronunciation on communication,and learners’expectations towards pronunciation teaching.Firstly,mean scores in relation to the aforementioned aspects will be examined.Secondly,differences between native/non-native speakers’responses will be statistically analysed.Thirdly,non-native learners’responses will be correlated with their proficiency level in English to identify the extent to which language competence may affect learners’attitudes.The study aims to gain useful insights that may hopefully raise students and teachers’awareness of what models we expect learners to imitate and attain in the English language classroom,how appropriate and relevant these may be especially in the globalized English world where non-native speakers will increasingly use English in a diversity of forms to achieve their communicative goals.The preliminary results will be presented and pedagogical considerations suggested.

ELF Interactions Among Chinese, Greek, and Swiss Speakers of English

The paper concerns the issue of ELF （English as a lingua franca） in the European and Asian context. The authors start from a brief conceptual perspective to shed light on salient aspects related to ELF. Then, this paper discusses the study investigating the interactions among NNS （non-native speakers） of English in the naturalistic settings, namely in Zhangjiajie （China）, Masouri （Kalymnos/Greece）, and Unterwasser （Switzerland）. The main objective of the research based on the qualitative methodology was to analyze the ELF interactions from the linguistic point of view focusing on lexicogrammar and pragmatic features. The secondary objective was to establish whether the identified ELF features contributed to communication intelligibility. The obtained results indicated a few significant similarities with the Seidlhofer＇s list of the ELT characteristics. Furthermore, it was established in the study that the ELF features did not interfere with effective communication between interlocutors

Rethinking multi-spatial information for transferable adversarial attacks on speaker recognition systems

Adversarial attacks have been posing significant security concerns to intelligent systems,such as speaker recognition systems(SRSs).Most attacks assume the neural networks in the systems are known beforehand,while black-box attacks are proposed without such information to meet practical situations.Existing black-box attacks improve trans-ferability by integrating multiple models or training on multiple datasets,but these methods are costly.Motivated by the optimisation strategy with spatial information on the perturbed paths and samples,we propose a Dual Spatial Momentum Iterative Fast Gradient Sign Method(DS-MI-FGSM)to improve the transferability of black-box at-tacks against SRSs.Specifically,DS-MI-FGSM only needs a single data and one model as the input;by extending to the data and model neighbouring spaces,it generates adver-sarial examples against the integrating models.To reduce the risk of overfitting,DS-MI-FGSM also introduces gradient masking to improve transferability.The authors conduct extensive experiments regarding the speaker recognition task,and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of their method,which can achieve up to 92%attack success rate on the victim model in black-box scenarios with only one known model.

NCTO Announces 6th Annual Meeting SPEAKERS

NCTO is delighted to announce the preliminary slate of speakers who will address NCTO Member Companies during the Annual Meeting in May 2009.

杨声器 Altec Lansing ACS500 Speakers:大声点!

如果你需要给你的高档多媒体PC配上一套具有丰富饱满声音的扬声器,那么Altec Lansing 399美元的ACS500Multimedia Speakers值得选用,这套扬声器提供了超重低音效果,并具有DolbyProLogic环绕立体声,只是需要占用一些桌面空间。 ACS500立式扬声器具有19英寸高,横截面积为5×7英寸。它们共享22.5W放大器和控制电路,以驱动各箱体内的四个扬声器。其中面朝前方的为一个3英寸中音扬声器和一个1英寸高频扬声器。

Emotional speaker recognition based on prosody transformation

A novel emotional speaker recognition system （ESRS） is proposed to compensate for emotion variability. First, the emotion recognition is adopted as a pre-processing part to classify the neutral and emotional speech. Then, the recognized emotion speech is adjusted by prosody modification. Different methods including Gaussian normalization, the Gaussian mixture model （GMM） and support vector regression （SVR） are adopted to define the mapping rules of F0s between emotional and neutral speech, and the average linear ratio is used for the duration modification. Finally, the modified emotional speech is employed for the speaker recognition. The experimental results show that the proposed ESRS can significantly improve the performance of emotional speaker recognition, and the identification rate （IR） is higher than that of the traditional recognition system. The emotional speech with F0 and duration modifications is closer to the neutral one.

In the Age of ‘World Englishes’,Native Speaker Teachers or Non-native Speaker Teachers?

This paper attempts to argue that in the age of‘World Englishes', it is not necessary to differentiate native speaker teachers from non-native speaker teachers. It is concluded that non-native speaker teachers can be as effective as their native colleagues and they have equal chance to achieve professional success, even though native speaker teachers have great advantages over non-native teachers in some aspects. It is time for employers, as well as ELT professionals to shut their eyes to the glaring differences between native speaker teachers and non-native speaker teachers and optimize such unique resources.

Native Speaker and L2 User in Language Teaching

The target of much language teaching and learning is to make students approximate to native speakers.The only rightful speak ers of a language are its native speakers.Contrary to these contemporary views,however,this paper argues that the obligation of the lan guage teacher is to help students to use L2 effectively not to simply imitate native speaker.A successful L2 user who comes from the group of L2 learners can be a model for students.Therefore,non-native teachers with a high degree of language proficiency and good teaching skills can be ideal and qualified language teachers.

Poet's Escapism and Speaker outside the Poem——William and Dorothy in Composed Upon Westminster Bridge,Sept.3,1802

This paper analyses the author's escapism In this Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802 ,and conclusion is reached that the poet wrote this particular poem for his beloved sister. And the sister 's calmness and complacency came to be the best pill to heal the wounds of the poet.

A novel approach for speaker diarization system using TMFCC parameterization and Lion optimization

In audio stream containing multiple speakers, speaker diarization aids in ascertaining "who speak when". This is an unsupervised task as there is no prior information about the speakers. It labels the speech signal conforming to the identity of the speaker, namely, input audio stream is partitioned into homogeneous segments. In this work, we present a novel speaker diarization system using the Tangent weighted Mel frequency cepstral coefficient(TMFCC) as the feature parameter and Lion algorithm for the clustering of the voice activity detected audio streams into particular speaker groups. Thus the two main tasks of the speaker indexing, i.e., speaker segmentation and speaker clustering, are improved. The TMFCC makes use of the low energy frame as well as the high energy frame with more effect, improving the performance of the proposed system. The experiments using the audio signal from the ELSDSR corpus datasets having three speakers, four speakers and five speakers are analyzed for the proposed system. The evaluation of the proposed speaker diarization system based on the tracking distance, tracking time as the evaluation metrics is done and the experimental results show that the speaker diarization system with the TMFCC parameterization and Lion based clustering is found to be superior over existing diarization systems with 95% tracking accuracy.

Speaker Adaptation with Transformation Matrix Linear Interpolation

A transformation matrix linear interpolation (TMLI) approach for speaker adaptation is proposed. TMLI uses the transformation matrixes produced by MLLR from selected training speakers and the testing speaker. With only 3 adaptation sentences, the performance shows a 12.12% word error rate reduction. As the number of adaptation sentences increases, the performance saturates quickly. To improve the behavior of TMLI for large amounts of adaptation data, the TMLI+MAP method which combines TMLI with MAP technique is proposed. Experimental results show TMLI+MAP achieved better recognition accuracy than MAP and MLLR+MAP for both small and large amounts of adaptation data. Key words speech recognition - speaker adaptation - MLLR - MAP - maximum likelihood model interpolation (MLMI) CLC number TN 912. 34 Foundation item: Supported by the Science and Technology Committee of Shanghai (01JC14033)Biography: XU Xiang-hua (1977-), female, Ph. D. candidate, research direction: large vocabulary continuous Mandarin speech recognition and speaker adaptation

Discourses of Chinese ELT Stakeholders on Native Speakerism

This paper reports on part of the findings of a large-scale study exploring the viewpoints of Chinese ELT stakeholders(students,teachers and administrators)on native speakerism in order to find out whether current EFL education in China is still affected by this chauvinistic ideology.The analysis of data via a critical lens reveals that the vast majority of the participants conferred upon NS products(teacher,language,culture and teaching methodology)a status superior to that granted to the NNS counterparts and failed to see linguacultural and epistemological inequalities between the English speaking West and traditional NNS countries,inter alia,China.These findings suggest that the three participant groups as an entirety succumb to native speakerism,and by extension that ELT in China is still haunted to a great degree by this ideology.Given that this study treats each participant group separately,future studies are expected to explore inter-group interactions in ideology.

Text Independent Automatic Speaker Recognition System Using Mel-Frequency Cepstrum Coefficient and Gaussian Mixture Models

The aim of this paper is to show the accuracy and time results of a text independent automatic speaker recognition (ASR) system, based on Mel-Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients (MFCC) and Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM), in order to develop a security control access gate. 450 speakers were randomly extracted from the Voxforge.org audio database, their utterances have been improved using spectral subtraction, then MFCC were extracted and these coefficients were statistically analyzed by GMM in order to build each profile. For each speaker two different speech files were used: the first one to build the profile database, the second one to test the system performance. The accuracy achieved by the proposed approach is greater than 96% and the time spent for a single test run, implemented in Matlab language, is about 2 seconds on a common PC.

Locality Preserving Discriminant Projection for Speaker Verification

In this paper, a manifold subspace learning algorithm based on locality preserving discriminant projection (LPDP) is used for speaker verification. LPDP can overcome the deficiency of the total variability factor analysis and locality preserving projection (LPP). LPDP can effectively use the speaker label information of speech data. Through optimization, LPDP can maintain the inherent manifold local structure of the speech data samples of the same speaker by reducing the distance between them. At the same time, LPDP can enhance the discriminability of the embedding space by expanding the distance between the speech data samples of different speakers. The proposed method is compared with LPP and total variability factor analysis on the NIST SRE 2010 telephone-telephone core condition. The experimental results indicate that the proposed LPDP can overcome the deficiency of LPP and total variability factor analysis and can further improve the system performance.