Related papers: Native Language Cognate Effects on Second Language…
Non-native speakers show difficulties with spoken word processing. Many studies attribute these difficulties to imprecise phonological encoding of words in the lexical memory. We test an alternative hypothesis: that some of these…
Linguists and psychologists have long been studying cross-linguistic transfer, the influence of native language properties on linguistic performance in a foreign language. In this work we provide empirical evidence for this process in the…
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at providing information acquired during pretraining on large-scale corpora and following instructions through user prompts. This study investigates whether the quality of LLM responses varies depending on…
According to the Language Familiarity Effect (LFE), people are better at discriminating between speakers of their native language. Although this cognitive effect was largely studied in the literature, experiments have only been conducted on…
Bilingual English speakers speak English as one of their languages. Their English is of a non-native kind, and their conversations are of a code-mixed fashion. The intelligibility of a bilingual text-to-speech (TTS) system for such…
As language technologies become widespread, it is important to understand how changes in language affect reader perceptions and behaviors. These relationships may be formalized as the isolated causal effect of some focal language-encoded…
While cross-linguistic model transfer is effective in many settings, there is still limited understanding of the conditions under which it works. In this paper, we focus on assessing the role of lexical semantics in cross-lingual transfer,…
This study evaluates Large Language Models' (LLMs) ability to simulate non-native-like English use observed in human second language (L2) learners interfered with by their native first language (L1). In dialogue-based interviews, we prompt…
In recent years, the number of people studying English as a second language (ESL) has surpassed the number of native speakers. Recent work have demonstrated the success of providing personalized content based on reading difficulty, such as…
This paper examines how linguistic similarity affects cross-lingual phonetic representation in speech processing for low-resource languages, emphasizing effective source language selection. Previous cross-lingual research has used various…
In native speakers' lexical choices, a concept can be more readily expressed by one expression over another grammatical one, a phenomenon known as nativelike selection (NLS). In previous research, arbitrary chunks such as collocations have…
The assumptions we make about a dialogue partner's knowledge and communicative ability (i.e. our partner models) can influence our language choices. Although similar processes may operate in human-machine dialogue, the role of design in…
This paper studies the effect of linguistic constraints on the large scale organization of language. It describes the properties of linguistic networks built using texts of written language with the words randomized. These properties are…
We present a computational analysis of three language varieties: native, advanced non-native, and translation. Our goal is to investigate the similarities and differences between non-native language productions and translations, contrasting…
Voice search is becoming a popular mode for interacting with search engines. As a result, research has gone into building better voice transcription engines, interfaces, and search engines that better handle inherent verbosity of queries.…
Prediction in language has traditionally been studied using simple designs in which neural responses to expected and unexpected words are compared in a categorical fashion. However, these designs have been contested as being `prediction…
Cognates are variants of the same lexical form across different languages; for example 'fonema' in Spanish and 'phoneme' in English are cognates, both of which mean 'a unit of sound'. The task of automatic detection of cognates among any…
A neural language model trained on a text corpus can be used to induce distributed representations of words, such that similar words end up with similar representations. If the corpus is multilingual, the same model can be used to learn…
We explore which linguistic factors -- at the sentence and token level -- play an important role in influencing language model predictions, and investigate whether these are reflective of results found in humans and human corpora (Gries and…
Speech systems are sensitive to accent variations. This is especially challenging in the Indian context, with an abundance of languages but a dearth of linguistic studies characterising pronunciation variations. The growing number of L2…