Beyond barriers:Complexity, accuracy, and fluency in long-term L2 speakers' speech

It remains to be a puzzling question why some people are more successful in learning a second language (L2) than others and under which conditions. In my dissertation I studied the effects of several factors, including the starting age of learning a L2, the amount of continued exposure to the first language, and the achieved level of education, on naturalistic second language acquisition. I looked at 102 oral history testimonies given by German-Jewish immigrants in the U.K., the U.S.A., and Australia who had arrived there when they were between 7 to 17 years old. They all had been forced to leave Germany either by themselves or accompanied by relatives between 11 November 1938 and 1 September 1939. They had given these interviews in their L2 English when they were between 57 and 87 years old. Hence, all of them had spent the majority of their lives in the L2 community in which they had established themselves.The interviews were particularly analysed for vocabulary and grammar, pronunciation, and fluency.We found that vocabulary and grammar were significantly related to the interviewees’ level of education. Their pronunciation was significantly related to the interviewees’ age at which they started learning the L2. Fluency was significanlty related to the age at which the interview was given.Altogether, our findings suggest that second language acquisition is related to a set of factors, including the level of education people obtain and the age at which people start learning a language

Longitudinal Speaker Clustering and Verification Corpus with Code-switching Frisian-Dutch Speech

In this paper, we present a new longitudinal and bilingual broadcast database designed for speaker clustering and text- independent verification research. The broadcast data is ex- tracted from the archives of Omrop Fryslaˆn which is the re- gional broadcaster in the province of Fryslaˆn, located in the north of the Netherlands. Two speaker verification tasks are provided in a standard enrollment-test setting with language consistent trials. The first task contains target trials from all speakers available appearing in at least two different programs, while the second task contains target trials from a subgroup of speakers appearing in programs recorded in multiple years. The second task is designed to investigate the effects of ageing on the accuracy of speaker verification systems. This database also contains unlabeled spoken segments from different radio pro- grams for speaker clustering research. We provide the output of an existing speaker diarization system for baseline verification experiments. Finally, we present the baseline speaker verifi- cation results using the Kaldi GMM- and DNN-UBM speaker verification system. This database will be an extension to the recently presented open source Frisian data collection and it is publicly available for research purposes

Longitudinal Speaker Clustering and Verification Corpus with Code-Switching Frisian-Dutch Speech

10.21437/Interspeech.2017-301Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH2017-August37-4

Description of Courses, 1979-80

Official publication of Cornell University V.71 1979/8