The rhotic in fake and authentic Polish-accented English

The paper addresses a very important aspect of Polish-accented English, namely the issue of frequent phonetic errors made by Polish learners which do not result from their inability to produce foreign sounds correctly, but which stem from various interference factors (e.g foreign pronounced as [fo’rejn]). Following Szpyra-Kozłowska’s (in press a) claims that such errors hinder successful communication far more than other segmental and suprasegmental inaccuracies and should thus be treated as a top pedagogical priority, what is suggested is a shift in phonetic instruction from the focus on the production of sounds and prosodies to the focus on the pronunciation of problematic words. Our major goal is to demonstrate how this proposal can be implemented in the language classroom. The authors present a report on the experiment in which a group of 25 Polish secondary school pupils has undergone a special training in the pronunciation of 50 commonly mispronounced words with the use of special, teacher-designed materials. The effectiveness of the employed procedure as well as the pupils’ reactions to it are examined and pedagogical conclusions are drawn.

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Discourse Intonation and Information Structure: An Empirical Study of Existential There Constructions in Non-native Spontaneous Speech

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica ◽

10.1515/ausp-2016-0023 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 8 (2) ◽

pp. 139-153

Author(s):

Judit Nagy

Keyword(s):

Language Learners ◽

Information Structure ◽

Sentence Type ◽

Spontaneous Speech ◽

New Information ◽

Different Types ◽

Discourse Intonation ◽

Problematic Area ◽

Accented English ◽

The Given

Abstract The management of given and new information is one of the key components of accomplishing coherence in oral discourse, which is claimed to be a problematic area for language learners (Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei, and Thurrell 1995: 14). Research on discourse intonation proposes that instead of the given/new dichotomy, givenness should be viewed as a continuum, with different types of accessibility (Baumann & Grice 2006). Moreover, Prince (1992) previously categorized information structure into Hearer-old/Hearer-new and Discourse-old/Discourse-new information. There is consensus on the fact that focus or prominence associated with new information is marked with nuclear pitch accent, and its main acoustic cue, fundamental frequency (f0) (Ward & Birner 2001: 120). Non-native intonation has been reported to display numerous differences in f0 range and patterns compared to native speech (Wennerstrom 1994; Baker 2010). This study is an attempt to address the issue of marking information structure in existential there sentences by means of f0 in non-native spontaneous speech. Data originates from task-based interactions in the Wildcat Corpus of Native- and Foreign-Accented English (Van Engen et al. 2010). This paper examines two issues: (1) information structure in relation to the notions of givenness and different types of accessibility (Baumann & Grice 2006) and to Prince’s (1992) multidimensional taxonomy and (2) the use of f0 peaks to mark the prominence of new information. Several differences were measured among native speakers regarding the use of f0, sentence type, and complexity.

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Intonation in Hong Kong English and Guangzhou Cantonese-accented English: A Phonetic Comparison

Journal of Language Teaching and Research ◽

10.17507/jltr.1105.07 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 11 (5) ◽

pp. 724

Author(s):

Yunyun Ran ◽

Jeroen Van De Weijer ◽

Marjoleine Sloos

Keyword(s):

Hong Kong ◽

Foreign Language ◽

Mainland China ◽

Language Variety ◽

Accented English ◽

Hong Kong English

Hong Kong English is to a certain extent a standardized English variety spoken in a bilingual (English-Cantonese) context. In this article we compare this (native) variety with English as a foreign language spoken by other Cantonese speakers, viz. learners of English in Guangzhou (mainland China). We examine whether the notion of standardization is relevant for intonation in this case and thus whether Hong Kong English is different from Cantonese English in a wider perspective, or whether it is justified to treat Hong Kong English and Cantonese English as the same variety (as far as intonation is concerned). We present a comparison between intonational contours of different sentence types in the two varieties, and show that they are very similar. This shows that, in this respect, a learned foreign-language variety can resemble a native variety to a great extent.

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Task-evoked pupil response for accurately-recognized accented speech

10.31234/osf.io/vx2ty ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Drew Jordan McLaughlin ◽

Kristin J. Van Engen

Keyword(s):

Second Language ◽

Cognitive Load ◽

Mandarin Chinese ◽

Recognition Accuracy ◽

Speech Understanding ◽

Pupil Response ◽

Accented Speech ◽

Linguistic Representations ◽

Native Speech ◽

Accented English

Unfamiliar second-language (L2) accents present a common challenge to speech understanding. However, the extent to which accurately-recognized unfamiliar L2-accented speech imposes a greater cognitive load than native speech remains unclear. The current study used pupillometry to assess cognitive load for native English listeners during the perception of intelligible Mandarin Chinese-accented English and American-accented English. Results showed greater pupil response (indicating greater cognitive load) for the unfamiliar L2-accented speech. These findings indicate that the mismatches between unfamiliar L2-accented speech and native listeners’ linguistic representations impose greater cognitive load even when recognition accuracy is at ceiling.

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Liu vs. Liu vs. Luke? Name influence on voice recall

Applied Psycholinguistics ◽

10.1017/s0142716418000267 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 39 (6) ◽

pp. 1117-1146 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

BRIANNE SENIOR ◽

JOBIE HUI ◽

MOLLY BABEL

Keyword(s):

Speech Perception ◽

Social Identity ◽

Social Expectations ◽

Potential Mechanism ◽

Familiarity Effect ◽

Linguistic Processing ◽

Basic Premise ◽

Language Familiarity ◽

Phonetic Cues ◽

Accented English

ABSTRACTListeners are better at remembering voices speaking in familiar languages and accents, and this finding is often dubbed the language-familiarity effect (LFE). A potential mechanism behind the LFE relates to a combination of listeners’ implicit knowledge about lower level phonetic cues and higher level linguistic processes. While previous work has established that listeners’ social expectations influence various aspects of linguistic processing and speech perception, it remains unknown how such expectations might affect talker recognition. To this end, Mandarin-accented English voices and locally accented English voices were used in a talker recognition paradigm in conditions which paired voices with stereotypically congruent names (Mandarin-accented English voice as Chen and locally accented English voice as Connor) and stereotypically incongruent names (vice versa). Across two experiments, listeners showed greater recall for the familiar, local voices than the Mandarin-accented ones, confirming the basic premise of the LFE. Further, incongruent accent/name pairings negatively affected listeners’ performance, although listeners with experience speaking Mandarin were less influenced by the incongruent accent/name pairings. These results indicate that the LFE, while relying largely on listeners’ ability to parse linguistic information, is also affected by nonlinguistic information about a talker’s social identity.

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Unfamiliar Accented English Negatively Affects EFL Listening Comprehension: It Helps to be a More Able Accent Mimic

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research ◽

10.1007/s10936-018-9562-y ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 47 (4) ◽

pp. 899-911 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Yu-Lin Cheng

Keyword(s):

Listening Comprehension ◽

Accented English

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Automatic speech recognition of multiple accented English data

10.21437/interspeech.2010-477 ◽

2010 ◽

Author(s):

Dimitra Vergyri ◽

Lori Lamel ◽

Jean-Luc Gauvain

Keyword(s):

Speech Recognition ◽

Automatic Speech Recognition ◽

Accented English

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Efficient Pronunciation Assessment of Taiwanese-Accented English Based on Unsupervised Model Adaptation and Dynamic Sentence Selection

Multidisciplinary Computational Intelligence Techniques ◽

10.4018/978-1-4666-1830-5.ch002 ◽

2012 ◽

pp. 12-30

Author(s):

Chung-Hsien Wu ◽

Hung-Yu Su ◽

Chao-Hong Liu

Keyword(s):

Mutual Information ◽

English Teachers ◽

Experimental Results ◽

Model Adaptation ◽

Selection Algorithm ◽

Accuracy Improvement ◽

Acoustic Models ◽

Efficient Approach ◽

Accented English ◽

Adaptation Method

This chapter presents an efficient approach to personalized pronunciation assessment of Taiwanese-accented English. The main goal of this study is to detect frequently occurring mispronunciation patterns of Taiwanese-accented English instead of scoring English pronunciations directly. The proposed assessment help quickly discover personalized mispronunciations of a student, thus English teachers can spend more time on teaching or rectifying students’ pronunciations. In this approach, an unsupervised model adaptation method is performed on the universal acoustic models to recognize the speech of a specific speaker with mispronunciations and Taiwanese accent. A dynamic sentence selection algorithm, considering the mutual information of the related mispronunciations, is proposed to choose a sentence containing the most undetected mispronunciations in order to quickly extract personalized mispronunciations. The experimental results show that the proposed unsupervised adaptation approach obtains an accuracy improvement of about 2.1% on the recognition of Taiwanese-accented English speech.

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