scholarly journals The perception of native vs. non-native Danish speech: Bent and Bradlow’s matched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit revisited

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 284-296
Author(s):  
Paweł Korpal ◽  
◽  
Mikołaj Sobkowiak ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Speech Intelligibility ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Foreign Accent ◽  
Valuable Insight ◽  
Accented Speech ◽  
Polish Language ◽  
Native Speech ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Language Pair

The main objective of the study was to test the applicability of Bent and Bradlow’s matched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit to the Danish-Polish language pair. We aimed to verify whether it was easier for Polish students of Danish to understand a Danish native speaker or a Polish speaker with a proficient command of Danish. Sixteen Polish students, divided into two groups of eight, listened to two recordings of two Danish texts: one recorded by a native speaker of Danish and the other one — by a native speaker of Polish who is a graduate of Danish philology from a Polish university. Before the experiment, all of the recordings were evaluated in terms of traces of foreign accent using a 7-point Likert scale, the experts being native speakers of Danish. The evaluators assessed the Polish native speaker’s pronunciation as proficient, but they identified certain segmental and suprasegmental features in his speech that are common indicators of a foreign accent in Danish. During the experiment, participants were asked to fill in each recording transcript with twenty missing words. The analysis of the results revealed that the participants scored higher when listening to the text recorded by the Polish speaker. Hence, the matched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit was observed in a study using Polish as L1 (native language) and Danish as a foreign language. The study may provide a valuable insight into the question of non-native speech perception, foreign-accented speech and the veracity of the matched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for the Polish–Danish language pair.

scholarly journals When One Person's Mistake Is Another's Standard Usage: The Effect of Foreign Accent on Syntactic Processing

2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 878-887 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adriana Hanulíková ◽  
Petra M. van Alphen ◽  
Merel M. van Goch ◽  
Andrea Weber
Keyword(s):  
Speech Processing ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Syntactic Processing ◽  
Foreign Accent ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Accented Speech ◽  
Grammatical Errors ◽  
Integration Problem ◽  
Native Speech

How do native listeners process grammatical errors that are frequent in non-native speech? We investigated whether the neural correlates of syntactic processing are modulated by speaker identity. ERPs to gender agreement errors in sentences spoken by a native speaker were compared with the same errors spoken by a non-native speaker. In line with previous research, gender violations in native speech resulted in a P600 effect (larger P600 for violations in comparison with correct sentences), but when the same violations were produced by the non-native speaker with a foreign accent, no P600 effect was observed. Control sentences with semantic violations elicited comparable N400 effects for both the native and the non-native speaker, confirming no general integration problem in foreign-accented speech. The results demonstrate that the P600 is modulated by speaker identity, extending our knowledge about the role of speaker's characteristics on neural correlates of speech processing.

scholarly journals English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in ESP contexts. Students' attitudes towards non-native speech and analysis of teaching materials

2017 ◽  
pp. 27
Author(s):  
Yolanda Joy Calvo-Benzies
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Foreign Accent ◽  
Teaching Materials ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Native Speakers Of English ◽  
Native Speech ◽  
Students Attitudes ◽  
Analysis Of Teaching

This paper focuses on non-native accents in ESP classrooms. In particular it looks at native and non-native speakers of English accents used in the audio material accompanying six ESP textbooks. In a second study, a group of undergraduate ESP students of Law and Tourism were asked to assess some of the non-native speakers accents found in these materials, focussing on aspects such as fluency, pronunciation, intelligibility and foreign accent. More specifically, they were asked to rate the following non-native accents of speakers in English: French, German, Polish, Chinese and Spanish. Results from the first part of the study show that native speaker models continue to be present in ESP textbooks to a far higher degree than non-native ones. In the second part, the non-native accents that students rated most positively were those of German and Polish speakers, and those seen in the most negative terms were French and Spanish. In general, the Law students tended to value native accents more than non-native ones, whereas students of Tourism broadly accept both native and non-native accents.

The Effects of Speaker Accent and Target Predictability on Perception of Mispronunciations

1999 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peggy M. Schmid ◽  
Grace H. Yeni-Komshian
Keyword(s):  
Distinctive Feature ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Foreign Accent ◽  
Initial Phoneme ◽  
Accented Speech ◽  
Native Speech ◽  
Processing Effort ◽  
Target Words

This study makes use of a listening for mispronunciation task to examine how native English listeners perceive sentences produced by non-native speakers. The effects of target predictability and degree of foreign accent were investigated. Native and non-native speakers produced English sentences containing mispronunciation. Mispronunciations (MPs) were constructed by changing the initial phoneme of target words by a single distinctive feature along the dimensions of voicing, place, or manner. Results showed that listeners (a) were more accurate and faster in detecting MPs produced by native than non-native speakers, (b) were more accurate and faster in detecting MPs in predictable than unpredictable sentences, and (3) were more accurate in detecting MPs produced by non-native speakers with milder accents, as compared to heavier accents. These findings suggest that listening to fairly intelligible but accented speech requires increased processing effort—possibly because of subtle differences in intelligibility and increased variability characteristic of non-native speech.

scholarly journals Native Speaker Perceptions of Accented Speech: The English Pronunciation of Macedonian EFL Learners

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 41-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anastazija Kirkova-Naskova
Keyword(s):  
Web Application ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Foreign Accent ◽  
Point Scale ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Accented Speech ◽  
English Pronunciation ◽  
Native Speakers Of English ◽  
Result Analysis

The paper reports on the results of a study that aimed to describe the vocalic and consonantal features of the English pronunciation of Macedonian EFL learners as perceived by native speakers of English and to find out whether native speakers who speak different standard variants of English perceive the same segments as non-native. A specially designed computer web application was employed to gather two types of data: a) quantitative (frequency of segment variables and global foreign accent ratings on a 5-point scale), and b) qualitative (open-ended questions). The result analysis points out to three most frequent markers of foreign accent in the English speech of Macedonian EFL learners: final obstruent devoicing, vowel shortening and substitution of English dental fricatives with Macedonian dental plosives. It also reflects additional phonetic aspects poorly explained in the available reference literature such as allophonic distributional differences between the two languages and intonational mismatch.

scholarly journals Detection of Non-native Speaker Status from Backwards and Vocoded Contentmasked Speech

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-105
Author(s):  
Arkadiusz Rojczyk ◽  
Andrzej Porzuczek
Keyword(s):  
White Noise ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Temporal Organization ◽  
Speech Rhythm ◽  
Accented Speech ◽  
Significant Contributor ◽  
Suprasegmental Features ◽  
The Status ◽  
Native Speech ◽  
Vocoded Speech

This paper addresses the issue of speech rhythm as a cue to non-native pronunciation. In natural recordings, it is impossible to disentangle rhythm from segmental, subphonemic or suprasegmental features that may influence nativeness ratings. However, two methods of speech manipulation, that is, backwards content-masked speech and vocoded speech, allow the identification of native and non-native speech in which segmental properties are masked and become inaccessible to the listeners. In the current study, we use these two methods to compare the perception of content-masked native English speech and Polish-accented speech. Both native English and Polish-accented recordings were manipulated using backwards masked speech and 4-band white-noise vocoded speech. Fourteen listeners classified the stimuli as produced by native or Polish speakers of English. Polish and English differ in their temporal organization, so, if rhythm is a significant contributor to the status of non-native accentedness, we expected an above-chance rate of recognition of native and non-native English speech. Moreover, backwards content-masked speech was predicted to yield better results than vocoded speech, because it retains some of the indexical properties of speakers. The resultsshow that listeners are unable to detect non-native accent in Polish learners of English from backwards and vocoded speech samples.

scholarly journals Speech in the foreign accent syndrome: differential diagnosis between organic and functional cases

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-332
Author(s):  
Simone dos Santos Barreto ◽  
Karin Zazo Ortiz
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Speech Intelligibility ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Foreign Accent ◽  
Prior History ◽  
Speech Impairments ◽  
Foreign Accent Syndrome ◽  
History Of ◽  
Transient Events ◽  
Classic Form

ABSTRACT. Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is an extremely rare disorder, with 112 cases described until 2019. We compare two cases of the foreign accent syndrome in native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese in its classic form (FAS) and psychiatric variant (FALS). Two cases were analyzed: (1) a right-handed, 69-year-old man, with a prior history of stroke, and (2) a right-handed, 43-year-old woman, diagnosed with schizophrenia. They were evaluate for language and speech, including the speech intelligibility. Both patients had speech impairments complaints, similar to a new accent, without previous exposure to a foreign language. However, the onset of the speech disorder was sudden in case 1 and insidious and with transient events in case 2, with speech intelligibility scores of 95.5 and 55.3% respectively. Besides neurologic impairment, the clinical presentation of FALS was extremely severe and differed to that expected in FAS cases, in which speech intelligibility is preserved.

The Business of Pragmatics. The Case of Discourse Markers in The Speech of Students of Business English and English Linguistics

2011 ◽  
Vol 161 ◽  
pp. 10-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lieven Buysse
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Foreign Language Learning ◽  
Discourse Markers ◽  
Business English ◽  
Foreign Language Learners ◽  
Native Speech

Abstract This paper investigates how foreign language learners use discourse markers (such as so, well, you know, I mean) in English speech. These small words that do not contribute much, if anything at all, to the propositional content of a message but modify it in subtle ways, are often considered among the last elements acquired in a foreign language. This contribution reports on close scrutiny of a corpus of English-spoken interviews with Belgian native speakers of Dutch, half of whom are undergraduates majoring in Commercial Sciences and half of whom are majoring in English Linguistics, and sets it off against a comparable native speaker corpus. The investigation shows that the language learners exhibit a clear preference for “operative discourse markers” and neglect or avoid “involvement discourse markers”. It is argued that in learner speech the former take on functions typically fulfilled by the latter to a greater extent than in native speech, and that in some cases the learners revert to a code-switching strategy to cater for their pragmatic needs, bringing markers from Dutch into their English speech. Finally, questions are raised as to the place of such pragmatic devices in foreign language learning.

The relative contribution of segments and intonation to the perception of foreign-accented speech

2015 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOAN SERENO ◽  
LYNNE LAMMERS ◽  
ALLARD JONGMAN
Keyword(s):  
Fundamental Frequency ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
The Other ◽  
Foreign Accent ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Relative Impact ◽  
Accented Speech ◽  
Relative Contribution ◽  
Accented English

ABSTRACTThe present study examines the relative impact of segments and intonation on accentedness, comprehensibility, and intelligibility, specifically investigating the separate contribution of segmental and intonational information to perceived foreign accent in Korean-accented English. Two English speakers and two Korean speakers recorded 40 English sentences. The sentences were manipulated by combining segments from one speaker with intonation (fundamental frequency contour and duration) from another speaker. Four versions of each sentence were created: one English control (English segments and English intonation), one Korean control (Korean segments and Korean intonation), and two Korean–English combinations (one with English segments and Korean intonation; the other with Korean segments and English intonation). Forty native English speakers transcribed the sentences for intelligibility and rated their comprehensibility and accentedness. The data show that segments had a significant effect on accentedness, comprehensibility, and intelligibility, but intonation only had an effect on intelligibility. Contrary to previous studies, the present study, separating segments from intonation, suggests that segmental information contributes substantially more to the perception of foreign accentedness than intonation. Native speakers seem to rely mainly on segments when determining foreign accentedness.

The comprehensibility of non-native speech

1982 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 114-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evangeline Marios Varonis ◽  
Susan Gass
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Complex Interaction ◽  
Controlled Study ◽  
Natural Setting ◽  
Controlled Experiments ◽  
Native Speech ◽  
Natural Settings ◽  
The Relationship

This study presents data collected from both natural settings and controlled experiments in order to describe native speaker responses to non-natives and to discuss what variables of a non-native's speech might elicit these responses. We present the results of three experiments. The first investigates native speaker reactions to requests for information by both native and non-native speakers in a natural setting. Experiment two is a controlled study focussing on two variables of non-native speech—pronunciation and grammar—and the response of native speakers to these variables. Experiment three examines the relationship between these variables and native speaker comprehension. Experiment four focuses on the effect of ordering on comprehensibility. We then discuss the role all of these factors play in the comprehensibility of non-native speech. We suggest that comprehensibility is achieved through a complex interaction of many factors and that it is comprehensibility which largely contributes to the use of foreigner talk by native speakers.

scholarly journals A Foreign Speech Accent in a Case of Conversion Disorder

2005 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 225-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jo Verhoeven ◽  
Peter Mariën ◽  
Sebastiaan Engelborghs ◽  
Hugo D’Haenen ◽  
Peter De Deyn
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Functional Neuroimaging ◽  
Conversion Disorder ◽  
Foreign Accent ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Two Samples ◽  
Foreign Accent Syndrome ◽  
Reference Corpus ◽  
Extensive Test

Objective: The aim of this paper is to report the psychiatric, neuroradiological and linguistic characteristics in a native speaker of Dutch who developed speech symptoms which strongly resemble Foreign Accent Syndrome. Background: Foreign Accent Syndrome is a rare speech production disorder in which the speech of a patient is perceived as foreign by speakers of the same speech community. This syndrome is generally related to focal brain damage. Only in few reported cases the Foreign Accent Syndrome is assumed to be of psychogenic and/or psychotic origin. Method: In addition to clinical and neuroradiological examinations, an extensive test battery of standardized neuropsychological and neurolinguistic investigations was carried out. Two samples of the patient's spontaneous speech were analysed and compared to a 500,000-words reference corpus of 160 normal native speakers of Dutch. Results: The patient had a prominent French accent in her pronunciation of Dutch. This accent had persisted over the past eight years and has become progressively stronger. The foreign qualities of her speech did not only relate to pronunciation, but also to the lexicon, syntax and pragmatics. Structural as well as functional neuroimaging did not reveal evidence that could account for the behavioural symptoms. By contrast psychological investigations indicated conversion disorder. Conclusions: To the best of our knowledge this is the first reported case of a foreign accent like syndrome in conversion disorder.

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