Sociolinguistic Awareness in Galician Bilinguals: Evidence from an Accent Identification Task

The inclusion of European minority languages in public spaces such as education, administration and the media has led to the emergence of a new profile of speakers, “new speakers”, who typically acquire a minority language through education, but vary in terms of their language experience and use. The present study investigated whether a distinctive variety spoken by Galician new speakers (neofalantes) has emerged in the community and whether listeners’ language background influences accent identification abilities and patterns. Galician-Spanish bilingual listeners completed an accent identification task and were asked to comment on factors influencing their decision. Results demonstrated that all listeners could identify Galician-dominant better than Spanish-dominant bilinguals but could not identify neofalantes. Neofalantes were categorised as both Spanish- and Galician-dominant, supporting the idea that neofalantes have a hybrid variety. This finding suggests that listeners have a gradient representation of language background variation, with Galician-like and Spanish-like accents functioning as anchors and the neofalantes’ accent situated somewhere in the middle. Identification accuracy was similar for all listeners but neofalantes showed heightened sensitivity to the Galician-dominant variety, suggesting that evaluation of sociophonetic features depends on the listener’s language and social background. These findings contribute to our understanding of sociolinguistic awareness in bilingual contexts.

Information packaging correlates of semantic information structure categories

This paper presents an Information Structure (IS) model at the information packaging (IPk) level and its usage in utterance partitioning and in explaining semantic IS category realizations at the pragmatic level. The IPk model proposes a hierarchical view of F0 contours that transforms utterances into binary contrast unit (CU) hierarchies. CUs have binary IPk partitions with two independent and overlapping structures and a nuclear element which project its IPk functions to the whole units it belongs to. Two nuclear accent identification rules are formulated in this paper in order to be used in decoding IPk partition hierarchy by F0 contour analysis. In the second part of the paper several intonational contours of English sentences, having different semantic IS events, are interpreted by correlating semantic IS analysis results with those of the IPk model-based analysis. By decoding IPk structure and functional constituents from F0 contours we can advance our knowledge about the relationship between prosody and intonational meaning.

Accent Detection Task to Classify Accented and Non-Accented Speech

This paper presents a brief survey on accent detection, accent identification, and accent classification. Speech processing has becoming more popular and inspiring expanses lately in signal processing area. It is because speech is one of the most natural form of human communication. However, in processing speech signals intrinsically show many variations even without background noise. Two different person can produce different spectrograms when saying the same sentence. Dialect or Accent is one of the most important factors that can influence the Automatic Speech Recognition or ASR performance besides gender (Unsupervised accent class). Many researches show that dialect or accent in speech can significantly affect the speech system performance. Various methods have been used to increase the accuracy of ASR with accent detection, accent identification, and accent classification. Fused i-vector and Phonotactic are the latest technique that shows a significant degree of accuracy. The purpose of this paper is to briefly survey on accent detection, accent identification, and accent classification and discuss the major improvements made in the past almost 10 years of research