Effects of listener experience with foreign accent on perception of accentedness and speaker age.

Abstract

The current study examined the effects of foreign accent and listener experience on the perception of a speaker’s age and native language. Ten audio stimuli were prepared from the recording of five Arabic speakers and five English speakers (18–79 years old) from the Speech Accent Archive [Weinberger (2009)] for the perception experiment. Thirty native speakers of English participated in the perception experiment through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk website, estimated the speaker age, rated the speaker’s accentedness, and estimated the native language of the speaker. The listeners were divided into two groups based on their experience with foreign accented English (experienced and inexperienced groups). Higher correlation was found between perceived age (PA) and actual chronological age (CA) for the native (English) stimuli than for the Arabic‐accented stimuli in both listener groups. The correlation between PA and CA was higher in the experienced listeners than in the inexperienced listeners. Accentedness rating suggests that the inexperienced listeners tend to rate both native and non‐native speakers neutrally on the scale. The results suggest that experiences with any foreign accented speech facilitates identification of age from speech and help to form the ability to perceive differences in the degree of foreign accented speech.