Listeners' Linguistic Experience Affects the Degree of Perceived Nativeness of First Language Pronunciation.

Lisa Kornder,Ineke Mennen

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.717615

Abstract

The aim of this study was to explore if and to what extent Austrian-English late sequential bilinguals who have been living in a second language (L2) environment for several decades are perceived to sound native in their first language (L1) when being compared to monolingual Austrian German (AG) control speakers. Furthermore, this investigation aimed to identify if listeners differ in their judgments of nativeness of L1 pronunciation depending on their own language background. For this purpose, two groups of native Austrian German listeners (N = 30 each), who differed regarding their linguistic background (Austrian German monolingual and Austrian German-English bilingual listeners) were asked to rate spontaneous speech samples produced by Austrian English bilingual and Austrian German monolingual speakers. Results showed that the bilingual L1 speech was perceived to sound overall less native compared to monolingual control speech. It was further observed that the two listener groups significantly differed in their perception of nativeness: Bilingual listeners were overall less likely to judge bilingual L1 pronunciation to sound non-native compared to monolingual listeners. To date, this is the first study to show that listener experience influences their perception of nativeness of L1 pronunciation and, thus, adds a new dimension to the notion of the native speaker.

Highlights

A speaker’s accent, shaped by various segmental and prosodic characteristics, is one of the most salient features of speech production and communication
On the six-point scale, ranging from 1 = certain of native speaker status to 6 = certain of non-native speaker status, monolingual control speakers received a median score of 1.0 and bilingual speakers were rated with a median score of 3.0, which suggests that the bilinguals were perceived to sound overall less native in their L1 compared to monolingual Austrian German (AG) speakers
With regard to the first research aim, the nativeness rating experiment showed that, overall, bilingual speakers who started acquiring their L2 English as adults and who have been long-term immersed in an English-speaking country for several decades were, perceived to sound less native in their native AG pronunciation compared to monolingual AG control speakers

Summary

Introduction

A speaker’s accent, shaped by various segmental and prosodic characteristics, is one of the most salient features of speech production and communication. Nativeness of First Language Pronunciation (e.g., Flege, 1991; Thornburgh and Ryalls, 1998; Flege et al, 2003; Baker and Trofimovich, 2005; Simon, 2009; Levy and Law, 2010), as well as numerous studies that examine the perception of non-native L2 speech by (predominantly) monolingual listeners (e.g., Bongaerts et al, 1995; Flege et al, 1995; Munro and Derwing, 1995a; Riney and Flege, 1998; Moyer, 1999; Jilka, 2000; Kang et al, 2016) While it is well-established that a speaker’s L2 accent is likely to show traces of the L1 system, more recent research shows that the reverse is possible, that is, a late-acquired L2 might affect a speaker’s L1 accent due to bidirectional interaction processes taking place between the L1 and the L2 system (e.g., Mennen, 2004; Dmitrieva et al, 2010; Mayr et al, 2012; Bergmann et al, 2016; de Leeuw et al, 2017; Stoehr et al, 2017; de Leeuw, 2019). Findings of accent rating studies show that listeners are sensitive to divergences from L1 pronunciation patterns in bilingual speakers, which suggests that changes in L1 pronunciation resulting from long-term exposure to an L2 might lead to a detectable non-native L1 accent (e.g., De Leeuw et al, 2010; Bergmann et al, 2016; Mayr et al, 2020)

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