Foreign-accented Speakers Research Articles

Effects of Noise and Speech Intelligibility on Listener Comprehension and Processing Time of Korean-Accented English

This study evaluated the effects of noise and speech intelligibility on the processing of speech produced from native English; high-intelligibility, Korean-accented English; and moderate-intelligibility, Korean-accented English speakers. Both listener comprehension, determined by accuracy judgment on true/false sentences, and processing time, estimated from response latency, were assessed under the following 3 conditions: quiet, +10 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and +5 dB SNR. Fifty-four monolingual, English-speaking adults served as the listeners for this study. While noise did not affect the time it took to process foreign-accented speech, it decreased the comprehension of the foreign-accented speech more so than the native speech. Decreasing English intelligibility also resulted in reduced listener comprehension. In addition, the processing time needed to comprehend the intended message depended on the intelligibility of the foreign-accented speaker. Listener comprehension negatively correlated with processing time. The findings suggest that decreased speech intelligibility and adverse listening conditions can be major challenges for effective communication between foreign-accented speakers and native listeners. The results also indicate that foreign-accented speech requires more effortful processing relative to native speech under certain conditions, affecting both comprehension and processing efficiency.

Children’s selective trust in native-accented speakers

Across two experiments, preschool-aged children demonstrated selective learning of non-linguistic information from native-accented rather than foreign-accented speakers. In Experiment 1, children saw videos of a native- and a foreign-accented speaker of English who each spoke for 10 seconds, and then silently demonstrated different functions with novel objects. Children selectively endorsed the silent object function provided by the native-accented speaker. In Experiment 2, children again endorsed the native-accented over the foreign-accented speaker, even though both informants previously spoke only in nonsense speech. Thus, young children demonstrate selective trust in native-accented speakers even when neither informant's speech relays meaningful semantic content, and the information that both informants provide is non-linguistic. We propose that children orient towards members of their native community to guide their early cultural learning.

Accent Trumps Race in Guiding Children's Social Preferences

A series of experiments investigated the effect of speakers' language, accent, and race on children's social preferences. When presented with photographs and voice recordings of novel children, 5-year-old children chose to be friends with native speakers of their native language rather than foreign-language or foreign-accented speakers. These preferences were not exclusively due to the intelligibility of the speech, as children found the accented speech to be comprehensible, and did not make social distinctions between foreign-accented and foreign-language speakers. Finally, children chose same-race children as friends when the target children were silent, but they chose other-race children with a native accent when accent was pitted against race. A control experiment provided evidence that children's privileging of accent over race was not due to the relative familiarity of each dimension. The results, discussed in an evolutionary framework, suggest that children preferentially evaluate others along dimensions that distinguished social groups in prehistoric human societies.

Perceptual adaptation to foreign accented speech.

Previous research on native listener adaptation to foreign-accented adaptation has demonstrated that training on a single non-native speaker results in talker-dependent learning (i.e., training does not generalize to new talkers). However, training on multiple foreign-accented speakers from a single language background results in talker-independent, but accent-dependent learning (i.e., training generalizes to new speakers of the trained accent, but not to new accents). The current study extends these findings, examining whether training on multiple accents can result in accent-independent learning. Native English listeners were trained on recognition of foreign-accented speech by five speakers from different language backgrounds. They were then tested on the speech of two novel speakers. One of the speakers was a native speaker of a language included in the training set (Mandarin), and the other was a native speaker of a language not included in the training set (Slovakian). Listeners demonstrated better performance on both the Mandarin and Slovakian tests than untrained control subjects, demonstrating accent-independent learning after training on multiple foreign accents. This suggests that individuals in multilingual communities, who are exposed to significant variation in the input, may be able to achieve highly flexible speech perception systems.

The effect of phonological variation on adult learner comprehension

This research report focuses on the relationship of English phonological variation to intelligibility for adult second language learners of English. Fifty-eight adult ESL learners (29 advanced beginners and 29 high intermediates) were tested' on their ability to understand working-class (New Yorkese), educated (Standard English) and foreign-accented speakers of English. Subjects were also asked to rank these speakers according to expected ease of comprehension. Findings from this study indicate Standard English to be more intelligible than either New Yorkese or foreign accented English for these learners.

Discrimination in Evaluative Judgments against Foreign-Accented Job Candidates

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of the ethnicity of speakers, as suggested in accents, on judgments of suitability for a job, and to establish the relationship between listeners' attitudes and the evaluation of accented speech. 203 subjects acted as personnel consultants and evaluated 10 job applicants for four jobs varying in social status. Five candidates spoke with an English-Canadian and five with a foreign accent. Data showed discrimination in favour of English-Canadian and against foreign-accented speakers, foreign-accented applicants were rated lower for the higher status jobs, but higher for lower status jobs. Measures of listeners' attitudes (authoritarianism and ethnocentrism) showed low but significant correlations with discrimination.