Native American English Speakers Research Articles

Strategic Deception in Interlanguage Pragmatics: A Comparative Study on Chinese EFL Learners and Native Speakers of American English

Strategic Deception in Interlanguage Pragmatics: A Comparative Study on Chinese EFL Learners and Native Speakers of American English

Cognitive load associated with speaking clearly in reverberant rooms

Communication is a fundamental aspect of human interaction, yet many individuals must speak in less-than-ideal acoustic environments daily. Adapting their speech to ensure intelligibility in these varied settings can impose a significant cognitive burden. Understanding this burden on talkers has significant implications for the design of public spaces and workplace environments, as well as speaker training programs. The aim of this study was to examine how room acoustics and speaking style affect cognitive load through self-rating of mental demand and pupillometry. Nineteen adult native speakers of American English were instructed to read sentences in both casual and clear speech—a technique known to enhance intelligibility—across three levels of reverberation (0.05 s, 1.2 s, and 1.83 s at 500–1000 Hz). Our findings revealed that speaking style consistently affects the cognitive load on talkers more than room acoustics across the tested reverberation range. Specifically, pupillometry data suggested that speaking in clear speech elevates the cognitive load comparably to speaking in a room with long reverberation, challenging the conventional view of clear speech as an ‘easy’ strategy for improving intelligibility. These results underscore the importance of accounting for talkers' cognitive load when optimizing room acoustics and developing speech production training.

Machine Learning Recognizes Frequency-Following Responses in American Adults: Effects of Reference Spectrogram and Stimulus Token.

Electrophysiological research has been widely utilized to study brain responses to acoustic stimuli. The frequency-following response (FFR), a non-invasive reflection of how the brain encodes acoustic stimuli, is a particularly propitious electrophysiologic measure. While the FFR has been studied extensively, there are limitations in obtaining and analyzing FFR recordings that recent machine learning algorithms may address. In this study, we aimed to investigate whether FFRs can be enhanced using an "improved" source-separation machine learning algorithm. For this study, we recruited 28 native speakers of American English with normal hearing. We obtained two separate FFRs from each participant while they listened to two stimulus tokens /i/ and /da/. Electroencephalographic signals were pre-processed and analyzed using a source-separation non-negative matrix factorization (SSNMF) machine learning algorithm. The algorithm was trained using individual, grand-averaged, or stimulus token spectrograms as a reference. A repeated measures analysis of variance revealed that FFRs were significantly enhanced (p < .001) when the "improved" SSNMF algorithm was trained using both individual and grand-averaged spectrograms, but not when utilizing the stimulus token spectrogram. Similar results were observed when extracting FFRs elicited by using either stimulus token, /i/ or /da/. This demonstration shows how the SSNMF machine learning algorithm, using individual and grand-averaged spectrograms as references in training the algorithm, significantly enhanced FFRs. This improvement has important implications for the obtainment and analytical processes of FFR, which may lead to advancements in clinical applications of FFR testing.

Estimates of speech efficiency in monolingual and bilingual speakers of English.

Introduction The Speech Efficiency Score (SES) serves as an acoustic metric for assessing fluency in conversational speech within the temporal domain. This study leverages SES to investigate conversational speech efficiency among native speakers of American English (AE) compared to speakers of Mandarin-accented English (MAE). Methods SES, speaking rate, articulation rate, and vocabulary diversity were measured and compared between two groups: native AE speakers and MAE speakers. The study utilized conversational speech samples collected from both groups to analyze these metrics. Results Findings indicate a disparity in speaking rate and articulation rate between the AE and MAE groups, with the AE group exhibiting significantly faster speech. However, no significant differences were observed in SES and vocabulary diversity between the two groups. Conclusion The results are discussed in the context of the interplay between speaking rate, speech fluency, and vocabulary diversity. These findings shed light on the maintenance of speech efficiency among bilingual speakers, suggesting that despite differences in speaking rate and articulation rate, SES and vocabulary diversity remain comparable between native AE speakers and MAE speakers. .

The influence of accent and device usage on perceived credibility during interactions with voice-AI assistants

Voice-AI assistants offer innovative ways for people to interact with technology, such as delivering search results through human-sounding voices. Unlike printed text, however, voices are associated with particular characteristics, such as accents, which have the potential to influence perceived credibility. Voice-AI assistants are also a relatively new phenomenon, and while people who use them frequently may be inclined to trust them, other people may not be. The current study investigated how voice accent and frequency-of-use affected users’ credibility assessments of search results delivered by voice-AI assistants. Participants, who were native speakers of American English and self-classified themselves according to how frequently they used voice-AI assistants, listened to statements produced by neural text-to-speech in either an American English or British English accent. They then rated the credibility of both the information content and the voice itself, along several dimensions. Results showed that in multiple conditions, participants perceived information delivered by British-accented voices as more credible than that delivered by American English-accented voices. Furthermore, frequency-of-use exerted a significant effect on perceived trustworthiness of a voice. These findings have implications for the ethical design of voice-AI systems, and for human-computer interaction more generally.

Does Native Language Matter in Perceptual Ratings of Dysarthria?

Despite the general agreement that dysarthria characteristics are largely language-independent, few efforts have attempted a systematic comparison across languages. To examine the role of native languages in the perception of speech characteristics of dysarthria secondary to Parkinson's disease (PD), auditory-perceptual ratings of dysarthria, and confidence level of the judgments were compared between two listener groups: language-matched and language-crossed. A total of 60 listeners (35 native speakers of Korean and 25 native speakers of American English) estimated speech abnormality for 20 speech dimensions using a visual analog scale method for both language-matched and language-crossed speech stimuli. Speech stimuli were passage readings of the respective languages obtained from individuals with and without PD. For speech dimension ratings, eight of 20 speech dimensions revealed significant differences in response to PD speech between the two listener groups, for most of which, language-crossed listeners' estimation was lower (i.e., more impaired) than language-matched listeners. For confidence-level ratings, language-matched listeners were less confident in the ratings of speakers with PD compared to the language-crossed listeners. The data support both language-universal and language-specific aspects in perceiving dysarthria characteristics, such that native language plays a role, especially when rating articulatory- and rhythmic-related characteristics. The findings are discussed with respect to the role of linguistic information, such as phonetic inventories and prosodic structures, in perceiving dysarthria characteristics.

Making the Unseen Seen: The Role of Signaling and Novelty in Rating Metaphors

Comprehension of metaphorical expressions differs with their degree of novelty. Conventional metaphors are typically comprehended as easily as literal sentences, while novel metaphors are responded to less quickly than their conventional counterparts. However, the influence of metaphor signals on the interpretability and acceptability of sentences with metaphors, especially their potential interaction with novelty, remains an open question. We conducted six online experiments among 1,694 native speakers of American English to examine how interpretability and acceptability ratings of individually presented sentences were affected by metaphor novelty and different types of metaphor signals. Across all six experiments, we consistently found that novel metaphors decreased the interpretability and acceptability of sentences compared to both conventional metaphors and literal controls. Signals, on the contrary, did not impact the interpretability or acceptability of the sentences. Moreover, only in experiment 3b did we find an interaction between metaphor type and signals. Specifically, when a metaphor was marked by double signals (i.e., both lexical signals and a typographical signal were added around the metaphorical keywords) vs. no signals, acceptability of novel metaphors increased, but acceptability of conventional metaphors decreased. We hypothesize that the double signaling of novel metaphors marks their novelty, making them more acceptable. By contrast, the double signaling of conventional metaphors may have been perceived as redundant, leading to a lower acceptability.

Closure duration versus f0 perturbation as a cue to underlying stops for the American English intervocalic flap

Researchers found that there are five main cues for distinguishing the voicing of these intervocalic plosives, preceding vowel duration, following vowel duration, closure duration, semantic context, and f0 perturbation, also known as consonant intrinsic f0. In American English, when /t/ and /d/ occur intervocalically, they are realized as a voiced alveolar flap [ɾ] (e.g., [ɹa͡ɪɾɪŋ] writing/riding, [liɾɚ] liter/leader). The presence of these cues indicates incomplete neutralization of these forms. To address a current gap in the literature, the present study focused on American English native speakers’ perception and use of CF0 and closure duration as independent and combined informative cues for deciding voicing contrast of /t/ and /d/ when neutralized by the flap. Participants engaged in a self-administered online forced-judgement task of a pseudoword in 30 combinations of CF0 and flap closure duration to indicate the underlying representation (/hɑtɑ/ or /hɑdɑ/) of the surface production [hɑɾɑ] they perceived. This study observed that participants are more likely to select /hɑtɑ/ when the CF0 is higher and / hɑdɑ/ elsewhere. These modest findings suggest that CF0 is a useful cue for voicing distinction. The results suggest that models of spoken word recognition and speech perception ought to include CF0 as a cue.

Exploring auditory recognition: Native Japanese listeners' perception of frequent and infrequent English words in noise with varied phonological neighborhood densities

Native Japanese listeners identified English words embedded in noise (SNR + 6dB) produced by native American English and Japanese speakers. The identical word list used in our previous study (Nozawa and Wayland 2023) was employed. Listeners responded by typing the words they heard. The findings revealed no discernible impacts of phonological neighborhood density, possibly due to the small vocabulary size limiting competition from other words. However, frequent words exhibited greater precision in recognition compared to infrequent words. Despite the introduction of noise, the overall accuracy of responses did not experience a substantial impact. Nevertheless, specific words like “class” and “club,” initially nearly perfect in accuracy without noise, dropped to 0% accuracy. Most errors included phoneme substitution rather than phoneme addition or deletion, and in / CVC/ words, the onset consonant was identified substantially better than the vowel and the coda consonant. Initial consonant clusters, such as /br/, / kl/, and /pl/, were frequently perceived as /l/ or /r/, leading to the initial stops or fricatives being missed. Errors encompassed the substitution of phonemes with others that are not typically perceptually assimilated into the same native language (L1) categories, which would not be revealed through predefined multiple-choice identification or discrimination tasks.

Investigating the effects of phonological neighborhood density, word frequency, and phoneme confusability on the English word recognition by native speakers of Japanese

This study aims to bridge the gap between previous research on the impact of phonological neighborhood density on word identification, which did not consider phoneme confusability, and studies on phoneme identification and discrimination, which did not account for the effects of phonological neighborhood density. Native Japanese listeners participated in this study, where they were tasked with identifying monosyllabic and disyllabic English words. The words varied in both phonological neighborhood density and word frequency and were produced by native speakers of American English and Japanese. Participants responded by typing the words they heard. The findings of this study indicated that there were no significant effects of phonological neighborhood density on word identification. However, frequent words were identified with greater accuracy compared to infrequent words. Moreover, words produced by native speakers of American English were more accurately identified than those produced by Japanese speakers. Japanese listeners' inaccurate perception of phonemes has resulted in word identification errors in both dense and sparse phonological neighborhoods. For example, they often mistakenly identify /l/ as /r/ and vice versa. Low and central vowels /æ, ɑ, ʌ/ are frequently misidentified as one another. These confusions are commonly observed among Japanese learners of English.

Is secondary stress phonetically real for second-language learners? Evidence from Japanese-accented English

Speakers of a non-stress language such as Japanese often have difficulty producing lexical stress distinctions in languages such as English. Distinguishing primary-stressed versus unstressed syllables may be difficult, but distinctions involving secondary stress may be even more challenging. Some studies report that Japanese learners of English (JE) do not distinguish secondary-stressed and unstressed syllables in terms of vowel duration and quality whereas native American English speakers (AE) do. However, the data are limited and inconclusive. To resolve this issue, the present study asked AE and two groups of JE differing in English proficiency to produce 83 English words that exhibit stress shift, e.g., phótogràph-phòtográphic-photógraphy and conducted acoustic analysis of vowels in corresponding positions, which have the same consonantal context but differ in stress level. Preliminary results indicate that JE frequently produce devoiced vowels in unstressed syllables, particularly in phonetic environments similar to where devoicing occurs in Japanese. Devoicing, however, does not seem to occur in secondary-stressed syllables, suggesting that JE might distinguish secondary-stressed and unstressed syllables with respect to devoicing. Results from duration and formant analysis will also be reported and discussed in relation to theories of native-language influences on second-language speech learning. [Work supported by JSPS.]

A Pragmatic Study of the Speech Act of Threatening between Jordanian and American Speakers

This paper investigates the speech act of making threats among native speakers of Jordanian Arabic (JA) and American English (AE). It explores new threat strategies used by Jordanian and American speakers and their pragmatic functions to construct an analytical framework for analyzing this act across cultures. The data for this study were collected using an open-ended questionnaire. This questionnaire consists of ten imaginary situations drawn from real life. The data were analyzed using chi-square tests (value &lt;0.05) to determine whether the difference between the two groups for each threat strategy was statistically significant. The subjects of Jordanian Arabic included 40 male participants and 40 female participants from three universities in Irbid district while the American subjects included 15 male participants and 15 female participants from the University of Illinois in the United States. Five threat strategies were identified. Four of which were shared between the two groups: Telling Authority, Committing Harm, Introducing Options and Warning. However, Promise of Vague Consequence was confined to JA speakers. The study also found that JA speakers tended to be less direct than their AE counterparts.

Telicity judgments in L2 English by L1 Slovak speakers

Abstract The study investigates the acquisition of telicity in L2 English by L1 Slovak speakers as a function of L2 proficiency (measured by a cloze test score), exposure (operationalized as length of stay in an English-speaking country) and instruction type (monolingual vs. bilingual). Telicity judgments were collected from Slovak learners of L2 English (n = 50) and a control group of American English native speakers (n = 15) in two offline acceptability judgment tasks. Two types of telicity encoding were examined: (1) the contribution of the [±quantized] feature of the object argument to predicate telicity, which involves processes in narrow syntax; and (2) the contribution of adverbial modifiers to telicity interpretations, including coercion contexts, which involve processes of aspectual reinterpretation. Based on previous research, it was hypothesized that the contribution of the [±quantized] feature of the object argument to predicate telicity, which is a syntactic phenomenon, will be easier to acquire than aspectual coercion by means of adverbial modifiers, which relies on pragmatic cues. The results indicate that the most significant predictor of telicity judgments based on syntactic cues is L2 proficiency, while length of stay affects telicity judgments in predicate categories involving coercion contexts.

Prosodic location modulates listener’s perception of novel German sounds

Interaction of sounds on the melodic tier (segments) with prosodic and phonotactic structure (syllabic context) in cross-language perception is not explicitly addressed by models of second language phonology (e.g., Perceptual Assimilation Model: Best, 1995). At initial stages of foreign language exposure, learners rely on position-specific phonetic detail more than native speakers or advanced learners, thus mappings according to prosodic and phonotactic context are a crucial factor in early interlanguage phonological development. In a perceptual assimilation experiment, we manipulated syllable position (onset vs. coda) and phonotactic complexity (simple vs. complex codas) in phonotactically similar languages for auditory presentation of six German obstruents (i.e., familiar [h k ʃ] and novel [ç x p͡f]) to native speakers of American English who had no previous exposure to German. By means of weighted proportions (Park &amp;amp; de Jong, 2008) and overlap scores (Levy, 2009), we found that [h k ʃ p͡f] mapped categorically to English orthographic categories &amp;lt;h&amp;gt;, &amp;lt;k&amp;gt;, &amp;lt;sh&amp;gt;, and &amp;lt;f&amp;gt;,&amp;nbsp;respectively, in all positions, whereas the novel fricatives [ç x] exhibited distinct mapping patterns from each other, from other sounds, and according to syllable position. These results demonstrate profound influences of both low-level prosodic and phonotactic contexts on perceptual assimilation of novel sounds

The Influence of L2 English on Attitudes Towards Gender-Neutral Job Titles

This study examines the influence of L2 English on attitudes towards gender-neutral job titles. It aims to determine whether language influences perceptions of job titles. Data were collected via questionnaires from 67 participants aged 18-26 years, comprising American English native speakers, Arabic native speakers, and Kuwaiti learners of English. Results indicate that high-proficiency English learners tend to neutralize job titles instead of assigning gender markers, a behavior which is influenced by their exposure to English and cultural attitudes towards gender equality. Most native English speakers used neutral job titles instead of gender assignments. The two control groups demonstrated a significant difference in their responses, with Arabic monolinguals assigning gender markers based on the dominant gender in a particular profession. Additionally, language background and demographics affected these results. Attitudes towards gender markedness in job titles has received little attention from scholars studying Arabic&amp;ndash;English bilinguals. Therefore, this study contributes to the literature by exploring attitudes towards gender markedness in job titles.

A comparative study of English vowel shifts and vowel space area among Korean Americans in three dialect regions

AbstractRecent sociophonetic research has focused on the ways in which race and ethnicity influence language as well as how language is used to construct racial and ethnic identity. Comparisons of the speech of members of one ethnic group across different regions are still uncommon. In this study, fifty-one native American English speakers of Korean descent, hailing from three different dialect areas of the United States (Los Angeles County and Orange County, California; Harris County, Texas; and Gwinnett County, Georgia), were recorded speaking English in casual interviews. Their speech was analyzed for characteristics of local sound patterns in each region, including the Short Front Vowel Shift (California Vowel Shift) and the Southern Vowel Shift, as well as overall Vowel Space Area. All three groups showed evidence of the Short Front Vowel Shift, and none demonstrated the Southern Vowel Shift. The Californian speakers had the smallest vowel spaces, while the Georgian speakers had the largest. We relate these findings to the ways Korean Americans in Texas and California understand their ethnic identity vis-à-vis a kind of metropolitan or urban speech style in a highly multicultural environment, while, in comparison, Korean Americans in Georgia may use vowel space to highlight their orientation toward or away from local mainstream (white) cultural identity.

Монгол, англи хэлний гуйх хэлэхүйн үйлдлийн зэрэгцүүлсэн судалгаа

The current study focused on cross-cultural comparison of requestive speech act realization patterns in Mongolian and English. This study aimed to compare patterns in the requests provided by native Mongolian speakers (n=86) and native speakers of American English (n=87) under the same social constraints involving nine different situations. Data were gathered through the discourse completion test (DCT) in which the participants were asked to complete the discourse with appropriate request patterns consistent with the given situation. Students were undergraduate students (sophomores and juniors) in their native countries. The data were processed in accordance with request strategies developed by Blum-Kulka et al. (1984). According to the degree of directness, all request strategies were classified into three major categories, particularly (1) direct strategies, (2) conventionally indirect strategies, and (3) unconventionally indirect strategies.

Acoustic characteristics of English/n, l, t, k/ produced by native speakers of American English and Japanese at and near the word boundary

The acoustic characteristics of English /n, l, t, k/ produced by native speakers of American English and Japanese at and near the word boundary are compared. The phonemes are produced in two-word sequences in sentence contexts, /n/ or /l/ appears at the end of the first word (e.g., an earth, you'll earn) or at the beginning of the second word (e.g., a nurse, you learn), while /t/ or /k/ appears at the beginning of the second word (e.g., stops talking, ice cream) or as the second segment of the initial cluster /sk/ of the second word (e.g., stop stalking, I screamed). Acoustic analysis revealed that English speakers' /n/ in coda position is shorter and creakier, while Japanese speakers' /n/ is as long as in onset. In addition, English speakers' vowels in /Vl#/ context are more velarized than vowels in /V#l/ context, whereas Japanese speakers' vowels in /Vl#/ context are less /l/-colored. English speakers produced initial /t/ and /k/ with much longer VOT than in /st/, /sk/ conditions, but because Japanese voiceless stops are weakly aspirated, Japanese speakers /t/ and /k/ not significantly different in VOT between the two contexts, leading potentially to syllable misparsing by English listeners

The role of the tongue back on contrasting voicing properties of English coda consonants: Evidence from an ultrasound imaging technique

This study explores how voicing properties of stop consonants at the coda of a syllable are reflected in the articulation of the tongue back in American English. The association between the laryngeal control of the voicing property of consonants and the positioning of the tongue back has been increasingly reported (e.g., Ahn, 2018; Coretta, 2020). A recent study (Coretta, 2020) reported that longer vowel duration indicating the following voiced stop consonant corresponds to greater tongue root advancement at the offset of the vowel in Italian and Polish. Since the vowel with a following voiced stop consonant has a longer duration than that with a voiceless stop consonant, the later offset of TB movement should be correlated with the offset of vocal folds vibration in American English as well. The preliminary result suggests that the later offset of TB advancement is positively correlated with the longer vowel duration of voiced consonants at the coda of a syllable; therefore, contrasting voicing property of coda consonants in English is phonological and phonetically evidenced in the articulation of the tongue back. Articulatory data from ultrasound images of the tongue from three native speakers of American English will be presented.

Validating acoustic predictors of sentence intelligibility using a racially diverse corpus

The goal of the present work is to validate a set of widely used acoustic measures that have been found to predict talker intelligibility using a new, racially diverse corpus of native speakers of American English. Previous work by Bradlow et al (1996, Speech Communication) predicted sentence intelligibility on a set of 20 demographically unspecified talkers from the Midwest, where they found changes in F0 and larger vowel spaces to be associated with higher sentence intelligibility. Here, we examine whether these same acoustic features can be generalized to a more racially diverse population of talkers, of which only 9 are white and non-Latine. The current corpus comprises 28 talkers, where each talker produced 60 sentences. Here, we focus on a core set of sentences, 10 Havard/IEEE and 10 BEL sentences, that all 28 talkers produced. Key acoustic features such as F0, speaking rate, and first and second formants of vowels, were extracted to associate with intelligibility measurements for these individuals. Intelligibility measures are taken from a previous study (Tripp et al., 2022, J. Acoust. Soc. Am.). Results from the present work are important in generalizing which acoustic features impact intelligibility in a racially diverse corpus.