Non-native Accents Research Articles

The Way They Speak: A Social Psychological Perspective on the Stigma of Nonnative Accents in Communication

The present review seeks to bridge research on accents, stigma, and communication by examining the empirical literature on nonnative accents, considering the perspectives of both speakers and listeners. The authors suggest that an accent, or one’s manner of pronunciation, differs from other types of stigma. They consider the role of communicative processes in the manner in which accents influence people and identify social and contextual factors related to accents that affect the speaker, the listener, and the interaction between them. The authors propose a framework of stigma of accents and possible future avenues of research to examine the social psychological and communicative effects of accents. They also discuss implications for stigma of other types of accents (e.g., other native, regional, and ethnic). Understanding how stigma of accents and communication affect each other provides a new theoretical approach to studying this type of stigma and can eventually lead to interventions.

Speaking With a Nonnative Accent: Perceptions of Bias, Communication Difficulties, and Belonging in the United States

Whereas past research on nonnative accents has focused on the attitudes and perceptions of listeners, the current research explores the experiences of speakers with nonnative accents. Two studies investigated the role of nonnative accents and their strength in perceptions of stigmatization and discrimination, problems in communication, and feelings of social belonging. Study 1 demonstrated that individuals with nonnative accents experienced two different, but related facets of stigmatization: expectations of stigmatization and problems in communication. Study 2 extended this research by examining the effects of the experience of stigma and communication problems associated with nonnative accents on social belonging in the United States The results showed that speaking with a nonnative accent, but not a regional native accent, was significantly associated with feeling less belonging, and this difference was mediated by perceived problems in communicating.

Development of Phonological Constancy

Efficient word recognition depends on detecting critical phonetic differences among similar-sounding words, or sensitivity to phonological distinctiveness, an ability evident at 19 months of age but unreliable at 14 to 15 months of age. However, little is known about phonological constancy, the equally crucial ability to recognize a word's identity across natural phonetic variations, such as those in cross-dialect pronunciation differences. We show that 15- and 19-month-old children recognize familiar words spoken in their native dialect, but that only the older children recognize familiar words in a dissimilar nonnative dialect, providing evidence for emergence of phonological constancy by 19 months. These results are compatible with a perceptual-attunement account of developmental change in early word recognition, but not with statistical-learning or phonological accounts. Thus, the complementary skills of phonological constancy and distinctiveness both appear at around 19 months of age, together providing the child with a fundamental insight that permits rapid vocabulary growth and later reading acquisition.

Indexical perception in Chinese: The influence of first‐language (L1) Taiwanese on second‐language (L2) Mandarin.

A pilot study on indexical perception in Chinese hypothesized that L1 Taiwanese speakers’ L2 Mandarin production could be detected as having a nonnative accent. If the nonnative accent was detectable, what phonetic properties (the phonetics of consonants or vowels, or the prosody) did L1 Taiwanese speakers’ Mandarin exhibit such that these attributes entailed indexical information? Additionally, the study argued that L1 Mandarin speakers would show higher sensitivity to the nonnative accent than L1 Taiwanese speakers. The results have shown that only in sentence production, the sentences being either low‐pass filtered or unfiltered, could the L1 Taiwanese talkers be possibly indexed correctly. It was also found that the listeners perceived more accurately when they encountered retroflex stimuli in monosyllabic word condition. Based on these findings, it was concluded that the prosody and the retroflex consonants seemed to reveal much of the talker’s L1 information. However, concerning the hypothesis that L1 Mandarin speakers were more sensitive to the nonnative accent, the results did not support this. The findings in this pilot study are preliminary, given the fact that the corpus was small. A bigger‐scale study is being carried out to gain more insights into indexical perception in Chinese.

Infant dialect discrimination.

To understand speech, infants must differentiate between phonetic changes that are linguistically contrastive and those that are not. Research has shown that infants are very sensitive to fine-grained differences in speech sounds that differentiate words in their own or another language. However, little is known about infants' ability to discriminate phonetic differences associated with different dialects of their native language. Using a visual habituation procedure, 7-, 11-, 18-, 24-, and 30-month olds were tested on their ability to discriminate two linguistically equivalent variants of the diphthong (/aI/)—one produced in their native dialect (North Midland American English) versus one produced in a non-native dialect (Southern American English). Seven-month olds discriminated the variants but 11-month olds did not. Infants from 18–30 months of age did not demonstrate statistically significant discrimination, but they did show a trend toward discrimination with increasing age. The findings suggest that dialect discrimination follows a U-shaped course of development. Because 11-month olds demonstrated the poorest dialect discrimination performance, we are currently assessing their ability to discriminate linguistically different speech sounds varying in degree of acoustic similarity. Preliminary findings suggest that both language experience and acoustic differences may influence infants' discrimination of phonetic contrasts in the native language. [Work supported by NIH-NIDCD Grant (R01DC006235), an IUPUI Educational Enhancement Grant, and grants from the IUPUI UROP and SROP Programs.]

Comprehension of familiar and unfamiliar native accents under adverse listening conditions.

This study aimed to determine the relative processing cost associated with comprehension of an unfamiliar native accent under adverse listening conditions. Two sentence verification experiments were conducted in which listeners heard sentences at various signal-to-noise ratios. In Experiment 1, these sentences were spoken in a familiar or an unfamiliar native accent or in two familiar native accents. In Experiment 2, they were spoken in a familiar or unfamiliar native accent or in a nonnative accent. The results indicated that the differences between the native accents influenced the speed of language processing under adverse listening conditions and that this processing speed was modulated by the relative familiarity of the listener with the native accent. Furthermore, the results showed that the processing cost associated with the nonnative accent was larger than for the unfamiliar native accent.

Segmental and supra-segmental contributions to cross-language speech intelligibility

Non-native accents affect speech recognition in noise, and previous work has shown that intelligibility is modulated by listener-talker interaction; a matched linguistic background between the two seems to maximise intelligibility. The present study examined the contribution of segmental and supra-segmental cues, as well as how the degree of L2 experience affects non-native speech perception. A group of monolingual native English listeners and two groups of French native listeners with different amounts of L2 experience were presented with English sentences produced by native and non-native (French) speakers in noise. The stimuli were digitally processed to swap the pitch and segment durations between recordings of the same sentences produced by different speakers (e.g., imposing a French-accented prosody onto recordings made from English speakers). The results revealed that English listeners were more accurate at recognizing speech with English segments but were little affected by prosody; low proficiency French listeners were more accurate when the speech had both French-accented segments and prosody; and high proficiency French listeners varied in the cues that they used depending on the noise level. The use of segmental and supra-segmental cues thus appears to vary with language experience and listening context.

Experiments on Automatic Recognition of Nonnative Arabic Speech

The automatic recognition of foreign-accented Arabic speech is a challenging task since it involves a large number of nonnative accents. As well, the nonnative speech data available for training are generally insufficient. Moreover, as compared to other languages, the Arabic language has sparked a relatively small number of research efforts. In this paper, we are concerned with the problem of nonnative speech in a speaker independent, large-vocabulary speech recognition system for modern standard Arabic (MSA). We analyze some major differences at the phonetic level in order to determine which phonemes have a significant part in the recognition performance for both native and nonnative speakers. Special attention is given to specific Arabic phonemes. The performance of an HMM-based Arabic speech recognition system is analyzed with respect to speaker gender and its native origin. The West Point modern standard Arabic database from the language data consortium (LDC) and the hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HTK) are used throughout all experiments. Our study shows that the best performance in the overall phoneme recognition is obtained when nonnative speakers are involved in both training and testing phases. This is not the case when a language model and phonetic lattice networks are incorporated in the system. At the phonetic level, the results show that female nonnative speakers perform better than nonnative male speakers, and that emphatic phonemes yield a significant decrease in performance when they are uttered by both male and female nonnative speakers.

The perception of phonemic contrasts in a non-native dialect

This study examined the impact on speech processing of regional phonetic/phonological variation in the listener's native language. The perception of the /e/-/epsilon/ and /o/-/upside down c/ contrasts, produced by standard but not southern French native speakers, was investigated in these two populations. A repetition priming experiment showed that the latter but not the former perceived words such as /epe/ and /epepsilon/ as homophones. In contrast, both groups perceived the two words of /o/-/upside down c/ minimal pairs (/pom/-/p(uspide down c)m/) as being distinct. Thus, standard-French words can be perceived differently depending on the listener's regional accent.

On using units trained on foreign data for improved multiple accent speech recognition

Foreign accented speech recognition systems have to deal with the acoustic realization of sounds produced by non-native speakers that does not always match with native speech models. As the standard native speech modeling alone is generally not adequate, it is usually extended with models of phonemes estimated from speech data of foreign languages, and often complemented with extra pronunciation variants. In this paper, the focus is set on the speech recognition of multiple non-native accents. The speech corpus used was recorded from speakers originated from 24 different countries. The introduction of models of phonemes of the target language adapted on foreign speech data is presented and detailed. For the recognition of non-native speech comprising multiple foreign accents, this approach provides better performance than the introduction of standard foreign units. The selection of the most frequent acoustic variants for each phoneme is also discussed as this method makes recognition results more homogenous across speaker language groups. Furthermore, the adaptation of the acoustic models on non-native speech data is studied. Results show that detailed models, which include the modeling of extra pronunciation variants through acoustic units estimated on foreign data, benefit more from the task and accent adaptation process than baseline standard models used for native speech recognition. In addition, experiments show that an adaptation of the acoustic models on a limited set of foreign accents provides speech recognition performance improvements even on foreign accents absent from the adaptation data.

Vowel perception: Effects of non-native language vs. non-native dialect

Three groups of listeners identified the vowel in CV and VC syllables produced by an American English talker. The listeners were (a) native speakers of American English, (b) native speakers of Australian English (different dialect), and (c) native speakers of Dutch (different language). The syllables were embedded in multispeaker babble at three signal-to-noise ratios (0 dB, 8 dB, and 16 dB). The identification performance of native listeners was significantly better than that of listeners with another language but did not significantly differ from the performance of listeners with another dialect. Dialect differences did however affect the type of perceptual confusions which listeners made; in particular, the Australian listeners’ judgements of vowel tenseness were more variable than the American listeners’ judgements, which may be ascribed to cross-dialectal differences in this vocalic feature. Although listening difficulty can result when speech input mismatches the native dialect in terms of the precise cues for and boundaries of phonetic categories, the difficulty is very much less than that which arises when speech input mismatches the native language in terms of the repertoire of phonemic categories available.

Portuguese and English intonation in contrast

The current surge of interest in studies on intonation, in areas ranging from L2 teaching to child language acquisition, finally mirrors the crucial role played by intonation in the whole of human communication through language. In studies on non-native linguistic proficiency, a ‘foreign intonation’ appears as the last stronghold of a non-native accent, consisting in the use, in a second language, of intonation patterns belonging to the first language of the learner. The use of a foreign intonation does not, however, only characterise an accent. Intonation patterns convey specific meanings in each language, and the correspondence between these meanings and specific pitch patterns is often as arbitrary as the correspondence between words and their meanings. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to provide a basis for the comparison of the intonation patterns of (European) Portuguese and (British) English, highlighting potential areas of difficulty for speakers of each of these languages in learning the other, and the reasons for these difficulties. Second, to give support to the view, current in L2 studies, that the learning of L2 intonation cannot be taken for granted, if breakdown in native to non-native spoken communication is to be avoided.

The Effects of Nonnative Accents on Listening Comprehension: Implications for ESL Assessment

Tests of ESL listening comprehension attempt to sample from language that reflects what examinees will be expected to comprehend in the relevant contexts, but most listening tests do not address the fact that accented English is a normal part of ESL listening. To begin to explore the issue, this study examined the extent to which native-English-speaking and ESL listeners performed better on a test when the speaker shared their native language. Four groups of 100 listeners, whose native languages were Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and standard American English, heard brief lectures presented in English by speakers with different native languages and answered questions based on the lectures. The results indicated that both native and nonnative listeners scored significantly lower on listening comprehension tests when they listened to nonnative speakers of English, native speakers of Spanish scored significantly higher when listening to Spanish-accented speech, and native speakers of Chinese scored significantly lower when listening to speakers who shared their native language.

Teaching the pronunciation of Japanese double-mora phonemes using speech recognition technology

A CALL (computer-aided language learning) system was developed for teaching the pronunciation of Japanese double-mora phonemes to non-native speakers of Japanese. Double-mora vowels and single-mora vowels are spectrally almost identical but their phone durations differ significantly. Similar conditions exist between moraic nasals and non-moraic nasals, and between moraic and non-moraic obstruents. Our CALL system asks the learner to read minimal pairs. Speech recognition technology is used to measure the durations of each phone and the system tells the learner the likelihood of native speakers understanding the learner's utterance as the learner intended. These intelligibility scores are based on perception experiments where native speakers judged the confusability of minimal pairs containing phones with various synthesized durations. The system then instructs the learner to either shorten or lengthen his pronunciation. The learner can terminate training when his communicative performance has met his expectations. For instance, when a learner hits a learning plateau, intelligibility indices can help him decide whether further learning effort is worthwhile. Given that most adult learners can never attain complete nativeness, it is of practical use to be told when non-native accents cannot be removed further. Learning experiments show that learners quickly capture the relevant duration cues.

Perception of suprasegmental structure in a non-native dialect

Two experiments examined the processing of Tokyo Japanese pitch-accent distinctions by native speakers of Japanese from two accentless-variety areas. In both experiments, listeners were presented with Tokyo Japanese speech materials used in an earlier study with Tokyo Japanese listeners, who clearly exploited the pitch-accent information in spoken-word recognition. In the first experiment, listeners judged from which of two words, differing in accentual structure, isolated syllables had been extracted. Both new groups were, overall, as successful at this task as Tokyo Japanese speakers had been, but their response patterns differed from those of the Tokyo Japanese, for instance in that a bias towards H judgments in the Tokyo Japanese responses was weakened in the present groups' responses. In a second experiment, listeners heard word fragments and guessed what the words were; in this task, the speakers from accentless areas again performed significantly above chance, but their responses showed less sensitivity to the information in the input, and greater bias towards vocabulary distribution frequencies, than had been observed with the Tokyo Japanese listeners. The results suggest that experience with a local accentless dialect affects the processing of accent for word recognition in Tokyo Japanese, even for listeners with extensive exposure to Tokyo Japanese.

Foreign Accent, Comprehensibility, and Intelligibility in the Speech of Second Language Learners

One of the chief goals of most second language learners is to be understood in their second language by a wide range of interlocutors in a variety of contexts. Although a nonnative accent can sometimes interfere with this goal, prior to the publication of this study, second language researchers and teachers alike were aware that an accent itself does not necessarily act as a communicative barrier. Nonetheless, there had been very little empirical investigation of how the presence of a nonnative accent affects intelligibility, and the notions of “heavy accent” and “low intelligibility” had often been confounded. Some of the key findings of the study—that even heavily accented speech is sometimes perfectly intelligible and that prosodic errors appear to be a more potent force in the loss of intelligibility than phonetic errors—added support to some common, but weakly substantiated beliefs. The study also provided a framework for a program of research to evaluate the ways in which such factors as intelligibility and comprehensibility are related to a number of other dimensions. The authors have extended and replicated the work begun in this study to include learners representing other L1 backgrounds (Cantonese, Japanese, Polish, Spanish) and different levels of learner proficiency, as well as other discourse types (Derwing & Munro, 1997; Munro & Derwing, 1995). Further support for the notion that accent itself should be regarded as a secondary concern was obtained in a study of processing difficulty (Munro & Derwing, 1995), which revealed that nonnative utterances tend to require more time to process than native‐produced speech, but failed to indicate a relationship between strength of accent and processing time.The approach to L2 speech evaluation used in this study has also proved useful in investigations of the benefits of different methods of teaching of pronunciation to ESL learners. In particular, it is now clear that learner assessments are best carried out with attention to the multidimensional nature of L2 speech, rather than with a simple focus on global accentedness. It has been shown, for instance, that some pedagogical methods may be effective in improving intelligibility while others may have an effect only on accentedness (Derwing, Munro, & Wiebe,1998).

Communication

The widespread use of the Daniel Jone's English Pronouncing Dictionary in the commonwealth countries seem to imply that British Received Pronunciation (BRP) is the model of English prescribed for the learners of English in these countries. To my mind, this form of pronunciation represents an "unrealistic" objective and one that is perhaps "undesirable". I consider RP as the "normative model" that limits itself to the consideration of communicative intentions attributed to the speaker only. I should like to argue in favour of a communicative model which goes by the measure of success with which a transaction between two participants is negotiated. In the second part, the paper discusses the importance of paraphonological features such as "plesasant" voice quality for communicative purposes. It is suggested that perhaps a course of Spoken English based on "diction" and "dramatics" rather than on the exact phonetic quality of sounds will prove to be more effective. Phonetic correlates of what is called "pleasant" voice quality have also been discussed.

Educational phonetics

The first Educational Phonetics section of JIPA shows a preoccupation with the theory, practice and results of language teaching. Clearly this area of professional interest will continue to occupy the interests of phoneticians as it has done ever since the Association was founded. Windsor Lewis's note addresses the perennial question of which phonological varieties of English should be set up as models for the non-native learner of English, while Jenner's article offers an alternative approach to the description of non-native accents which may suggest a novel basis for the organisation of pronunciation teaching. Contributions have been promised in other areas of professional interest, but did not materialise in time to be incorporated in this issue.

THE EFFECT OF FAMILIARITY ON THE COMPREHENSIBILITY OF NONNATIVE SPEECH

This study reports on data collected to investigate the effect of various types of familiarity on native speaker comprehension of nonnative speaker speech. We discuss the effects of familiarity with topic, familiarity with nonnative speech in general, familiarity with a nonnative accent in particular, and familiarity with a particular nonnative. Our results indicate that while the most important of these variables is familiarity with topic, the other variables all have a facilitating effect on comprehension. We discuss these findings as they relate to more general notions of comprehensibility.We also say of some people that they are transparent to us. It is, however, important as regards this observation that one human being can be a complete enigma to another. We learn this when we come into a strange country with entirely strange traditions; and, what is more, even given a mastery of the country's language. We do not understand the people. If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.—Ludwig Wittgenstein

The vowel system in educated Panjabi-speakers' English

One of the major non-native accents of English is what for convenience of reference we shall call Panjabi English (PE)—the English spoken by educated Panjabi speakers (for Panjabi see Gill & Gleason, 1962). This accent has assumed a certain importance over the last two decades because of the settlement of a large number of Panjabi speakers from India and Pakistan in various English-speaking countries, chiefly Britain. Nevertheless, it has not attracted much attention from the linguist. One possible reason for this neglect is that many linguists hold the view that there can be no ‘system’ in a non-native variety of a language, which, they may contend, is the result of an attempt to imitate, with varying degrees of inefficiency, some native variety of the language (though now at several generations' remove).