Non-native Accents Research Articles

A randomised controlled pilot trial of the influence of non-native English accents on examiners\u2019 scores in OSCEs

BackgroundObjective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) are important aspects of assessment in medical education. There is anecdotal evidence suggesting that students with non-native English accents (NNEA) may be subjected to unconscious bias. It is imperative to minimise the examiners’ bias so that the difference in the scores reflects students’ clinical competence. Research shows NNEAs can cause stereotyping, often leading to the speaker being negatively judged. However, no medical education study has looked at the influence of NNEAs in assessment.MethodsThis is a randomized, single-blinded controlled trial. Four videos of one mock OSCE station were produced. A professional actor played a medical student. Two near identical scripts were prepared. Two videos showed the actor speaking with an Indian accent and two videos showed the actor speaking without the accent in either script. Forty-two OSCE examiners in the United Kingdom (UK) were recruited and randomly assigned to two groups. They watched two videos online, each with either script, each with a different script. One video with a NNEA and one video was without. Checklist item scores were analysed with descriptive statistics and non-parametric independent samples median test. Global scores were analysed with descriptive statistics and Mann-Whitney test.ResultsThirty-two examiners completed the study. The average scores for the checklist items (41.6 points) did not change when the accent variable was changed. Independent samples median test showed no statistically significant relationship between the accent and the scores (p = 0.787). For the global scores received by the videos with the NNEA, there were one less ‘Good’ grade and one more ‘Fail’ grade compared to those without the NNEA. Mann-Whitney test on global score showed lower scores for videos with NNEA (p = 0.661).ConclusionsExaminers were not biased either positively or negatively towards NNEAs when providing checklist or global scores. Further study is required to validate the findings of this study. More discussion is warranted to consider how the accent should be considered in current medical education assessment.RegistrationTrial registration completed trial, ID: ISRCTN17360102, Retrospectively registered on 15/04/2020.

How Nonnative Speakers Experience Conflict at Work: The Influence of Stereotype Threat

The trend towards globalization increases the likelihood that organizations will employ persons with nonnative accents. Many people with nonnative accents are aware that they sound different, but for the most part, their experiences have been largely ignored in organizational research. Our research begins to rectify this omission by examining how nonnative speakers think, act and perceive the results of, conflict situations. We investigate the experiences of nonnative speakers in three studies, in which we examine 1) whether nonnative speakers experience stereotype threat in workplace conflict situations with native speakers, 2) whether stereotype threat is associated with certain conflict managing behaviors (e.g. yielding and avoiding), and 3) the relationship between stereotype threat, satisfaction with conflict outcomes and processes, and objective conflict outcomes. Findings suggest that nonnative speakers experience stereotype threat when interacting with native speakers in conflict situations and the experience of stereotype threat can lead to more passive conflict behaviors. Stereotype threat was also associated with less satisfaction with conflict outcomes and goal-attainment as well as lower objective conflict outcomes. Theoretical and practical implications of these results as well as directions for future research are discussed.

The Impact of Non-Native English on Omissions in Simultaneous Interpreting

Omission is a strategy or technique in interpreting, whether it is made for pragmatic reasons or processing capacity reasons. Following a review of the approaches to omission, this study sets out to explore the impact of a strong, non-native English accent on omission, if any. An experiment has been carried out on senior interpreting students, described below in detail to seek the relation between accent and omission. Moreover, the self-perceptions of interpreting students regarding the speech and their own performance obtained through post-experiment questionnaires and interviews will be discussed. In order to answer the research questions asked below, senior interpreting students’ simultaneous interpreting performances of identical texts read with and without a strong non-native English will be compared. After the student performances are analysed with respect to omission, the data will be backed by post-experiment questionnaires and interviews. The other research question is on the types of omissions. Thus, the study will dwell on both whether omissions are made, and if yes, why they are made. The conclusions are hoped to shed light on the use of the strategy of omission in simultaneous interpreting by interpreting students in the case of a strong, non-native accent and to have pedagogical implications besides practical ones.

Comparative Acoustic Analyses of L2 English: The Search for Systematic Variation

Background/Aims: Previous research has shown that exposure to multiple foreign accents facilitates adaptation to an untrained novel accent. One explanation is that L2 speech varies systematically such that there are commonalities in the productions of nonnative speakers, regardless of their language background. Methods: A systematic acoustic comparison was conducted between 3 native English speakers and 6 nonnative accents. Voice onset time, unstressed vowel duration, and formant values of stressed and unstressed vowels were analyzed, comparing each nonnative accent to the native English talkers. A subsequent perception experiment tests what effect training on regionally accented voices has on the participant’s comprehension of nonnative accented speech to investigate the importance of within-speaker variation on attunement and generalization. Results: Data for each measure show substantial variability across speakers, reflecting phonetic transfer from individual L1s, as well as substantial inconsistency and variability in pronunciation, rather than commonalities in their productions. Training on native English varieties did not improve participants’ accuracy in understanding nonnative speech. Conclusion: These findings are more consistent with a hypothesis of accent attune­ment wherein listeners track general patterns of nonnative speech rather than relying on overlapping acoustic signals between speakers.

Accent bias: A barrier to Black African-born nurses seeking managerial and faculty positions in the United States.

The purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions of Black African-born nurses (BABN) with non-native accents regarding their nursing career advancement in the United States. Data were collected using individual interviews. Fifteen nurses originally from three sub-Saharan African countries were included in the study. The findings were reported under six themes: perceived low level of intelligence, not suitable to lead, making fun of/belittling, prejudging without evidence, downgrading, and accent modification. The finding indicated that participants believed that their race and accent influenced their professional nursing opportunities. These results are relevant to BABNs, nurse educators, and healthcare organization leaders. BABNs are capable of participating in nursing leadership and education despite their non-native accent.

The Effect of Listeners’ Experience on Comprehensibility and Accentedness of Non-native Korean Speech -Focus on Arabic-accented speech-

The main purpose of this paper is to examine how listeners’ experience (the extent of exposure to the non-native accented speech or the familiarity with the non-native accent) influences the judgments of Non-native Korean Speech (NNKS), specifically Arabic-accented speech of Korean. Thirty-four native Korean language speakers were selected as listeners and were asked to rate Arabic-accented Korean speech of eight native Arabic speakers in terms of comprehensibility and accentedness. Half of the group was experienced with the Arabic language, and the other half was not, and only ten of them had experienced the Arabic language for a period of one year or more. As a result, the experienced group showed higher ratings in terms of comprehensibility, suggesting that the experience with non-native accent plays an important role in judging how easy to understand NNKS. The listeners showed significant differences in judging accentedness based on the length of their experience, in which the listeners with long experience showed higher sensitivity toward the degree of non-native accent. However, no significant difference was noticed in terms of comprehensibility or accentedness based on the listener’s cognition of his familiarity with Arabic-accented speech.

Rapid adaptation to fully intelligible nonnative-accented speech reduces listening effort.

In noisy settings or when listening to an unfamiliar talker or accent, it can be difficult to understand spoken language. This difficulty typically results in reductions in speech intelligibility, but may also increase the effort necessary to process the speech even when intelligibility is unaffected. In this study, we used a dual-task paradigm and pupillometry to assess the cognitive costs associated with processing fully intelligible accented speech, predicting that rapid perceptual adaptation to an accent would result in decreased listening effort over time. The behavioural and physiological paradigms provided converging evidence that listeners expend greater effort when processing nonnative- relative to native-accented speech, and both experiments also revealed an overall reduction in listening effort over the course of the experiment. Only the pupillometry experiment, however, revealed greater adaptation to nonnative- relative to native-accented speech. An exploratory analysis of the dual-task data that attempted to minimise practice effects revealed weak evidence for greater adaptation to the nonnative accent. These results suggest that even when speech is fully intelligible, resolving deviations between the acoustic input and stored lexical representations incurs a processing cost, and adaptation may attenuate this cost.

Non-native speaker pause patterns closely correspond to those of native speakers at different speech rates.

When speaking a foreign language, non-native speakers can typically be readily identified by their accents. But which aspects of the speech signal determine such accents? Speech pauses occur in all languages but may nonetheless vary in different languages with regard to their duration, number or positions in the speech stream, and therefore are one potential contributor to foreign speech production. The aim of this study was therefore to investigate whether non-native speakers pause ‘with a foreign accent’. We recorded native English speakers and non-native speakers of German or Serbo-Croatian with excellent English reading out an English text at three different speech rates, and analyzed their vocal output in terms of number, duration and location of pauses. Overall, all non-native speakers were identified by native raters as having non-native accents, but native and non-native speakers made pauses that were similarly long, and had similar ratios of pause time compared to total speaking time. Furthermore, all speakers changed their pausing behavior similarly at different speech rates. The only clear difference between native and non-native speakers was that the latter made more pauses than the native speakers. Thus, overall, pause patterns contributed little to the acoustic characteristics of speakers’ non-native accents, when reading aloud. Non-native pause patterns might be acquired more easily than other aspects of pronunciation because pauses are perceptually salient and producing pauses is easy. Alternatively, general cognitive processing mechanisms such as attention, planning or memory may constrain pausing behavior, allowing speakers to transfer their native pause patterns to a second language without significant deviation. We conclude that pauses make a relatively minor contribution to the acoustic characteristics of non-native accents.

Speech perception in a second language: Hearing is believing-seeing is not.

This study examined the effects of the speaker's face and accent on second language (L2) speech perception. Forty-two Chinese speakers of English immersed in the L2 environment were instructed to perform a cross-modal semantic judgement task. They saw an Asian or Caucasian face on the screen and heard word pairs in L2 in a native English accent or a Chinese accent, and were asked to judge whether the word pairs were related to each other in meaning or not. Results showed that for words presented in the native accent, there was a semantic effect in both reaction time and accuracy, irrespective of the face shown. For words presented in the non-native accent, the RT data showed a semantic effect, whereas the accuracy revealed a reversed semantic effect. The speed-accuracy trade-off suggests a relatively weak semantic effect. These patterns were not modulated by the faces accompanying the word pairs. These results suggest that the cue of accent plays an important role during bilinguals' speech perception in L2, such that non-native accent hampers speech perception, even when it matches bilinguals' first language. In contrast, bilinguals do not seem to depend on the social indexical cue of the face when it is not reliable. The present findings hold implications for the Bilingual Model of Lexical Access (BIMOLA) of bilingual speech perception and the monolingual models of social speech perception.

Thai hotel undergraduate interns’ awareness and attitudes towards English as a lingua franca

The study examines twenty-eight Thai undergraduate hotel interns’ attitudes towards the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) in terms of its varieties of spoken English. Drawing upon the questionnaire, semi-structured interview, and verbal-guise test based on the eleven recorded voices whose accents obtained were from native and non-native speakers, the findings reveal that the students reflected the most positive attitudes towards American and Hong Kong accents while the Korean one was rated rather negatively. However, the students were well aware of the lingua franca status of their spoken English; and thus, the non-native accents were tentatively accepted. This study suggests that Thai leaners’ awareness and positive attitude towards varieties of English must be promoted in both English classes and on-the-job training. English teachers and trainers of hotel staff should also be aware of the significance of exposure to accents and introduce undergraduate interns to varieties of English in order to enhance mutual intelligibility for effective ELF communication at work.

Word stress representations are language-specific: Evidence from event-related brain potentials.

Understanding speech at the basic levels entails the simultaneous and independent processing of phonemic and prosodic features. While it is well-established that phoneme perception relies on language-specific long-term traces, it is unclear if the processing of prosodic features similarly involves language-specific representations. In the present study, we investigated the processing of a specific prosodic feature, word stress, using the method of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) employing a cross-linguistic approach. Hungarian participants heard disyllabic pseudowords stressed either on the first (legal stress) or on the second (illegal stress) syllable, pronounced either by a Hungarian or a German speaker. Results obtained using a data-driven ERP analysis methodology showed that all pseudowords in the deviant position elicited an Early Differentiating Negativity and a Mismatch Negativity component, except for the Hungarian pseudowords stressed on the first syllable. This suggests that Hungarian listeners did not process the native legal stress pattern as deviant, but the same stress pattern with a nonnative accent was processed as deviant. This implies that the processing of word stress was based on language-specific long-term memory traces.

Building Cultural Bridges through Social Media Networks: A Case Study

An English teacher uses Skype to connect his high school students in an Indian village with international teachers to help them interact and converse with them in English. Each international teacher interacts with the students in English once for 40 minutes. The teacher does that daily, and each day an international guest teacher is from a different country. The aims of this study are to report the effects of this kind of intercultural exchange on students’ English language skill development and cultural and global awareness. Results showed many benefits for the students: Listening and speaking skill enhancement, getting used to different native and non-native accents, improved pronunciation, and learning new vocabulary and grammatical structures. The students also learn names of countries, their location, flags, currency, cities, people, and exchange information and pictures about the local and target cultures. They learn about the foreign country’s educational system, history, antiquities, food, art, traditions, and costumes. They are taken on virtual field trips to some historical places and museums. They learn about natural phenomena such as the northern lights. Sometimes they receive books, T-shirts and pens as gifts from foreign teachers. Shortcomings of such intercultural exchange and suggestions for improvement are given.

Speech-Language Pathologists' Perceptions of Nonnative Accent: A Pilot Study

Purpose Considering the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association's (ASHA) global influence and continued emphasis on heightening multicultural receptivity, a major consideration for ASHA is to cultivate cultural sensitivity and competence in its largely female (95.30%), monolingual (93.46%), and White (92.10%) workforce. ASHA's 32-year transition from no formal multicultural education to mandatory multicultural education infusion provokes to enquire whether multicultural education in speech-language pathologists (SLPs) has modified SLPs' perceptions toward multicultural issues. In this article, we explored an aspect of such sensitivity. We want to know whether there exists a linear relationship between SLPs' age, as an index of their exposure to formal multicultural education, and SLPs' bias toward nonnative accent, as an index of their multicultural sensitivity. Method Two hundred sixty-eight SLP ASHA members completed a web-based pilot survey testing whether SLPs made biased associations based on personality traits, sociocultural factors, professional attire, and physical appearance of persons with nonnative accent and whether the SLPs thought they had an accent. Logistic regression tested whether age predicts explicit biased associations for these five outcomes. Results ASHA SLPs made biased associations with accent for all outcomes, but age only predicted the likelihood of explicit accent-based biases for physical appearance. The relationship was curvilinear, with 40- to 45-year-olds making the most biased associations and older SLPs making progressively fewer biased associations. Conclusion Clearly, the specific psychosocial attributes associated with perception of nonnative accent need to be explored from a dynamical systems perspective to discover potential variables that might directly or indirectly influence accent perception and potential biases.

Modern Notions of Accent-ism: Findings, Conceptualizations, and Implications for Interventions and Research on Nonnative Accents

Nonnative-accented speakers face prevalent discrimination. The assumption that people freely express negative sentiments toward nonnative speakers has also guided common research methods. However, recent studies did not consistently find downgrading, so that prejudice against nonnative accents might even be questioned at first sight. The present theoretical article will bridge these contradictory findings in three ways: (a) We illustrate that nonnative speakers with foreign accents frequently may not be downgraded in commonly used first-impression and employment scenario paradigms. It appears that relatively controlled responding may be influenced by norms and motivations to respond without prejudice, whereas negative biases emerge in spontaneous responding. (b) We present an integrative view based on knowledge on modern forms of prejudice to develop modern notions of accent-ism, which allow for predictions when accent biases are (not) likely to surface. (c) We conclude with implications for interventions and a tailored research agenda.

Assessing Parkinson's disease severity using speech analysis in non-native speakers

BackgroundSpeech disorder is a common manifestation of Parkinson's disease with two main symptoms, dysprosody and dysphonia. Previous research studying objective measures of speech symptoms involved patients and examiners who were native language speakers. Measures such as cepstral separation difference (CSD) features to quantify dysphonia and dysprosody accurately distinguish the severity of speech impairment. Importantly CSD, together with other speech features, including Mel-frequency coefficients, fundamental-frequency variation, and spectral dynamics, characterize speech intelligibility in PD. However, non-native language speakers transfer phonological rules of their mother language that tamper speech assessment. ObjectivesThis paper explores CSD's capability: first, to quantify dysprosody and dysphonia of non-native language speakers, Parkinson patients and controls, and secondly, to characterize the severity of speech impairment when Parkinson's dysprosody accompanies non-native linguistic dysprosody. MethodsCSD features were extracted from 168 speech samples recorded from 19 healthy controls, 15 rehabilitated and 23 not-rehabilitated Parkinson patients in three different clinical speech tests based on Unified Parkinson's disease rating scale motor-speech examination. Statistical analyses were performed to compare groups using analysis of variance, intraclass correlation, and Guttman correlation coefficient µ2. Random forests were trained to classify the severity of speech impairment using CSD and the other speech features. Feature importance in classification was determined using permutation importance score. ResultsResults showed that the CSD feature describing dysphonia was uninfluenced by non-native accents, strongly correlated with the clinical examination (µ2>0.5), and significantly discriminated between the healthy, rehabilitated, and not-rehabilitated patient groups based on the severity of speech symptoms. However, the feature describing dysprosody did not correlate with the clinical examination but significantly distinguished the groups. The classification model based on random forests and selected features characterized the severity of speech impairment of non-native language speakers with high accuracy. Importantly, the permutation importance score of the CSD feature representing dysphonia was the highest compared to other features. Results showed a strong negative correlation (µ2<-0.5) between L-dopa administration and the CSD features. ConclusionsAlthough non-native accents reduce speech intelligibility, the CSD features can accurately characterize speech impairment, which is not always possible in the clinical examination. Findings support using CSD for monitoring Parkinson's disease.

One of Us: On the Role of Accent and Race in Real-Time In-Group Categorization

In the present research, we investigated the combined role of accent (native vs. nonnative) and race (European native or White vs. nonnative or Black) in real-time in-group categorization among Italian participants. We found that targets presenting mixed cues (i.e., Black persons with a native accent and White persons with a nonnative accent) led to the simultaneous and parallel activation of in-group and out-group representation in the early stage of person perception, showing that both accent and appearance were initially processed. However, later in the process, when accent and appearance did not match, the first played a major role in the participants’ construal of the target as “one of us.” Finally, we examined the role of social identification, beliefs on the importance of language and race, prejudice, social dominance, and contacts with first-generation Italians in the categorization process. Theoretical and applied implications of the findings are discussed.

Perception precedes production in native Mandarin speakers of English

Nonnative accents are commonplace, but why? Ample research shows that perceptual representations of second-language speakers are shaped by their first language. But is production also affected? If perceptual representations perfectly control motor production, then second-language speakers should understand their own speech accurately. To test this, we recorded 48 native Mandarin speakers labeling pictures in English. We then played back their own recorded productions (e.g., “lock”) as they chose one of four pictures (lock, log, shape, and ship). They also heard a paired native English speaker. Words contained contrasts challenging for Mandarin speakers, principally coda voicing (lock, log) and similar-vowel (shape, ship) pairs. Listeners achieved 89% accuracy on both their own productions and native speakers,’ suggesting good matching between perception and production. However, errors were unevenly distributed: Mandarin speakers heard their own voiced codas (log) as voiceless (lock) more often than the reverse (10% vs. 5%, p = 0.002). This mirrors a similar but larger voiceless bias in native-English listeners hearing accented stimuli, suggesting that Mandarin speakers’ coda voicing perception is more nativelike than their production. Ongoing work attempts to differentiate interlanguage intelligibility effects from learning of idiosyncratic speech patterns, and we are exploring which acoustic features predict recognition.Nonnative accents are commonplace, but why? Ample research shows that perceptual representations of second-language speakers are shaped by their first language. But is production also affected? If perceptual representations perfectly control motor production, then second-language speakers should understand their own speech accurately. To test this, we recorded 48 native Mandarin speakers labeling pictures in English. We then played back their own recorded productions (e.g., “lock”) as they chose one of four pictures (lock, log, shape, and ship). They also heard a paired native English speaker. Words contained contrasts challenging for Mandarin speakers, principally coda voicing (lock, log) and similar-vowel (shape, ship) pairs. Listeners achieved 89% accuracy on both their own productions and native speakers,’ suggesting good matching between perception and production. However, errors were unevenly distributed: Mandarin speakers heard their own voiced codas (log) as voiceless (lock) more often than the re...

Using Phonetic Posteriorgram Based Frame Pairing for Segmental Accent Conversion

Accent conversion AC aims to transform non-native utterances to sound as if the speaker had a native accent. This can be achieved by mapping source speech spectra from a native speaker into the acoustic space of the target non-native speaker. In prior work, we proposed an AC approach that matches frames between the two speakers based on their acoustic similarity after compensating for differences in vocal tract length. In this paper, we propose a new approach that matches frames between the two speakers based on their phonetic rather than acoustic similarity. Namely, we map frames from the two speakers into a phonetic posteriorgram using speaker-independent acoustic models trained on native speech. We thoroughly evaluate the approach on a speech corpus containing multiple native and non-native speakers. The proposed algorithm outperforms the prior approach, improving ratings of acoustic quality 22% increase in mean opinion score and native accent 69% preference while retaining the voice quality of the non-native speaker. Furthermore, we show that the approach can be used in the reverse conversion direction, i.e., generating speech with a native speaker's voice quality and a non-native accent. Finally, we show that this approach can be applied to non-parallel training data, achieving the same accent conversion performance.

Nonnative accent and the perceived grammaticality of spoken grammar forms

Abstract Scholars advocate for more classroom attention to be paid to spoken grammar which deviates from commonly taught rules of writing. However, these recommendations have not considered potential barriers that learners may encounter when using spoken grammar with L1 speakers. We investigate one such challenge: the effect of learners’ accents and degree of accentedness on how their use of these forms is subjectively perceived by L1 speakers. Ten non-expert raters rated the grammatical acceptability of four frequent spoken grammar forms, read out by 15 speakers (10 L1 Tagalog, 5 L1 English) rated as having heavy, moderate, or no accents. A one-way ANOVA revealed a significant effect of accent on grammaticality scores. Post-hoc tests showed a strong correlation between accent and perceived grammaticality, with more accented speakers scoring significantly lower on grammaticality. The discussion considers implications for spoken grammar teaching, and future research on the relationship between accent and perceived grammaticality.

The Effect of Use of Native-accent and Non-native Accent Materials on the Iranian EFL Learners’ Listening Comprehension: An EIL Perspective

The Effect of Use of Native-accent and Non-native Accent Materials on the Iranian EFL Learners’ Listening Comprehension: An EIL Perspective