Non-native Accents Research Articles

Women With Mandarin Accent in the Canadian English-Speaking Hiring Context: Can Evaluations of Warmth Undermine Gender Equity?

Although many workers speak with a non-native English accent, our understanding of this phenomenon is limited because prior work predominantly focused on men. This overlooks whether the biases women experience due to their accent manifests differently. To address this omission, we use an intersectional lens to examine how non-native accents associated with more gender-traditional countries may affect women's hiring outcomes. We argue that the bias women with these accents face is subtle due to an association of non-native (vs. native) accents with perceptions of women's warmth (whereas there are no such effects for men) and consequently higher perceptions of hireability. Yet we posit that the indirect effect on hireability occurs within feminine, but not masculine, industries, which ultimately undermines equity by pushing women with these non-native accents into lower pay and prestige occupations. We found support for our hypotheses in three vignette-based experiments conducted in Canada using a Mandarin accent. Managers and decision-makers need to be aware of the insidious bias women with these non-native accents experience because it may not be immediately apparent that an association of accent with higher ratings of warmth may undermine women at work. Additional online materials for this article are available on PWQ's website at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/03616843231165475

Adapting Off-the-Shelf Speech Recognition Systems for Novel Words

Current speech recognition systems with fixed vocabularies have difficulties recognizing Out-of-Vocabulary words (OOVs) such as proper nouns and new words. This leads to misunderstandings or even failures in dialog systems. Ensuring effective speech recognition is crucial for the proper functioning of robot assistants. Non-native accents, new vocabulary, and aging voices can cause malfunctions in a speech recognition system. If this task is not executed correctly, the assistant robot will inevitably produce false or random responses. In this paper, we used a statistical approach based on distance algorithms to improve OOV correction. We developed a post-processing algorithm to be combined with a speech recognition model. In this sense, we compared two distance algorithms: Damerau–Levenshtein and Levenshtein distance. We validated the performance of the two distance algorithms in conjunction with five off-the-shelf speech recognition models. Damerau–Levenshtein, as compared to the Levenshtein distance algorithm, succeeded in minimizing the Word Error Rate (WER) when using the MoroccanFrench test set with five speech recognition systems, namely VOSK API, Google API, Wav2vec2.0, SpeechBrain, and Quartznet pre-trained models. Our post-processing method works regardless of the architecture of the speech recognizer, and its results on our MoroccanFrench test set outperformed the five chosen off-the-shelf speech recognizer systems.

Acoustic convergence of voicing when shadowing an unfamiliar language and a non-native accent

Previous work has established that speakers are able adjust the acoustic properties of their speech in order to mimic their interlocuter or speech model with whom they share a native language (e.g., Pardo, 2013). However, it is less clear whether convergence to accented speech and/or unfamiliar languages is also a possibility. The goal of the present study is to investigate acoustic convergence between two groups of native English speakers (N = 15 in each group) and a speaker of Russian-accented English versus a speaker of Russian. The study consisted of four experimental phases: baseline, exposure, shadowing, and post-test. Participants in both groups shadowed acoustically identical material, although one group was informed that they were hearing Russian-accented English words (ACC-ENG condition), while the second group was told that they were shadowing Russian words (RUS condition). Initial analysis of the VOT durations of participants’ voiceless stops indicated that only participants in the RUS group converged towards the models’ shorter VOT during shadowing, although this convergence did not generalize to participants’ pronunciation of English words during the post-test. Additional data analysis is ongoing. This presentation will also discuss results with respect to their implications for theories of speech accommodation and non-native speech learning.

Exposure to nonnative-accented speech reduces listening effort and improves social judgments of the speaker

Prior research has revealed a native-accent advantage, whereby nonnative-accented speech is more difficult to process than native-accented speech. Nonnative-accented speakers also experience more negative social judgments. In the current study, we asked three questions. First, does exposure to nonnative-accented speech increase speech intelligibility or decrease listening effort, thereby narrowing the native-accent advantage? Second, does lower intelligibility or higher listening effort contribute to listeners’ negative social judgments of speakers? Third and finally, does increased intelligibility or decreased listening effort with exposure to speech bring about more positive social judgments of speakers? To address these questions, normal-hearing adults listened to a block of English sentences with a native accent and a block with nonnative accent. We found that once participants were accustomed to the task, intelligibility was greater for nonnative-accented speech and increased similarly with exposure for both accents. However, listening effort decreased only for nonnative-accented speech, soon reaching the level of native-accented speech. In addition, lower intelligibility and higher listening effort was associated with lower ratings of speaker warmth, speaker competence, and willingness to interact with the speaker. Finally, competence ratings increased over time to a similar extent for both accents, with this relationship fully mediated by intelligibility and listening effort. These results offer insight into how listeners process and judge unfamiliar speakers.

Neurophysiologic Patterns of Semantic Processing of Accented Speech

Perceiving and comprehending speech depends on the intelligibility of the speech signal. Frequently, communication occurs with adverse listening conditions including background noise or reverberation which compromise the intelligibility of the speech signal. Studies focused on the effects of these extrinsic degrading factors on the perception of a message after it has been produced. Fewer studies, however, explored the effect of a non-native accent on speech perception and comprehension ( Anderson-Hsieh et al., 1992 ; Munro & Derwing, 1995 ; van Wijngaarden et al., 2002 ). This study determines the effects of speech from a non-native speaker of English on semantic processing as it occurs in speech perception. Individuals made judgements about semantically congruent or incongruent sentences spoken by native or non-native accented speakers while we assessed processing of semantic information using behavioral and neurophysiological (ERP) responses. Two groups of 12 individuals between 20 and 30 years of age participated in this study. The results revealed a later N400 in response to a non-native accent. N400 effect results indicated that, compared to a native accent, listening to non-native accent increases semantic processing difficulty, even with relevant semantic context. • Non-native accented speech (NNS) has the same effect as noise on the listener. • Lower N400 amplitude shows semantic processing difficulty in non-native speech. • Addition of relevant semantic context does not significantly aid processing.

Pause Length and Differences in Cognitive State Attribution in Native and Non-Native Speakers

Speech pauses between turns of conversations are crucial for assessing conversation partners’ cognitive states, such as their knowledge, confidence and willingness to grant requests; in general, speakers making longer pauses are regarded as less apt and willing. However, it is unclear if the interpretation of pause length is mediated by the accent of interactants, in particular native versus non-native accents. We hypothesized that native listeners are more tolerant towards long pauses made by non-native speakers than those made by native speakers. This is because, in non-native speakers, long pauses might be the result of prolonged cognitive processing when planning an answer in a non-native language rather than of a lack of knowledge, confidence or willingness. Our experiment, in which 100 native Polish-speaking raters rated native and non-native speakers of Polish on their knowledge, confidence and willingness, showed that this hypothesis was confirmed for perceived willingness only; non-native speakers were regarded as equally willing to grant requests, irrespective of their inter-turn pause durations, whereas native speakers making long pauses were regarded as less willing than those making short pauses. For knowledge and confidence, we did not find a mediating effect of accent; both native and non-native speakers were rated as less knowledgeable and confident when making long pauses. One possible reason for the difference between our findings on perceived willingness to grant requests versus perceived knowledge and confidence is that requests might be more socially engaging and more directly relevant for interpersonal cooperative interactions than knowledge that reflects on partners’ competence but not cooperativeness. Overall, our study shows that (non-)native accents can influence which cognitive states are signaled by different pause durations, which may have important implications for intercultural communication settings where topics are negotiated between native and non-native speakers.

Native and Non-Native Accents of English: Different Perceptions of English as a Global Language in a Phonetic Perspective. An Editorial to RiL Special Issue Vol. 20.1 and 20.2.

The text reviews selected current issues related to native and non-native accents of English, including the status of English as a global language, the value of varieties of English and the question of a possible supremacy of one accent over other varieties. The text links theoretical and applied issues addressing the question of which variety should be used in EFL education. Focusing on the phonetic dimension it weights the conflicting reasons given in classic works, such as Kachru’s and McArthur’s to eventually point to novel research programmes as exemplified in other texts included in the special issues of Research in Language, i.e. vol. 20, issues 1 and 2, most of which were inspired by Accents 2021, an annual conference organised by the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics, Institute of English Studies, University of Lodz, Poland.

How Students Perceive the Learning of English as an International Language: A Theoretical and Practical Approach

English is no longer the language belonging to about 375 million native English speakers. It is also an international language spoken by more than a billion of second and foreign language users. The models used to teach English as a second or foreign language have traditionally been mainly native speaker models. However, in the last few years, a large number of researchers have suggested integrating a model of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) into the English classroom because it has several benefits for international communication, since international intelligibility is now the main goal. In this work, a research study has been carried out to analyze how Spanish students of English (B2 level) value some of the main tenets of the ELF model, such as the importance of confidence, intelligibility and the dichotomy native vs. non-native accent while speaking the foreign language.

The impact of mixed-cultural speech on the stereotypical perception of a virtual robot.

Despite the fact that mixed-cultural backgrounds become of increasing importance in our daily life, the representation of multiple cultural backgrounds in one entity is still rare in socially interactive agents (SIAs). This paper's contribution is twofold. First, it provides a survey of research on mixed-cultured SIAs. Second, it presents a study investigating how mixed-cultural speech (in this case, non-native accent) influences how a virtual robot is perceived in terms of personality, warmth, competence and credibility. Participants with English or German respectively as their first language watched a video of a virtual robot speaking in either standard English or German-accented English. It was expected that the German-accented speech would be rated more positively by native German participants as well as elicit the German stereotypes credibility and conscientiousness for both German and English participants. Contrary to the expectations, German participants rated the virtual robot lower in terms of competence and credibility when it spoke with a German accent, whereas English participants perceived the virtual robot with a German accent as more credible compared to the version without an accent. Both the native English and native German listeners classified the virtual robot with a German accent as significantly more neurotic than the virtual robot speaking standard English. This work shows that by solely implementing a non-native accent in a virtual robot, stereotypes are partly transferred. It also shows that the implementation of a non-native accent leads to differences in the perception of the virtual robot.

Neural and cognitive mechanisms of accented speech processing: the role of speaker identity and listener experience

Current everyday communication is a linguistic melting pot. Many learners of English as a second language have a nonnative accent when speaking English. We are also likely to interact with people from different language backgrounds, whose accent may be similar or different from one’s own accent. Although behavioral measures indicate that listeners adapt quickly to nonnative-accented speech, neurocognitive studies have shown distinct neural mechanisms in processing nonnative-accented sentences relative to native-accented sentences. I will present recent behavioral and EEG/ERP experiments that studied how speaker identity and listener experience affect the comprehension of nonnative- and native-accented sentences. Specifically, we studied how listeners’ experience with nonnative-accented speech modulates accented speech comprehension by testing different listeners (young and older adults with little experience with nonnative-accented speech, listeners immersed in nonnative-accented speech, and bilingual (nonnative-accented) listeners). We also examined how faces cuing the speaker’s ethnicity create language expectations, and how these biases impact the neural and cognitive mechanisms associated with the comprehension of nonnative- and native-accented sentences. Implications of the findings will be discussed by integrating neurocognitive theories of language comprehension with linguistic theories on the role of socio-indexical cues in speech comprehension.

Accent Speaks Louder than Ability: Elucidating the Effect of Nonnative Accent on Trust

Nonnative accent often leads to prejudicial judgments. In this paper, we examine the effect of a job candidate’s Mandarin Chinese accent on a hiring manager’s perceptions of trust and the three dimensions of trustworthiness. The results of an online experiment with 179 working adults suggest that speaking with a nonnative accent (vs. no accent) adversely affects hiring decision-makers’ perceptions of trust and the ability dimension of trustworthiness, but not the benevolence and integrity dimensions. We also examined the effects of perspective taking (vs. no perspective taking) on trust and trustworthiness to test its beneficial role in interpersonal evaluations. The findings suggest that perspective taking may significantly mitigate the effect of language-based stigma on people’s judgments, providing evidence-based insights for organizational leaders and HR professionals.

Accent Anxiety: An Exploration of Non-Native Accent as a Source of Speaking Anxiety among English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Students

Speaking anxiety is a form of foreign language anxiety which may reduce students’ willingness to communicate orally. Despite accent being one of the most salient aspects of speech, there has been little research to date on the relationship between non-native accent and speaking anxiety. The purpose of this study is therefore to examine English learners’ perceptions and beliefs about accent, and also to explore the concept of accent anxiety, that is, speaking anxiety arising due to concern about one’s non-native accent. An anonymous online questionnaire was distributed to English students in a French university. The questionnaire sought to gauge the students’ attitudes both towards speaking and accent and gathered qualitative responses about the students’ experiences of accent anxiety and their coping strategies. A thematic analysis was then carried out on the 54 responses. It was found that the majority of the students did not believe attaining a native-sounding accent was essential to language learning and felt that comprehensibility should be the primary objective. However, many of these students nonetheless considered it a personal goal to sound more native-like. Furthermore, most of the students had at some point in their learning felt embarrassed or worried about their accents, with the two primary causes being fear of negative evaluation from their peers and fear of future communication issues. It was concluded that concern over how non-native accents sound is a potential source of speaking anxiety for learners of English. As these students highlighted the classroom as being the main location where this anxiety arises, the study concludes with some suggestions for educators as well as ideas for future research directions.

When A Nonnative Accent Lets You Spot All the Errors: Examining the Syntactic Interlanguage Benefit.

In our continuously globalizing world, cross-cultural and cross-linguistic communications are far from exceptional. A wealth of research has indicated that the processing of nonnative-accented speech can be challenging for native listeners, both at the level of phonology. However, few online studies have examined the underpinnings of accented speech recognition from the perspective of the nonnative listener, even though behavioral studies indicate that accented input may be easier to process for such individuals (i.e., the interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit. The current EEG study first examined the phonological and syntactic analysis of nonnative-accented speech among nonnative listeners. As such, 30 English learners of Spanish listened to syntactically correct and incorrect Spanish sentences produced in native and nonnative-accented Spanish. The violation in the incorrect sentences was caused by errors that are typical (i.e., gender errors; *la color) or atypical (i.e., number errors; *los color) for English learners of Spanish. Results indicated that nonnative listeners elicit a phonological mismatch negativity (PMN) when attending to speech produced by a native Spanish speaker. Furthermore, the nonnative listeners showed a P600 for all grammatical violations, indicating that they repair all errors regardless of their typicality or the accent in which they are produced. Follow-up analyses compared our novel data to the data of native listeners from the methodologically identical precursor study. These analyses showed that native and nonnative listeners exhibit directionally opposite PMN effects; whereas natives exhibited a larger PMN for English-accented Spanish, nonnatives displayed a larger PMN in response to native Spanish utterances (a classic interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit). An additional difference was observed at the syntactic level: Whereas natives repaired only atypical number errors when they were English-accented, nonnative participants exhibited a P600 in response to all English-accented syntactic errors, regardless of their typicality (a syntactic interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit). Altogether, these results suggest that accented speech is not inherently difficult to process; in fact, nonnatives may benefit from the presence of a nonnative accent. Thus, our data provide some of the first electrophysiological evidence supporting the existence of the classic interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit and its novel syntactic counterpart.

Effects of Instructor Accent on Undergraduate Evaluations and Learning at a Catholic College

Catholic institutions of higher education are called to form citizens who fight against injustice, including persistent racial oppression. To do this, Catholic, public, and other private institutions must provide students opportunities to learn about and confront racism (Johnston, 2014). It is important that these institutions confront these issues because they employ faculty and staff who may experience systemic racism and can provide cultural knowledge to aid deconstructing racist ideologies. Undergraduate student evaluations of instructors or faculty, however, indicate discrimination against those perceived as non-white and with non-native English accents. This study focuses on one form of racism at a Catholic liberal arts college: bias against instructors who speak with a non-native English accent. This between-groups experimental study was guided by critical sociolinguistic theory and sociocultural theory to examine patterns in undergraduate engagement with material that varied only by instructor accent. Participants (n=98) completed a pre-assessment, a microlecture (randomized by accent), a post-assessment, and a microlecture evaluation. The study’s theoretical frameworks suggest that students would demonstrate bias against non-white presenters, despite the Catholic context and having no visual cues about the race or ethnicity of the presenter. Pre-and post-assessment results indicated that the microlecture had some limited effects on student learning regardless of instructor accent; however, instructors that were perceived as white had significantly higher ratings in terms of the student belief that they “showed enthusiasm about the subject matter” and that “watching this microlecture improved [their] score on the quiz.” These findings suggest continued work is needed to understand and confront issues of systemic racism in higher education.

How sociolinguistic factors shape children's subjective impressions of teacher quality.

When university students are asked to rate their instructors, their evaluations are often influenced by the demographic characteristics of the instructor-such as the instructor's race, gender, or language background. These influences can manifest in unfair systematic biases against particular groups of teachers and hamper movements to promote diversity in higher education. When and how do these biases develop? Here, we begin to address these questions by examining children's sociolinguistic biases against teachers who speak with different accents. To do this, we presented 5-year-old Canadian English-speaking children with pairs of adult talkers. Children were asked to select "who they'd like to be their teacher" then they rated "how good of a teacher" they thought each talker would be on a 5-point scale. In each trial, one talker spoke in the locally dominant variety of Canadian English, and the other spoke in a different accent. Children strongly preferred Canadian-accented teachers over teachers who spoke with non-native (i.e., French or Dutch) accents, but also demonstrated a preference for Canadian teachers over teachers who spoke with non-local regional accents (i.e., Australian or British). In line with the binary choice data, children rated the Canadian talkers more favourably. The relationship between the gender of the teacher and the gender of the child also impacted ratings. This work demonstrates that even at the onset of formal education, children may already exhibit signs of accent-based biases. We discuss these findings in relation to the growing literature on implicit bias in higher education.

Speaker Accent Modulates the Effects of Orthographic and Phonological Similarity on Auditory Processing by Learners of English.

The cognate effect refers to translation equivalents with similar form between languages—i.e., cognates, such as “band” (English) and “banda” (Spanish)—being processed faster than words with dissimilar forms—such as, “cloud” and “nube.” Substantive literature supports this claim, but is mostly based on orthographic similarity and tested in the visual modality. In a previous study, we found an inhibitory orthographic similarity effect in the auditory modality—i.e., greater orthographic similarity led to slower response times and reduced accuracy. The aim of the present study is to explain this effect. In doing so, we explore the role of the speaker's accent in auditory word recognition and whether native accents lead to a mismatch between the participants' phonological representation and the stimulus. Participants carried out a lexical decision task and a typing task in which they spelled out the word they heard. Words were produced by two speakers: one with a native English accent (Standard American) and the other with a non-native accent matching that of the participants (native Spanish speaker from Spain). We manipulated orthographic and phonological similarity orthogonally and found that accent did have some effect on both response time and accuracy as well as modulating the effects of similarity. Overall, the non-native accent improved performance, but it did not fully explain why high orthographic similarity items show an inhibitory effect in the auditory modality. Theoretical implications and future directions are discussed.

Stress and vowel reduction by Korean Learners of English

Having a foreign accent is unavoidable for late second or foreign language learners. The reason is that physical changes in the brain influence learning a variety of aspects in a new language system (Flege, 1987; Patkowski, 1990). In other words, a well-established first language mediates the acquisition of a second language. The mediation can be called cross-linguistics influence or negative transfer (Sharwood Smith and Kellerma, 1986). In terms of suprasegmental aspects of pronunciation, vowel reduction occurring in stress-timed languages such as English but lacking in syllable-timed languages is noteworthy to understand the cause of nonnative accents. The present work aims to explore patterns of vowel reduction in Korean accented English, with the goal of finding pronunciation issues in the English of Korean learners that might be due to transfer effects from an acoustic-phonetic standpoint. English speech samples from native English and Korean speakers of the Wildcat Corpus were used for data analysis. The vowel qualities, the duration ratios, and formant values of unstressed vowels produced by Korean and English speakers were analyzed. Results show that the Korean speakers tend not to reduce English unstressed vowels, assimilate them into similar vowels in their vowel inventory, and produce them as full vowels.

Examining the context benefit in older adults: A combined behavioral-electrophysiologic word identification study

When listening to degraded speech, listeners can use high-level semantic information to support recognition. The literature contains conflicting findings regarding older listeners' ability to benefit from semantic cues in recognizing speech, relative to younger listeners. Electrophysiologic (EEG) measures of lexical access (N400) often show that semantic context does not facilitate lexical access in older listeners; in contrast, auditory behavioral studies indicate that semantic context improves speech recognition in older listeners as much as or more than in younger listeners. Many behavioral studies of aging and the context benefit have employed signal degradation or alteration, whereas this stimulus manipulation has been absent in the EEG literature, a possible reason for the inconsistencies between studies. Here we compared the context benefit as a function of age and signal type, using EEG combined with behavioral measures. Non-native accent, a common form of signal alteration which many older adults report as a challenge in daily speech recognition, was utilized for testing. The stimuli included English sentences produced by native speakers of English and Spanish, containing target words differing in cloze probability. Listeners performed a word identification task while 32-channel cortical responses were recorded. Results show that older adults’ word identification performance was poorer in the low-predictability and non-native talker conditions than the younger adults', replicating earlier behavioral findings. However, older adults did not show reduction or delay in the average N400 response as compared to younger listeners, suggesting no age-related reduction in predictive processing capability. Potential sources for discrepancies in the prior literature are discussed.

Accents of Russian in Performative Use: Ethnic Styles, Language Attitudes, and Identities of Young Non-native Speakers

The paper deals with the performative use of different ethnic accents by young multilingual speakers of Russian. It aims at revealing the ways ethnic accents are used to challenge existing monolingual bias and reclaim agency opposing ethnic and linguistic prejudices. The study is based on an analysis of videos representing and discussing different nonnative accents of Russian, created both by professional comedians and by amateurs and published on YouTube and TikTok. Metadata and comments on the videos expressing attitudes towards the performance of accents and linguistic stereotypes were also included in the analysis to reveal typical audience reactions. Keywords: youth multilingualism, language ideology, ethnic identity, Russian, migration, comedy, vlogs

Attitudes toward Jordanian Arabic-Accented English among Native and Non-native Speakers of English

This paper explores attitudes toward Jordanian Arabic-accented English among native and non-native speakers of English. Three groups of listeners (native English speakers, Jordanian Arab specialists and non-specialists in English) were asked to rate three groups of speakers (a group of native English speakers and two groups of Jordanian Arabic bilinguals) reading a short story in English on the degree of foreign accentedness, friendliness, pleasantness and clarity. The results showed that the Jordanian Arabic speakers, especially those with a lower level of English, were perceived less favourably than the native speakers. Furthermore, the English native listeners generally had more favourable perceptions than the non-native listeners with regard to the non-native speakers. The degree of foreign-accentedness was highly correlated with attitudes toward non-native speakers, especially among the non-native speakers themselves. The results confirm that a native English accent is preferred over non-native accents.