Non-native Accents Research Articles

L2 English Speakers’ Perception of Their English Accent: An Investigation of European and Asian Attitudes

According to previous studies, Japanese learners of English (JLEs) have a negative perception of their own variety of English along with a strong desire to sound native-like. Language attitudes toward L2 (second language) English accents may affect their active participation in English communication situations. The present study is cross-national and investigates whether other L2 English learners from different L1 (first language) backgrounds negatively perceive their own variety of English and English pronunciation as JLEs do. A total of 290 college students in Austria, Germany, Denmark, Malaysia, China, Japan, and Kazakhstan evaluated their own accent by responding to 10 statements on a 6-point scale. By comparing the responses as percentages and the binomial test, the analysis revealed that the Japanese perceived their accent most negatively, followed by the Chinese, whereas the Europeans, Malaysians, and Kazakhs perceived their accents positively to varying degrees. Among the seven countries, the L1 Danish group perceived their own variety as native-like most and non-native accent least, where the JLEs showed the opposite results. On the other hand, the endorsement for native accent was recognized across the countries. Based on the results, I claim that individual socio-contextual settings could have a critical impact on developing distinct attitudes toward one’s own accent among EFL speakers. 

Using Rational Models to Interpret the Results of Experiments on Accent Adaptation.

Exposure to unfamiliar non-native speech tends to improve comprehension. One hypothesis holds that listeners adapt to non-native-accented speech through distributional learning—by inferring the statistics of the talker's phonetic cues. Models based on this hypothesis provide a good fit to incremental changes after exposure to atypical native speech. These models have, however, not previously been applied to non-native accents, which typically differ from native speech in many dimensions. Motivated by a seeming failure to replicate a well-replicated finding from accent adaptation, we use ideal observers to test whether our results can be understood solely based on the statistics of the relevant cue distributions in the native- and non-native-accented speech. The simple computational model we use for this purpose can be used predictively by other researchers working on similar questions. All code and data are shared.

Social acquisition context matters: Increased neural responses for native but not nonnative taboo words

This study examined whether the context of acquisition of a word influences its visual recognition and subsequent processing. We utilized taboo words, whose meanings are typically acquired socially, to ensure that differences in processing were based on learned social taboo, rather than proficiency. American English-speaking participants made word/non-word decisions on American taboo (native dialect), British taboo (non-native dialect), positive, neutral, and pseudo- words while EEG was recorded. Taboo words were verified as taboo by both American and British English speakers in an independent norming survey. American taboo words showed a more positive amplitude of the Late Positive Complex (LPC), a neural correlate of emotionality and social processing, compared with British taboo words and all other word categories. Moreover, in an item-wise analysis, LPC amplitudes of American taboo words were positively correlated with their taboo ratings. British taboo words did not show this effect. This indicates that American participants, who had very limited social contact with British English, did not have the same perception of social threat from British taboo words as they had from American taboo words. These results point to the importance of social context of acquisition in establishing social-affective meaning in language.

Social priming for nonnative-accented speech

Prior work indicates that a speaker’s race/ethnicity can prime a listener to expect native versus nonnative (foreign) accents. In the present study, we replicate the findings of McGowan (2015) and then address novel topics including the effect of social primes on perceptual adaptation. Using a matched-guise design, we examined the effect of race information on the perception of, and adaptation to, Mandarin Chinese-accented English in babble. Subjects randomly assigned an East Asian female’s face during the speech perception task showed an advantage over subjects assigned a White female’s face or a silhouette (control) face (as measured by transcription accuracy). Performance across trials indicated that although subjects in the control group initially perform worse than those in the East Asian prime group, they perceptually adapt more rapidly to the Mandarin accent, eventually reaching a similar level of performance. Subjects in the White prime group, however, do not adapt as rapidly as those in the control group. In a second experiment, we aim to expand on this work by examining similar priming effects for Arabic-accented English (with Middle Eastern, White, or control primes), and uncommon combinations of minority race/ethnicity primes with nonnative accents (e.g., an East Asian face with an Arabic accent).

Comparing Levenshtein distance and dynamic time warping in predicting listeners’ judgements of accent distance

Non-native accent ratings are related to segmental and holistic acoustic deviations from listeners’ home accents (Bartelds et al., 2020). This study builds on prior work by including both non-ambient native and nonnative accents, using a different perceptual task in which listeners ranked talkers based on their perceived distance from Standard American English, and employing analyses that account for collinearity between distance metrics. Listeners (n = 52) completed two rankings where all talkers produced the same sentence and one where each talker produced a unique sentence. Phonemic and holistic acoustic distances between the nine non-ambient accents and Midland American English were quantified using Levenshtein distances and dynamic time warping (DTW), respectively. Results from separate linear mixed effects models showed that both DTW and Levenshtein distances contributed to perceptual distance. Sentence and its interaction with DTW/Levenshtein distance were not significant. The model predicting perceptual rankings from DTW was a better fitting model than the model with Levenshtein distances. Because DTW captures both segmental and suprasegmental distance, it may better predict listeners’ similarity judgements among English varieties than a metric only capturing phonemic distance. [Funded by the National Science Foundation (1941691; 1941662) and The Ohio State University Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences.]

Prosodic and segmental information effects on perceived accentedness of native and non-native speech

Studies on the effects of prosodic information on perception of accent have investigated the ability of listeners to distinguish between accent varieties using prosodic cues in the absence of segmental information. The present study examined how prosodic and segmental information impact perception of accentedness. Specifically, we examined how listeners perceive accentedness of low-pass filtered and unfiltered speech, as low-pass filtered speech isolates prosody while removing segmental information. Native speaker English participants were exposed to speech from 1 of 4 conditions: unfiltered English produced by native English talkers, low-pass filtered English produced by native English talkers, unfiltered English produced by native Mandarin talkers, or low-pass filtered English produced by native Mandarin talkers. Participants rated each sentence with Likert scale responses from 1 (native speaker of English with no non-native accent) to 9 (strong non-native accent). Unfiltered native English speech received the lowest accentedness ratings and unfiltered Mandarin the highest. Low-pass filtered speech from all talkers was rated as intermediate between the two unfiltered conditions regardless of talker. These findings suggest that when making assessments of speaker accentedness, listeners make finer distinctions through the use of segmental information than they do with prosodic information.

English Accent Variations in YouTube Voice-Over Ads and the Role of Perceptions on Attitude and Purchase Intentions

Recent changes in the media landscape have refocused research onto online advertising, such as YouTube advertising, Instagram TV, and Facebook video advertisements. The aim of this study is to investigate the impacts of accented voice-overs ads without the physical appearance of the spokesperson on consumer perceptions, attitudes, and behavioral intentions. Two studies were conducted, and the results show that foreign/nonnative accents and host/native accents are different in their effectiveness when determining consumers’ perceived attractiveness, expertise, and entertainment in their attitudes toward the YouTube ad and purchase intentions. Results show that a nonnative accent is perceived to be more entertaining than a native accent. The perception of expertise was very similar for native and nonnative English accents. The implications based on the two studies suggest that perceived attractiveness of the accent was dependent on the similarity (e.g., tonal language) between the nonnative and native accent. The results imply that the motive of the ad (e.g., information versus entertainment) must be clear so that there is congruency between motives and perceptions toward the respective accent.

Accent Speaks Louder than Ability: The Effect of Nonnative Accents on Trust Repair

This paper examines whether speaking with a nonnative accent adversely affects individuals’ perceived trustworthiness and level of trust after a trust violation in an English-speaking context. Furthermore, this study also examines how others-focused perspective taking plays a role in helping to overcome the biased judgements. An experimental vignette situated around a hiring process was conducted to examine these research questions. The results suggest that nonnative English speakers do face bias in the form of being judged as less trustworthy in terms of their ability, but not benevolence and integrity, and are hence trusted less in comparison to native English speakers following an identical interaction. In addition, the findings indicate that perspective taking ameliorates that unjustified penalty by having the trustor vicariously walk in the nonnative speaker’s shoes. These study findings hold promising theoretical and practical implications for organizations that unfair judgements on stigmatized individuals, including nonnative English speakers, may be overcome through operationalizing perspective taking. This study contributes to the current literature on diversity management by emphasizing language-based stigmas and a more comprehensive understanding of interpersonal trust repair. Keywords: Nonnative accent, stigma, ability, trust repair, trustworthiness, perspective-taking

Phonetic convergence to non-native speech: Acoustic and perceptual evidence

While the tendency of speakers to align their speech to that of others acoustic-phonetically has been widely studied among native speakers, very few studies have examined whether natives phonetically converge to non-native speakers. Here we measured native Dutch speakers’ convergence to a non-native speaker with an unfamiliar accent in a novel non-interactive task. Furthermore, we assessed the role of participants’ perceptions of the non-native accent in their tendency to converge. In addition to a perceptual measure (AXB ratings), we examined convergence on different acoustic dimensions (e.g., vowel spectra, fricative CoG, speech rate, overall f0) to determine what dimensions, if any, speakers converge to. We further combined these two types of measures to discover what dimensions weighed in raters’ judgments of convergence. The results reveal overall convergence to our non-native speaker, as indexed by both perceptual and acoustic measures. However, the ratings suggest the stronger participants rated the non-native accent to be, the less likely they were to converge. Our findings add to the growing body of evidence that natives can phonetically converge to non-native speech, even without any apparent socio-communicative motivation to do so. We argue that our results are hard to integrate with a purely social view of convergence.

Do Managers' Nonnative Accents Influence Investment Decisions?

ABSTRACTReactions to earnings calls are sensitive to subtle features of managers' speech, but little is known about the effect of nonnative accents in this setting. Nonnative-accented CEOs may avoid holding calls in English for fear of investors' negative stereotypes. However, theory indicates that stereotypes from the CEO position and nonnative accents conflict, and that the process of reconciling conflicting stereotypes requires effortful processing. We use a series of four experiments to test each link of the causal chain that we hypothesize based on this theory. We demonstrate that motivated investors reconcile conflicting stereotypes by inferring exceptional qualities, such as hard work and determination, that positively affect their impressions of nonnative-accented CEOs and, hence, of the company as an investment. We also show that, because bad news stimulates effortful processing, investors receiving bad (versus good) news are more likely to form a positive image of nonnative-accented CEOs and their companies.Data Availability: Contact the authors.

General adaptation to accented English: Speech intelligibility unaffected by perceived source of non-native accent.

Foreign-accented speech commonly incurs a processing cost, but this cost can be offset when listeners are given informative cues to the speaker's purported ethnicity and/or language background. This study investigates the mechanism that underlies this facilitatory effect of top-down expectation, evaluating between general adaptation (an across-the-board relaxation of phonetic categorization criteria) and targeted adaptation (tuning in to accent-specific phonetics). In experiment 1, native speakers of American English completed a transcription-in-noise task with Chinese-accented English sentences. All listeners heard the same voice but were randomly assigned to one of four visual conditions: a blank silhouette, a European face, an East Asian face, or a South Asian face. Results showed that although there was no significant effect of visual condition, listeners who believed the speaker to be non-natively accented enjoyed significantly improved performance compared to those who reported hearing a native accent. Crucially, however, listeners who correctly perceived the speaker as Chinese-accented showed no additional benefit over those who heard some other foreign accent. This basic pattern held even when listeners were primed to expect congruent face-accent pairings (experiment 2). Overall, these results provide evidence for a general adaptation mechanism, rather than a targeted mechanism involving accent-specific phonetic adjustments.

Effects on the Listening Comprehension of Different Non-native English Accents of Chinese Learners of English

Purpose: This study assessed the effects on the Listening Comprehension of Different Non-native English Accents on Chinese Learners of English. The study aimed to determine, first of all, the reaction of Chinese learners of English to different non-native English accents. Second, it sought to investigate the differences in the difficulties that Chinese learners of English face while listening to English spoken with accents native (Chinese English accent) or non-native. Third, the study attempted to find out the relationship between English spoken with the native Chinese accent and/or non-native English accents and listening comprehension. Methodology/Approach/Design: The sample included 16 participants majoring in International Education of Chinese Language. They were selected randomly for the study. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches were employed to collect and analyze data. Results: The findings revealed that non-native English accent plays a more important role than the native English accents in listening and comprehension. The findings also revealed a listening comprehension advantage for test-takers who are familiar with accents, in this case, the Chinese non-native English accent. Practical Implications: For a better understanding of the teaching and learning process of English as a foreign language, learners or listeners need to assess the influence of non-native accents on their listening comprehension to find better ways in improving their listening skills. This study contributes significantly to this field. Originality/Value: This study employed multi non-native accent including African English accents. It attempted to contribute significant value in this field as most of the teachers who teach English globally are non-native English Speakers and they, in essence, have considerable influence on the learners’ listening comprehension.

The effects of lecturers’ non-native accent strength in English on intelligibility and attitudinal evaluations by native and non-native English students

The rapid spread of English medium instruction (EMI) across the globe has led to a growing number of non-native lecturers teaching in English to student populations that are increasingly international. The aim of the present study was to investigate to what extent lecturers with slight or moderate Dutch accents or native British English accents are evaluated differently in terms of intelligibility, comprehensibility and attitudinal impressions by non-native and native English-speaking listeners. In an experiment, 189 Dutch listeners, 175 international non-native listeners and 158 native English listeners evaluated fragments recorded by moderately accented Dutch, slightly accented Dutch and native English speakers. Findings showed that the moderately non-native accented lecturers were evaluated more negatively than lecturers with slight or native accents by both Dutch and international non-native listeners, but not by native English listeners. This suggests that non-native listeners evaluate the accents of non-native lecturers according to native speaker pronunciation norms.

Korean Elementary Teachers’ Perceptions of NESs’ and NNESs’ Pronunciation

Despite the validated EIL status, native English accents are commonly regarded as the most appropriate pronunciation-teaching norms, while nonnative accents are still considered inappropriate. This study attempts to explore Korean-speaking elementary teachers’ perceptions of native and nonnative English accents and find out the extent to which the teachers’ ratings of the accents show variance and correlations as regards likeability, familiarity, intelligibility, comprehensibility, and instructional model suitability. For these, 53 in-service Korean-speaking elementary teachers were asked to evaluate two native (American and British) and two nonnative (Filipino and Korean) English accents by the five variables. The results were as follows: 1) The AmE accent was rated most positively, while the FiE accent was least favorable in all the variables; 2) The KoE accent was evaluated to be more familiar, intelligible, and comprehensible than the BrE accent at a significant level. In contrast, the two accents exhibited an insignificant difference in likeability and suitability; 3) Significant correlations were obtained among the variables except for comparisons of likeability-intelligibility, likeability-comprehensibility, and familiarity-comprehensibility; 4) The instructional model suitability had a significant correlation with the four remaining variables. Based on these results, pedagogical implications and implications for teacher education were suggested, followed by this study’s limitations.

Detection of Non-native Speaker Status from Backwards and Vocoded Contentmasked Speech

This paper addresses the issue of speech rhythm as a cue to non-native pronunciation. In natural recordings, it is impossible to disentangle rhythm from segmental, subphonemic or suprasegmental features that may influence nativeness ratings. However, two methods of speech manipulation, that is, backwards content-masked speech and vocoded speech, allow the identification of native and non-native speech in which segmental properties are masked and become inaccessible to the listeners. In the current study, we use these two methods to compare the perception of content-masked native English speech and Polish-accented speech. Both native English and Polish-accented recordings were manipulated using backwards masked speech and 4-band white-noise vocoded speech. Fourteen listeners classified the stimuli as produced by native or Polish speakers of English. Polish and English differ in their temporal organization, so, if rhythm is a significant contributor to the status of non-native accentedness, we expected an above-chance rate of recognition of native and non-native English speech. Moreover, backwards content-masked speech was predicted to yield better results than vocoded speech, because it retains some of the indexical properties of speakers. The resultsshow that listeners are unable to detect non-native accent in Polish learners of English from backwards and vocoded speech samples.

More than just accent? The role of dialect words in children’s language-based social judgments

Recent research suggests that young children are capable of distinguishing between phonetically dissimilar spoken accents yet have difficulty in distinguishing between phonetically similar accents. The current studies aimed to determine whether the presence of dialect-specific vocabulary enhances young children’s ability to categorize speakers. In Study 1, 4- to 7-year-old children performed tasks in which they matched speakers based on the dialect-specific vocabulary the speakers used. Participants were successful in matching speakers based on vocabulary at a rate significantly greater than chance. In Study 2, participants performed a task in which they inferred a speaker’s future dialect-specific vocabulary use based on the speaker’s previous vocabulary use. Participants were able to infer a speaker’s vocabulary use at a rate significantly greater than chance, and participants also showed social preference for and selective trust of speakers who used the participants’ native dialect vocabulary over those who used a non-native dialect vocabulary. These interesting results suggest that when accent differences are too subtle for children to categorize speakers, dialect-specific vocabulary may enhance young children’s ability to categorize a speaker. The results of preference and selective trust questions also suggest that children as young as 4 years use their knowledge of a speaker’s vocabulary to guide their preferred social interactions, choosing to interact with others who speak similarly to them.

What do we know about Foreign Accent Syndrome? - Letter to the Editor.

Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is a speech disorder with sudden changes in speech patterns resulting in affected people perceived to have a new non-native accent. Characteristic changes in language concluded in interviews provide some initial insight into the syndrome.1 The control group (without disorders) had normal speech and grammar, patients with language-speech disorders faced difficulty in speaking whereas FAS patients were labelled ‘foreign’ due to frequent hesitation, slow speech, inappropriate grammar and word selection.1 A great deal of time has been dedicated to understanding FAS, however, a varied patient presentation and underlying pathophysiology has led to difficulties in diagnosing the disorder and evaluating its true epidemiology.

The effect of accent salience on generalization of perceptual adaptation

Listeners often have difficulty understanding non-native accented speech. However, they are able to quickly adapt to non-native accented speech and generalize this adaptation to novel talkers. Previous studies that examined the mechanisms underlying generalization of adaptation mostly focused on acoustic similarity. That is, prior studies have demonstrated that acoustic similarity between non-native talkers in training and testing facilitates generalization. While acoustic similarity facilitates generalization, it is possible that salience of an accent (i.e., how noticeable the non-native accent is to a listener) also plays a significant role in generalization. That is, even if non-native accented talkers are acoustically similar to each other, generalization might not occur if a talker's non-native accent is not sufficiently distinct from the native-accented speech the listeners are familiar with. Thus, this study aims to examine the roles of salience of a non-native accent in generalization of perceptual adaptation to novel talkers. In the present study, native English speakers listen and transcribe English sentences read by Korean learners of English. Intelligibility (i.e., number of words transcribed) is measured to examine whether generalization to a novel non-native accented talker occurred. The results of the study will inform our understanding of generalization of adaptation to non-native accented talkers.

Emblem Gestures Improve Perception and Evaluation of Non-native Speech.

Traditionally, much of the attention on the communicative effects of non-native accent has focused on the accent itself rather than how it functions within a more natural context. The present study explores how the bodily context of co-speech emblematic gestures affects perceptual and social evaluation of non-native accent. In two experiments in two different languages, Mandarin and Japanese, we filmed learners performing a short utterance in three different within-subjects conditions: speech alone, culturally familiar gesture, and culturally unfamiliar gesture. Native Mandarin participants watched videos of foreign-accented Mandarin speakers (Experiment 1), and native Japanese participants watched videos of foreign-accented Japanese speakers (Experiment 2). Following each video, native language participants were asked a set of questions targeting speech perception and social impressions of the learners. Results from both experiments demonstrate that familiar—and occasionally unfamiliar—emblems facilitated speech perception and enhanced social evaluations compared to the speech alone baseline. The variability in our findings suggests that gesture may serve varied functions in the perception and evaluation of non-native accent.

Individual empathy levels affect gradual intonation-meaning mapping: The case of biased questions in Salerno Italian

The paper investigates the interplay between intonational cues and individual variability in the perceptual assessment of speakers’ epistemic bias in Salerno Italian yes-no questions. We present a perception experiment in which we manipulated pitch span within the nuclear configuration (both nuclear accent and boundary tone) to predict degree of perceived positive bias (i.e., expected positive answer) to yes-no question stimuli. Our results show that a wider pitch span within the nuclear region predicts a higher degree of perceived positive bias, while negative bias is predicted by narrow pitch span. Crucially, though, two interacting sources of listener variability were uncovered, i.e., prolonged exposure to a non-native dialect as well as degree of empathy (i.e., Empathy Quotient, EQ). Exposure to non-native phonological systems was found to affect the way pitch span is mapped onto perceived epistemic bias, through category interference, though mediated by EQ levels. Specifically, high-empathy listeners were more affected by degree of non-native dialect exposure. EQ scores were hence found to have an effect on gradual span manipulation by interacting with the dialect exposure effect. These results advance our understanding of the intonation-meaning mapping by taking into account both the impact of gradual phonetic cues on meaning processing as well as uncovering sources of cognitive variability at the perceiver’s level.