American English Speakers Research Articles

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

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

Portraying accent stereotyping by second language speakers.

Stereotyping towards the second language accent of second language learners is extensively seen even when the content of learner speech can be understood. Previous studies reported conflicting results on accent perception by speakers of second languages, especially among homogenous learners. In this paper, we conducted a survey and two experiments to test whether Mandarin-speaking advanced learners of English may give harsher accent ratings to their fellow learners than to Standard American English speakers. The survey was designed to understand the L2 listeners' beliefs about accented speech. In Experiment 1, participants rated short audio recordings of L2 learner' and Standard American English speech; in Experiment 2, they did the same in a more detailed word-in-sentence accent rating task. Results showed a markedly high level of perceived L2 accentedness for several learner speech stimuli despite good intelligibility, especially for the strongly-accented Cantonese passage and for specific vowel and consonant types. The findings reveal the existence of native-speakerism in China and highlight existing accent stereotypes. Implications for policymaking and language teaching are discussed.

Hedged Performatives in Spoken American English: A Discourse-oriented Analysis

This paper provides a corpus-based analysis of so-called “hedged performatives,” which, although frequently referred to in the literature, have never been the subject of an in-depth functional study. Using data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the focus is on I must/ have to say, I must/ have to admit, and I must/ have to confess, as the hedged performatives which are among the most frequent and score highest in terms of collocational strength. The qualitative analysis identifies two main functions, viz., downtoner and emphasizer. They are shown to derive from the interplay of three co(n)textual parameters: (i) “semantic valency” of the host clause (i.e., positive, negative, or neutral semantic content), (ii) “thematic orientation” of the host clause (i.e., toward the speaker, the addressee, or a third person/the situation), and (iii) conversational “alignment” of the speaker with the interlocutor (i.e., agreement or disagreement). It is further shown that hedged performatives play an important role in rapport management, serving (mainly positive face) politeness strategies, which are captured in terms of face-preservation, face-damage, and face-boost.

A SOCIOPRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF THE SPEECH ACT OF REQUESTING IN LOCAL ENGLISH COURSEBOOKS

<p>The speech act of requesting is a speech act commonly found and used in daily conversations. It is an intriguing research topic of pragmatics, particularly pragmatics in materials development, which is a sub-topic of language teaching. Earlier studies of pragmatics in language teaching reported that English teachers tend to look down on pragmatic aspects when teaching the language, including being ignorant of sociopragmatic information about language use in English coursebooks. For this reason, this paper discusses the findings of a sociopragmatic analysis in a local English coursebook. A content analysis employing pragmatic and sociopragmatic theoretical frameworks and a pragmatic judgment task by a native speaker of American English was carried out to investigate the sociopragmatic information in the course book. Results indicated that it did not contain an adequate amount of sociopragmatic knowledge indicating sociopragmatic failure. Thus, it implies that the coursebook may not be reliable language input for pragmatic competence improvement. <strong></strong></p>

Cross cultural verbal cues to deception: truth and lies in first and second language forensic interview contexts.

The verbal deception literature is largely based upon North American and Western European monolingual English speaker interactions. This paper extends this literature by comparing the verbal behaviors of 88 south Asian bilinguals, conversing in either first (Hindi) or second (English) languages, and 48 British monolinguals conversing in English. All participated in a live event following which they were interviewed having been incentivized to be either deceptive or truthful. Event details, complications, verifiable sources, and plausibility ratings were analyzed as a function of veracity, language and culture. Main effects revealed cross cultural similarities in both first and second language interviews whereby all liar's verbal responses were impoverished and rated as less plausible than truthtellers. However, a series of cross-cultural interactions emerged whereby bi-lingual South Asian truthtellers and liars interviewed in first and second languages exhibited varying patterns of verbal behaviors, differences that have the potential to trigger erroneous assessments in practice. Despite limitations, including concerns centered on the reductionary nature of deception research, our results highlight that while cultural context is important, impoverished, simple verbal accounts should trigger a 'red flag' for further attention irrespective of culture or interview language, since the cognitive load typically associated with formulating a deceptive account apparently emerges in a broadly similar manner.

(354) A Call for a Validated Survey to Assess Sexual Function and Satisfaction for Trans Women Post Vaginoplasty

Abstract Introduction The path toward standardized assessment of sexual function and satisfaction (SFS) in women has progressed significantly since it was forged in the 1970s. There are many current reliable options such as the FSFI and the PROMIS Sexual Function & Satisfaction v2.0, which have been validated in North American English speakers to assess SFS in a clinical setting. However, these questionnaires are inadequate to effectively assess SFS of a trans woman post-vaginoplasty due to both absence of appropriate questions (e.g. addressing post-op restoration of sensation) and the presence of inappropriate questions (e.g. assessing endogenous lubrication). Objective Upon analysis of the current measures to assess SFS, we hope to demonstrate the need for a validated tool to assess SFS of trans women post-vaginoplasty. Methods Surveys which assess female SFS validated in North American English speakers were compiled and reviewed to assess the appropriateness for trans women post-vaginoplasty. The variables assessed included whether the surveys discussed endogenous lubrication, pain/discomfort specific to penetration, and pain/discomfort in other areas of the genitalia. Surveys were also assessed for the lack of factors specific to trans women post-vaginoplasty such as dilation and depth of the neovagina, scarring and restoration of sensation, prostate stimulation, and cosmetic appearance of the genitalia. Results A total of 18 surveys were assessed. 8 surveys were excluded if they were designed for specific populations or diseases (WSID; MSFQ; DSDS; TSS; PFSF; SFQ) or their tools could not be accessed (DISF; DSFI). 70% of questionnaires asked about endogenous lubrication. 40% asked about pain limited to penetration. In the studies which asked about pain, 25% (n=1) assessed pain in other areas of the genitalia. 1 survey asked about vaginal dilation or depth to assess difficulty with penetration. There were no questionnaires that assessed prostate stimulation, the appearance of the genitalia, scarring, or the restoration of sensation. Conclusions Although the tools available contain many questions which are appropriate for the assessment of SFS of trans women post-vaginoplasty, most surveys assessed endogenous lubrication which is irrelevant to trans women and none assessed several domains important for trans women post-vaginoplasty. A survey specific to post-op trans women should assess neovaginal dilation and depth, scarring and restoration of sensation, as well as a cosmetic satisfaction with genitalia as measures of SFS. For example, trans women report sexual pleasure from stimulation of the prostate through the neovaginal canal during penetration; this type of pleasure is not applicable to cis women and is therefore not assessed in existing surveys, rendering the available tools incomplete. Due to the inadequacy of the current tools in the assessment of SFS for trans women post-vaginoplasty, we call for the development of a validated survey for this population which is in line with the precedent set by several other SFS questionnaires validated for similarly specific populations. Disclosure No

Prosodic location modulates listener’s perception of novel German sounds

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

Grammaticality Judgments of Tense and Agreement by Child Speakers of African American English: Effects of Clinical Status, Surface Form, and Grammatical Structure.

We examined the grammaticality judgments of tense and agreement (T/A) structures by children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) within African American English (AAE). The children's judgments of T/A forms were also compared to their judgments of two control forms and, for some analyses, examined by surface form (i.e., overt, zero) and type of structure (i.e., BE, past tense, verbal -s). The judgments were from 91 AAE-speaking kindergartners (DLD = 34; typically developing = 57), elicited using items from the Rice/Wexler Test of Early Grammatical Impairment. The data were analyzed twice, once using General American English as the reference and A' scores and once using AAE as the reference and percentages of acceptability. Although the groups differed using both metrics, the percentages of acceptability tied the DLD T/A deficit to judgments of the overt forms, while also revealing a general DLD weakness judging sentences that are ungrammatical in AAE. Judgments of the overt T/A forms by both groups correlated with their productions of these forms and their language test scores, and both groups showed structure-specific form preferences ("is": overt > zero vs. verbal -s: overt = zero). The findings demonstrate the utility of grammaticality judgment tasks for revealing weaknesses in T/A within AAE-speaking children with DLD, while also calling for more studies using AAE as the dialect reference when designing stimuli and coding systems. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.22534588.

Iconicity ratings for 14,000+ English words.

Iconic words and signs are characterized by a perceived resemblance between aspects of their form and aspects of their meaning. For example, in English, iconic words include peep and crash, which mimic the sounds they denote, and wiggle and zigzag, which mimic motion. As a semiotic property of words and signs, iconicity has been demonstrated to play a role in word learning, language processing, and language evolution. This paper presents the results of a large-scale norming study for more than 14,000 English words conducted with over 1400 American English speakers. We demonstrate the utility of these ratings by replicating a number of existing findings showing that iconicity ratings are related to age of acquisition, sensory modality, semantic neighborhood density, structural markedness, and playfulness. We discuss possible use cases and limitations of the rating dataset, which is made publicly available.

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

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

Монгол, англи хэлний гуйх хэлэхүйн үйлдлийн зэрэгцүүлсэн судалгаа

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

Clear speech and phonological typology: A case study of Tashlhiyt Berber

Clear speech is a type of listener-oriented, intelligibility-enhancing mode of speaking. It has been shown to enhance the perceptibility of many different types of phonological contrasts, cross-linguistically. An open question is whether all phonological contrasts are enhanced to an equivalent extent in clear speech. In the current study, we ask whether rarer phonological patterns receive less of a clear speech intelligibility boost, relative to more common phoneme contrasts. Tashlhiyt Berber is an Afroasiatic language spoken in Morocco. Tashlhiyt has been well studied for having typologically uncommon phonotactic properties. This study examines the effect of clear speech on the discrimination of rarer lexical contrasts in Tashlhiyt Berber. We predict that the more typologically uncommon contrasts (e.g., word pairs containing complex and geminate initial onsets) will have a smaller increase in perceptibility from casual to clear speech than more common contrasts (e.g., singleton contrasts). Furthermore, native and naive listeners’ (here, American English speakers) discrimination of these contrasts across speech styles is also compared. Cross-language perception of clear speech provides a window to understanding the phonetic bases for cross-linguistic typological patterns.

Individual differences in acoustic variability and perceptual sensitivity to subphonemic variation

Individual differences are robustly attested in both speech production and perception, with interspeaker variation in production frequently observed in the same domains in which extensive variation is observed across listeners in perception. This study extends existing research by examining whether the relationship between production variability and perceptual sensitivity previously observed for vowels (e.g., Perkell et al., 2008; Franken et al., 2017) is also observed for consonants. 55 speakers of American English completed two online tasks designed to evaluate individual differences in the production and perception of /s/ and /ɹ/: a sentence production task and a 4IAX perceptual discrimination task. Preliminary comparison of acoustic variability measurements from the production task and response accuracy measurements from the perception task suggest that individual differences in these two domains are sometimes, but not always, related across speakers. Specifically, production variability and perceptual sensitivity were correlated for phonologically meaningful acoustic dimensions in the liquid phoneme /ɹ/, but not for any measured dimensions in the fricative phoneme /s/.

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

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

Validating acoustic predictors of sentence intelligibility using a racially diverse corpus

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

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

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

Gender, but not speech material, affects extended high-frequencylevels in the speech spectrum

Current evidence suggests extended high-frequency (EHF) speech cues support speech perception. Audibility of these cues likely depends on speech spectral levels at EHFs. These levels may vary across genders and different speech materials. In this study, we investigated the effect of talker gender and speech materials on EHF levels in speech. A group of 30 (15female) native speakers of American-English was recruited to participate in this study. A three-minute spontaneous narrative was recorded for each participant along with a subset of the Bamford-Kowal-Bench (BKB) sentences. An ERB-scaled long-term average speech spectrum was calculated for the narrative and for the BKB sentences for each subject. Linear mixed-effects models were used to test intersubject and intrasubject variability in 8 EHF ERB bands. There was a significant effect of gender with female EHF levels ∼4 dB higher than male EHF levels. Within-subjects comparison of BKB sentences and narratives revealed no significant difference in EHF levels between speech materials. These findings highlight the possibility that EHFs could play a more prominent role in female speech perception than male speech perception, and suggest that EHF levels are relatively stable across speech materials for a given talker. [Work supported by NIH under Grant No. R01-DC019745.]

Clear speech improves word segmentation in quiet and in noise: Evidence from visual-world eye-tracking

Listener-oriented hyperarticulated clear speech facilitates linguistic processing and cognitive functioning associated with speech perception under various listening conditions. Using the visual-world eye-tracking paradigm, we investigated whether clear speech also aids speech segmentation, or the discovery of word boundaries, and examined the dynamic time course of its effect. Native American English speakers (N = 77) heard sentences in which the target word (e.g., ham) was temporarily ambiguous with a longer unintended competitor (e.g., hamster) across a word boundary (e.g., She saw the ham starting…) while viewing images depicting the target, competitor, and unrelated distractors. Clear and conversational sentences were presented in quiet or in speech-shaped noise at +3 dB signal-to-noise ratio. Analysis of eye fixations to the images over time revealed that compared with conversational speech, clear speech facilitated the disambiguation of the target from the competitor even before the disambiguation point was reached. The facilitation was found in both listening conditions but was relatively delayed in noise. These findings suggest that speaking clearly improves word segmentation and reduces lexical competition especially in optimal listening conditions. The speech segmentation facilitation may partly underlie the clear speech benefits observed for other signal-dependent and relatively signal-independent linguistic and cognitive processes.

On the set of emotions with facial signals.

Which, if any, emotions have a facial signal? Studies from AI to Zoology sometimes presuppose an answer to this question. According to one important and influential research program, the basic (fundamental and discrete) emotions can be identified by their possession of a biologically based unique and universally recognized facial signal. To the classic set of six such emotions, researchers recently advanced 12 new candidates, which were examined in the present study with a standard free-labeling procedure in three samples: English-speaking Americans (n = 200), Mandarin-speaking Chinese (n = 101), and Malayalam-speaking Indians (n = 200). In the three samples, respectively, a majority of respondents chose the predicted label for only one, one, and none of the 12 faces. That is, a majority of respondents failed to choose the predicted label for 11 of the 12 faces in the English-speaking (proportion of respondents range for the 11: .04 to .45) and Mandarin-speaking (proportion of respondents range for the 11: .00 to .44) samples; a majority of respondents failed to choose the predicted label for any of the 12 faces in the Malayalam-speaking sample (proportion of respondents range: .00 to .42). The modal choice in the three samples was the predicted label for five, six, and one, respectively, of the 12 faces. "Recognition" of the predicted emotion was negligible (< 15% of respondents) for five, eight (two of which were modal), and 10, respectively, of the 12 faces. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION IN THE TRILOGY OF RUSH HOUR

Intercultural communication (ICC) is a dynamic communicative phenomenon due to the cultural value presented in the multicultural communication exchange. The present study aims to explore the intercultural communication between Black and Chinese speakers in the trilogy of Rush Hour. Specifically, this study aims to see the characteristics of Black English and the communicative effects of conversation among speakers of different cultural backgrounds. Through the methods of qualitative descriptive, linguistic behavior is justified to show whether the conventions are acceptable to each community group. The results show that as an American English-speaking, Carter, a Black American is more expressive in using English because he is a native speaker, while Lee, as an L2 English from China, faces more communicative barriers. The cultural value of non-standard forms also adorns such conversation, e.g., phonological and sentence structures stigmatization. Not to mention, Chinese surnames produce homonyms with English pronouns.