Unfamiliar Accent Research Articles

International Medical Graduate–Patient Communication: A Qualitative Analysis of Perceived Barriers

International medical graduates (IMGs) represent a substantial portion of all medical residents in the United States. Yet, IMGs may be disadvantaged in their communications with U.S. patients for a variety of reasons. The authors conducted a qualitative study to examine IMGs' perceptions of the barriers to their communication with patients. A convenience sample of 12 IMGs participated in interviews that lasted 1 to 1.5 hours. Residents from the Caribbean, Colombia, Denmark, India, Iran, Pakistan, and Peru participated in individual interviews conducted on-site at one of three clinics. Interviews were transcribed and then coded independently and jointly. The authors used a qualitative analysis of interview transcripts to identify primary and secondary themes. IMGs' perceptions of the barriers to communication with their Appalachian patients fit into two broad themes: educational barriers and interpersonal barriers. Within each of these themes, the authors identified secondary themes: education-related barriers were science immersion and lack of communication training, and interpersonally related barriers were unfamiliar dialects, new power dynamics, and different rapport-building expectations. The analysis of the interview data yielded several important findings that residency programs should consider when designing orientations, training curricula, and communication interventions. Programs may need to address challenges related to regional dialect and "informal" English use, as well as communication barriers associated with cross-cultural differences in norms, values, and beliefs. Programs also need to draw on multilayered interventions to address the multidimensional challenges of cross-cultural physician-patient communication.

Categorization of regional and foreign accent in 5- to 7-year-old British children

This study examines children's ability to detect accent-related information in connected speech. British English children aged 5 and 7 years old were asked to discriminate between their home accent from an Irish accent or a French accent in a sentence categorization task. Using a preliminary accent rating task with adult listeners, it was first verified that the level of accentedness was similar across the two unfamiliar accents. Results showed that whereas the younger children group behaved just above chance level in this task, the 7-year-old group could reliably distinguish between these variations of their own language, but were significantly better at detecting the foreign accent than the regional accent. These results extend and replicate a previous study (Girard, Floccia, & Goslin, 2008) in which it was found that 5-year-old French children could detect a foreign accent better than a regional accent. The factors underlying the relative lack of awareness for a regional accent as opposed to a foreign accent in childhood are discussed, especially the amount of exposure, the learnability of both types of accents, and a possible difference in the amount of vowels versus consonants variability, for which acoustic measures of vowel formants and plosives voice onset time are provided.

The benefit of variation in cross‐language perception of voice onset time (VOT).

Listeners are consistently able to adjust to perceptually ambiguous sounds (Norris et al., 2003; among others). When listeners are exposed to sounds ambiguous between two phonetic categories, boundaries adjust to the ambiguous signal. Perceptual learning has been suggested to account for adjustment to unfamiliar accents. It is not necessarily true, though, that this flexibility extends to more extreme cases of variation. Many sounds in accented speech are unambiguously mapped to the wrong category (e.g., unaspirated voiceless stops in French‐accented English are perceived as voiced by native English listeners). We examined English listeners’ perception of accented English in a perceptual learning paradigm with two exposure conditions: native French VOT mean and range in words that are lexically unambiguous (e.g., poach, *boach, not pet bet). Perceptual learning completely fails when listeners are exposed to the mean VOT, and in fact, this is coupled with an expanded voiced category, even though the words ...

Perceptual learning of noise vocoded words: Effects of feedback and lexicality.

Speech comprehension is resistant to acoustic distortion in the input, reflecting listeners' ability to adjust perceptual processes to match the speech input. This adjustment is reflected in improved comprehension of distorted speech with experience. For noise vocoding, a manipulation that removes spectral detail from speech, listeners' word report showed a significantly greater improvement over trials for listeners that heard clear speech presentations before rather than after hearing distorted speech (clear-then-distorted compared with distorted-then-clear feedback, in Experiment 1). This perceptual learning generalized to untrained words suggesting a sublexical locus for learning and was equivalent for word and nonword training stimuli (Experiment 2). These findings point to the crucial involvement of phonological short-term memory and top-down processes in the perceptual learning of noise-vocoded speech. Similar processes may facilitate comprehension of speech in an unfamiliar accent or following cochlear implantation.

Allophonic reassignment in dialect adaptation

This study explored speakers’ success in acquiring an unfamiliar dialect. Twenty-four speakers of American English attempted to learn Glaswegian, a dialect in which /r/ is produced as a tap. Its closest counterpart is the flap allophone of /t/. The question posed is whether an allophone of one consonant can be remapped to serve as the realization of another consonant. Subjects were trained and tested with materials in which /r/ appeared only in the last word. Each block contained 12 initial and 12 medial /r/’s. A training block was presented twice followed by a generalization block. A week after training, subjects returned for retesting on the original training and generalizations blocks, and a new generalization block. The block order was counterbalanced. Subjects were highly successful at imitating medial /r/ (71%), a striking example of fast categorical remapping in production. Success rates were lower (46%) for /r/ in initial position, where flaps do not appear in English. Generalization and retest results were only slightly worse than original training results, indicating that subjects acquired long-term general knowledge about Glaswegian pronunciation. The slight superiority on familiar materials in the retest phase points to an interaction of lexical learning with general phonological learning.

An SLP in Malaysia

An SLP in Malaysia

Lexical Information Drives Perceptual Learning of Distorted Speech: Evidence From the Comprehension of Noise-Vocoded Sentences.

Speech comprehension is resistant to acoustic distortion in the input, reflecting listeners' ability to adjust perceptual processes to match the speech input. For noise-vocoded sentences, a manipulation that removes spectral detail from speech, listeners' reporting improved from near 0% to 70% correct over 30 sentences (Experiment 1). Learning was enhanced if listeners heard distorted sentences while they knew the identity of the undistorted target (Experiments 2 and 3). Learning was absent when listeners were trained with nonword sentences (Experiments 4 and 5), although the meaning of the training sentences did not affect learning (Experiment 5). Perceptual learning of noise-vocoded speech depends on higher level information, consistent with top-down, lexically driven learning. Similar processes may facilitate comprehension of speech in an unfamiliar accent or following cochlear implantation.

音声中の抑揚の大きさと変化パターンが話者の性格印象に与える影響

This study reports systematic relations between intonations and impressions of speakers' personality. Fundamental frequencies (F0) of stimuli were transformed to emphasize pitch modulations, and unfamiliar intonations for native speakers were generated by reversing pitches. In the first experiment, 66 university students were asked to rate personality images on speech stimuli with the Big Five categories. In the second experiment, 54 participants rated the same stimuli regarding mimetic words, which describe personality characteristics. Results showed that emphases of intonation contours independently affected personality impression traits. Relations between the degree of emphases in intonations and the personality traits were described by simple or reverse U-shaped curves, whose peak positions and slopes were varied by traits. By combining these characteristic curves, the study could restore the personality image as a whole via speech. Although participants evaluated speeches with unfamiliar intonation as obscure talks, the speakers were viewed easygoing and optimistic. The results indicate our tolerance toward the people, who speak non-native or unfamiliar dialect accent.

Theoretical models of non-native speech perception: Implications for perception of foreign-accented speech

Linguistic experience systematically affects speech perception, specifically for non-native phonemes and contrasts. Native language influences are strong in adults, and emerge in infancy. Several theoretical models of non-native speech perception have been proposed, including the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM: Best), Speech Learning Model (LSM: Flege), and Native Language Magnet model (NLM: Kuhl). Findings that infants learn statistical distributions of phoneme sequences, and phonetic details, converge on the notion that exposure to specific phonetic patterns affects the perception of phonological structure. A reasonable extrapolation is that perception of even native utterances should be influenced by their pronunciation with either familiar or unfamiliar phonetic structure. That is, if a listener is inexperienced with a given foreign accent, or another native language dialect, perception should be predictably affected when native phonemes/words are produced with those accents. This issue has received modest research attention, which has focused on sentences/words rather than phonemes. Findings suggest that unfamiliar accents do reduce recognition and intelligibility of native sentences and words. The implications of non-native speech models, particularly PAM and SLM, for understanding and studying the impact of foreign accent on perception of native phonemes and contrasts, as well as longer utterances, will be discussed. [Work supported by NIH.]

The Politics of Relation: Creole Languages in "Dogeaters" and "Rolling the R's"

On March 25, 1990, a review of Jessica Hagedorn's novel Dogeaters appeared on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. While the review was generally favorable, the reviewer offered this critique of the use of different languages in the book: There are times when, reading one wishes for not only an intimate knowledge of contemporary Manila society, but also of Spanish and Tagalog. Filipino English [Taglish] will be an unfamiliar dialect to most readers. Conveying its nuances to an English-speaking readership is a task Ms. Hagedorn has set herself but one in which she has not quite succeeded. [...] It's amusing to interbreed the languages and the music like that. But I'd like to know what it means. Maybe because there is no equivalent, there is no colloquial way of talking about merienda in English (a light meal in the late afternoon or evening), let alone kundiman and halo-halo. Or no equivalent for any of the hundreds of other non-English expressions that pepper Ms. Hagedorn's pages. [...] The exoticisms become tiresome, more a nervous tic than a desire to make connection across the gulf of culture. (D'Alpuget 38) In remarking that conveying [Taglish's] nuances to an English-speaking readership is a task Ms. Hagedorn has set herself but one in which she has not quite succeeded, the reviewer reveals her misapprehensions about Hagedorn's use of Taglish in the novel, assuming that failure stems from Hagedorn's unwillingness to translate and make indigenous culture easy to understand for Anglophone consumers. Indeed, the remark assumes that the author is supposed to cater to this particular English-speaking American audience and inadvertently points to a hierarchization of languages that reflects the global division of labor in the political economy of the United States, where English is privileged over both Tagalog, a language of a former American colony, and Spanish, the language of many of America's underclass immigrants. (1) Despite what this New York Times book review suggests, Hagedorn uses a rather superficial form of Taglish, an almost inaccurate depiction of the Taglish used in Manila, which comprises much more Tagalog than English. Rather, the sprinkling of Tagalog and Spanish words and phrases among the English words in the novel stimulates a dynamic among the various languages quite different from the way Standard English is deployed in the United States. The novel, set in the Philippine martial law period, depicts Manila society and politics in the 1970s, focusing on the experiences of characters that are considered marginal by the society in which they lived: the daughters, wives, and sisters of powerful male senators and generals as well as working-class Filipinas and impoverished male sex workers. The moments in the novel where Taglish is present amid the predominantly English text present us with a cultural sensibility that evokes the author's perception of Manila during Martial Law (1972-1986). More specifically than in Dogeaters, R. Zamora Linmark's novel Rolling the R's dramatizes this opposition between English and a creole language. Rolling the R's depicts a culture where Hawai'i Creole English (HCE) or Pidgin, the language regularly used by the local, poor, working-class Filipino American residents in the novel, is considered far inferior to standard English and is regulated by the education system. Here, Pidgin is linked to marginalized identities, particularly sexualized and racialized identities: for example, Edgar Ramirez, as a young gay Filipino boy, is deemed sexually and racially unacceptable to the traditional values of Hawai'i's Filipino communities. The novel follows the lives of a cast of ten-year-old fifth-graders who are considered outcasts in the economically depressed community of Kalihi in 1970s Hawai'i. This cast includes not only Edgar, but Katrina, a sexually promiscuous girl; Florante, a recent immigrant from the Philippines who is fluent in several languages and is a brilliant poet; and Vicente, a sexually repressed boy who allows himself to soar only when he performs Donna Summer songs. …

Can children with speech difficulties process an unfamiliar accent?

This study explores the hypothesis that children identified as having phonological processing problems may have particular difficulty in processing a different accent. Children with speech difficulties (n = 18) were compared with matched controls on four measures of auditory processing. First, an accent auditory lexical decision task was administered. In one condition, the children made lexical decisions about stimuli presented in their own accent (London). In the second condition, the stimuli were spoken in an unfamiliar accent (Glaswegian). The results showed that the children with speech difficulties had a specific deficit on the unfamiliar accent. Performance on the other auditory discrimination tasks revealed additional deficits at lower levels of input processing. The wider clinical implications of the findings are considered.

What speaking rates do non-native listeners prefer?

In this study we report on an experiment in which two groups of ESL participants (native Mandarin listeners and a mixed group of speakers of other languages) used a 9-point scale ranging from 'too slow' to 'too fast' to assess the appropriateness of the speech rate of narratives read by native English speakers and Mandarin learners of English. The narratives were played to listeners at their unmodified rates and at three computer-manipulated rates: all passages were adjusted to the Mean Mandarin rate, the Mean English rate, and a Reduced Rate, 10 per cent slower than the Mean Mandarin rate. In general, the modifications did not result in improvements in the ratings. However, the listeners did tend to assign better ratings to accelerated (compared with natural rate) productions from the slowest Mandarin speakers. Regression analyses projected that the Mandarin-speaking listeners would prefer the same 'ideal' rate for Mandarin-accented speech that they did for native English speech, while the other ESL learners would prefer Mandarin-accented English to be spoken at a rate slower than native English speech but faster than the Mandarin speakers' natural rate. This result may reflect a difference in processing costs for familiar and unfamiliar accents. Taken together with the results of other studies, these findings suggest that the admonition to second language learners to 'slow down' is unlikely to be a broadly beneficial strategy.

Separating style and content with bilinear models.

Perceptual systems routinely separate "content" from "style," classifying familiar words spoken in an unfamiliar accent, identifying a font or handwriting style across letters, or recognizing a familiar face or object seen under unfamiliar viewing conditions. Yet a general and tractable computational model of this ability to untangle the underlying factors of perceptual observations remains elusive (Hofstadter, 1985). Existing factor models (Mardia, Kent, & Bibby, 1979; Hinton & Zemel, 1994; Ghahramani, 1995; Bell & Sejnowski, 1995; Hinton, Dayan, Frey, & Neal, 1995; Dayan, Hinton, Neal, & Zemel, 1995; Hinton & Ghahramani, 1997) are either insufficiently rich to capture the complex interactions of perceptually meaningful factors such as phoneme and speaker accent or letter and font, or do not allow efficient learning algorithms. We present a general framework for learning to solve two-factor tasks using bilinear models, which provide sufficiently expressive representations of factor interactions but can nonetheless be fit to data using efficient algorithms based on the singular value decomposition and expectation-maximization. We report promising results on three different tasks in three different perceptual domains: spoken vowel classification with a benchmark multi-speaker database, extrapolation of fonts to unseen letters, and translation of faces to novel illuminants.

Parent-Child Comparative Analysis

This paper describes a criterion-referenced method that was developed to assess the speech and language of a girl, age 4 years, 8 months, whose parents spoke English that was greatly influenced by their native Nigerian language. The method, called Parent-Child Comparative Analysis (PCCA), consisted of administering an identical battery of tests to both father and child and then interpreting the child’s performance in relation to that of the father’s. Normal age-level expectations for various linguistic structures also influenced interpretation. Results indicated that the child’s articulation skills were mildly delayed for her age and dialect and that she had a moderate disorder in several language areas. Suggestions and limitations of the PCCA are provided for clinicians who may wish to use this method for assessing persons who speak an uncommon or unfamiliar dialect of English and/or when information about the normal patterns of a dialect is unavailable.

Social influences on the whistled songs of starlings

Playback experiments on individuals singing near their nest show that starlings tend to repeat the theme they have just heard even if it is an unfamiliar dialect and not ‘programmed’ in their own current sequence. The type of response and its temporal characteristics could be related to internal sequential organization rules. Moreover, starlings discriminate between two dialectal variants of a given theme and respond more often and more quickly to the familiar dialect. A social influence on the choice of theme by the individual can also be observed in foraging flocks and roosts where song is frequently given. Observation of such groups reveal that one theme predominates on each given occasion and that it depends on the number of individuals present and on the type of group (flock or roost). This is probably a function of the tendency to match. Previous observations of flights toward the roost showed that birds originating from different dialectal areas congregate in such groups. A few analyses of songs in flocks and roosts confirm the presence of different dialects simultaneously.

The effect of two educated dialects on sentence repetition scores of five year old Scottish children.

Five and six year old Scottish children from 4 schools imitated two parallel sets of sentences graded for difficulty and linguistic features, and modelled by two testers who spoke with similar social dialects (educated) but different regional dialects (Glaswegian and New Zealand). Contrary to predictions the unfamiliar New Zealand dialect was no handicap to such young children from either high or low socio-economic districts. Apart from an obvious interpretation that the children had already been exposed to dialect differences by television, a competing hypothesis would be that the speakers' adaptability in a one-to-one situation may lead to an adjustment of features like speed, clarity or articulation which counter the effects of an unfamiliar dialect.

Cognate Recognition across Dialects

Abstract Synchronic cognates are subject to recognition failures across dialects, if processing through different determining features leads to phonemic misclassification. But phonemes common to all dialects can also cause recognition failures if they differ in function. These findings support a theoretical distinction between phone, phoneme, and morpho phone, the last being an essential unit for the cognate reconstruction necessary for error-free processing of unfamiliar dialects.