Welsh and Northern English), and two American ones (New York and South Carolina, to represent Eastern and Southern American); regional features were based primarily on the descriptions in [1], with native-speaker input where possible. The regional accents are abbreviated in this paper as: Br(Sc) = Edinburgh; Br(W) = Cardiff; Br(N) = Leeds; Am(E) = New York; and Am(S) = South Carolina. For the s...

This research focuses on the identification and characterisation of accents in French. For both foreign and regional accents, we started with perceptual identification experiments, we measured phonetic features which may characterise these accents using automatic phoneme alignment, and we ranked the most discriminating features by using classification techniques. The following features are perc...

Speaking anxiety is a form of foreign language which may reduce students’ willingness to communicate orally. Despite accent being one the most salient aspects speech, there has been little research date on relationship between non-native and speaking anxiety. The purpose this study therefore examine English learners’ perceptions beliefs about accent, also explore concept anxiety, that is, arisi...

This article reports on research which seeks to compare and measure the similarities between phonetic transcriptions in the analysis of relationships between varieties of English. It addresses the question of whether these varieties have been converging, diverging, or maintaining equilibrium as a result of endogenous and exogenous phonetic and phonological changes. We argue that it is only poss...

This study investigates infants’ discrimination abilities for familiar and unfamiliar regional English accents. Using a variation of the head-turn preference procedure, 5-month-old infants demonstrated that they were able to distinguish between their own South-West English accent and an unfamiliar Welsh English accent. However, this distinction was not seen when two unfamiliar accents (Welsh En...

Previous research has found that listeners understand talkers who speak with the same accent as themselves better than others. The aim of the current study was to investigate how speech intelligibility is modulated by this talker-listener accent interaction when native and non-native listeners hear spontaneous speech. To this end, native Southern British English listeners and native Korean list...

This study investigates how Mandarin Chinese (MC) speakers learn English pitch accents under the influence of L1 prosody system. Based on Speech Learning Model (SLM), it is hypothesized that MC speakers will produce H* better than L* since MC speakers tend to associate stressed syllables with higher pitch. Another hypothesis is that MC speakers will produce pitch accents better in the sentence-...

This study investigated whether and how imitation of sentences spoken in Liverpool English (LE) and Standard Southern British English (SSBE), affected attitudes related to these accents. LE has low prestige and low social attractiveness, while SSBE has high prestige and high attractiveness. A previous study showed that imitation positively affects social attractiveness, but not prestige, for an...