The present study investigated the extent to which accent sensitivity provides the foundation for lexical knowledge and listening comprehension for Japanese university students learning English as a foreign language (EFL). On an English accent correctness (i.e., YES/NO response) decision task, 63 participants showed considerably high accuracy and speed in identifying correctly-accented nouns (8...

This paper presents a new approach to exploit data-driven universal background model (UBM) generation using tied Gaussians for accent identification (AID). The motivation of the proposed algorithm is to potentially utilize broad phoneticspecific accent characteristics by Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and examine data-driven phonetically-inspired UBM creation for GMM-supervector based accent clas...

It is believed that knowledge gained from reliable accent classification could be employed to improve the performance of speech recognition and speaker recognition algorithms. In this paper, we investigate the use of articulatory movement in the spectral domain to classify accented speech. The trajectories are modelled by a mixture of probability density functions of a random sequence of states...

FAS is a speech disorder characterized by changes to the normal speech patterns of the native language. This speech impairment is usually due to stroke or brain injury. Segmental, suprasegmental and prosodic features are altered. FAS speakers’ speech is perceived as foreign rather than disordered. It may be because the speech remains highly accurate and the impairments are generally within the ...

This study compared the post-CVA speech of a patient presenting with the foreign accent syndrome (FAS) to both a premorbid baseline for that patient and to similarly analyzed data from an earlier reported case of FAS. The object of this research was to provide quantitative acoustic data to determine whether: (1) the constellation of phonetic features associated with FAS is the same across patie...

Both subjective impressions and previous research with monolingual listeners suggest that a foreign accent interferes with word recognition in infants, young children, and adults. However, because being exposed to multiple accents is likely to be an everyday occurrence in many societies, it is unexpected that such non-standard pronunciations would significantly impede language processing once t...

This paper presents the case of a 33-year-old, right-handed, French-speaking Belgian lady who was involved in a car accident as a pedestrian. Six months after the incident she developed a German/Flemish-like accent. The patient's medical history, the onset of the FAS and the possible psychological causes of the accent change are analyzed. Relevant neuropsychological, neurolinguistic, and psycho...

A recent paper by Lev-Ari and Keysar (2010) reported that the processing fluency associated with non-native speech causes non-native speakers to sound less credible. The authors found that the same trivia statements were rated as less truthful when spoken by a non-native speaker of English. The present paper reports the results of three studies that attempted to replicate the findings of Lev-Ar...

A group of higher than average ability learners of the phonetic characteristics of a foreign language attempted to imitate stimuli from Japanese in tasks involving long and complex phrases and shorter minimal pair contrasts. Three information modalities were used (aural, visual, orthographic), introduced progressively, in order to test the subjects' use of different input sources. Their perform...