We investigated comprehension of and adaptation to speech in an unfamiliar accent in older adults. Participants performed a speeded sentence verification task for accented sentences: one group upon auditory-only presentation, and the other group upon audiovisual presentation. Our questions were whether audiovisual presentation would facilitate adaptation to the novel accent, and which cognitive...

The goal of this study is to provide a global view of Spanish second language (L2) accent and to identify the sounds and structures that lead to the perception of foreign accent. We designed a list of real Spanish monosyllabic words with various syllable structures that covers all phonemes in Spanish. The words were produced by L2 learners and native speakers and rated by native listeners. We u...

INTRODUCTION Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS) is a relatively rare motor speech disorder in which the pronunciation of a patient is perceived by listeners of the same language community as distinctly foreign. FAS has been well documented in adult patients with etiologically heterogeneous, though mostly vascular brain lesions affecting the motor speech network of the language dominant hemisphere. I...

High degree of between-rater variability in pronunciation assessment is often reported in literature. However, human assessments of pronunciation skills of second language (L2) learners are used in standardized languageproficiency tests. Besides, these scores are used as a reference point in evaluating computer-based systems for pronunciation teaching and testing. Therefore it is important to b...

Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is a rare disorder characterized by the emergence of a perceived foreign accent following brain damage. Despite decades of study, little is known about the neural substrates involved in this disorder. In this case study, MRI images of the brain were obtained during a speech task for an American English-speaking monolingual female who presented with FAS of unknown e...

Understanding the circumstances under which talker (and other types of) variability affects language perception represents an important area of research in the field of spoken word recognition. Previous work has demonstrated that talker effects are more likely when processing is relatively slow (McLennan & Luce, 2005). Given that listeners may take longer to process foreign-accented speech than...

Acquiring another language is a fairly challenging process. Pronunciation one of the components which embodies source concern for many learners. The reason behind this that English has difficult sounds non-native speakers. As an learner, improving pronunciation can help not only in making natural sentences, but also speech clear and understandable. This work trying to shed light on process acqu...