This paper reports on an investigation of the potential for a shared-L1 advantage on an academic English listening test featuring speakers with L2 accents. 212 second-language listeners (including 70 Mandarin Chinese L1 listeners, and 60 Japanese L1 listeners) completed three versions of the University Test of English as a Second Language (UTESL) listening sub-test which featured an Australian ...

The present study investigates the contribution of fundamental frequency (F0) in native English and native French listeners‟ segmentation of French speech. The results of a word-monitoring task with resynthesized stimuli show that pitch accents modulated speech segmentation for both groups, but unlike native listeners, the English listeners, who were at mid and high proficiencies in French, wer...

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is a key component in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) applications. Stability of ASR systems largely depends on accent, gender, age of speakers, background noise and channel variations. In this paper, a study has been conducted to classify five different accents of Urdu language spoken in Pakistan i.e. Punjabi, Urdu, Pashto, Saraiki and Sindhi. Speech data ha...

the global spread of english, co-occurring with globalization, has generated new views towards some issues in english language teaching, one of which being the place of home culture versus foreign language culture in english language classes. the following study aimed to compare the viewpoint of three groups, i.e. language teachers, language learners and parents regarding the role of home cultu...

This article deals with research into the importance of native or near pronunciation a person’s L2 L3 and prejudices faced by those who may speak an accented form majority language. In order to reach its conclusions, analyses focused on learning English as undertaken over last 50 years. It concentrated impact speech biases for against speakers language identifies where these findings converge d...

Prosody, as manifested in accents and phrasal boundaries, is a recognized and important aspect of human language understanding. Accents are supported by syllables, whereas phrasal boundaries occur between words. The influence of both accents and boundaries on the other hand, extends to surrounding syllables and, in the case of boundaries, preceding words (even as far back as the last accent in ...

In this paper we investigate speech recognition performance of systems employing several accent-specific recognisers in parallel for the simultaneous recognition of multiple accents. We compare these systems with oracle systems, in which test utterances are presented to matching accent-specific recognisers, and with accent-independent systems, in which acoustic and language model training data ...

Declaration By submitting this thesis electronically, I declare that the entirety of the work contained therein is my own, original work, that I am the sole author thereof (save to the extent explicitly otherwise stated), that reproduction and publication thereof by Stellenbosch University will not infringe any third party rights and that I have not previously in its entirety or in part submitt...