The present study examined how native English speakers in Canada assessed the degree of foreign accent in nonnative speech when they were required to focus on the content of an utterance. The native English listeners were asked to listen to English sentences produced by speakers of Japanese, Mandarin, and Tamil, and to rate their foreign accent on a 9-point scale in two different rating tasks. ...

In this paper, a study is made on selecting existing acoustic models that are trained from native English speech for improving recognition of nonnative English talkers’ speech. The problem is addressed from the perspective that foreign accents prevent detailed triphone models that are commonly used in highperformance speech recognition systems to match well with these talkers’ speech, and there...

Foreign accent is judged by the degree to which the non-native (L2) production is perceived differently from production patterns by native speakers (NL) [1]. Both segmental and suprasegmental features are shown influential in accent perception by NL speakers or L2 learners [2]-[4]. However, roles of prosodic cues in the process are not well known yet. Our study aims to investigate effects of in...

This paper describes the prosodic characteristics of a female Dutch native speaker with so-called Foreign Accent Syndrome. Although Foreign Accent Syndrome has often been regarded as a speech disorder which is characterized by substantial deviations in intonation patterns, the case of a Dutch-speaking patient is reported whose intonation patterns can be regarded as normal.

Multiple reports have described patients with disordered articulation and prosody, often following acute aphasia, dysarthria, or apraxia of speech, which results in the perception by listeners of a foreign-like accent. These features led to the term foreign accent syndrome (FAS), a speech disorder with perceptual features that suggest an indistinct, non-native speaking accent. Also correctly kn...

We worked to create an effective classifier for foreign accented English speech in order to determine the origins of the speaker. Using pitch features, we first classify between two accents, German and Mandarin, and then expanded to a set of twelve accents. We achieved a notable improvement over random performance and gained insights into the strengths of and relationships between the accents w...

It is well known that speaker variability caused by accent is one factor that degrades performance of speech recognition algorithms. If knowledge of speaker accent can be estimated accurately, then a modiied set of recognition models which addresses speaker accent could be employed to increase recognition accuracy. In this study, the problem of language accent classiication in American English ...

Previous research on the perception of foreign accent has largely focused on speaker-dependent factors such as Age of Learning and Length of Residence which are specific to an individual speaker. Factors that are independent of particular speakers and their language learning history have also been shown to affect perception of second language speech. The present study examined two speaker-indep...