For most of us, speaking in a non-native language involves deviating to some extent from native pronunciation norms. However, the detailed basis for foreign accent (FA) remains elusive, in part due to methodological challenges in isolating segmental from suprasegmental factors. The current study examines the role of segmental features in conveying FA through the use of a generative approach in ...

this study aimed at investigating the impact of utilizing call on efl learners’ foreign accent reduction. to this end, 62 participants out of 100 undergraduate freshman english students at islamic azad university central tehran branch were ed based on a piloted sample pet and a text-to-read. the ed participants were then nonrandomly assigned to an experimental and a control group, each containi...

Recent data suggest that the first presentation of a foreign accent triggers a delay in word identification, followed by a subsequent adaptation. This study examines under what conditions the delay resumes to baseline level. The delay will be experimentally induced by the presentation of sentences spoken to listeners in a foreign or a regional accent as part of a lexical decision task for words...

In this article we present a study of a multi-accent and accentindependent non-native speech recognition. We propose several approaches based on phonetic confusion and acoustic adaptation. The goal of this article is to investigate the feasibility of multi-accent non-native speech recognition without detecting the origin of the speaker. Tests on the HIWIRE corpus show that multi-accent pronunci...

The present study investigates the perception of foreign-accented speech. It seeks to address the issue of whether systematic exposure to a representative sample of speech from a specific foreign accent improves comprehension of that accent. In this study, perception of Spanish-accented English was examined before and after a training regimen that involved exposure to a range or word-level Span...

A key issue in judging foreign accent is to isolate the phonetic component from potentially confounding higher-level factors such as grammatical or prosodic errors which arise when using natural sentence-length speech material. The current study evaluated accent and intelligibility ratings of children’s speech for isolated words spliced out of extemporaneous material elicited via a picture desc...

Are listeners able to adapt to a foreign-accented speaker who has, as is often the case, an inconsistent accent? Two groups of native Dutch listeners participated in a cross-modal priming experiment, either in a consistent-accent condition (German-accented items only) or in an inconsistent-accent condition (German-accented and nativelike pronunciations intermixed). The experimental words were i...

Oral fluency and foreign accent distinguish L2 from L1 speech production. In language testing practices, both fluency and accent are usually assessed by raters. This study investigates what exactly native raters of fluency and accent take into account when judging L2. Our aim is to explore the relationship between objectively measured temporal, segmental and suprasegmental properties of speech ...

Source Generator Based Prosodic Features John H.L. Hansen and Levent M. Arslan Robust Speech Processing Laboratory Duke University Department of Electrical Engineering Box 90291, Durham, North Carolina 27708-0291 ABSTRACT Speaker accent is an important issue in the formulation of robust speaker independent recognition systems. Knowledge gained from a reliable accent classi cation approach could...