This study investigated whether Iranian EFL learners are aware of different varieties of English spoken throughout the world and whether they have tendency towards a particular variety of English. Likewise, it explored the attitudes of Iranian EFL learners towards the native and non-native varieties of English. Moreover, it made an attempt to investigate whether such attitudes are gender-orient...

This study investigates the relation between speech accent and musical beat in two languages of different accent types. ‘Accent’ is intended to refer to any type of prominence: stress in English and pitch in Japanese. Previous studies on English textsetting indicate a rather strong matching of linguistic accents and musical beat strength. In L2 acquisition, Japanese learners of English tend to ...

Accents provide information about the speaker's geographical, socio-economic, and ethnic background. Research in applied psychology and sociolinguistics suggests that we generally prefer our own accent to other varieties of our native language and attribute more positive traits to it. Despite the widespread influence of accents on social interactions, educational and work settings the neural un...

We measured the alignment of F0 minima and maxima with segmental landmarks, in prenuclear rising accents in Northern and Southern German. As in earlier studies of other languages, we found consistent patterns of alignment. Both Northern and Southern German speakers align rises later than published data for Greek, English, and Dutch; Southern German speakers show later alignment than Northern sp...

Most English text-to-speech synthesisers offer one of only two accents: General American or RP. Developing a new accent is laborious, since it is not possible to choose one accent as a base form and systematically translate to others. We use the approach of Wells ([1]), categorising vowels in terms of abstract keywords that encode classes of words. Thus it is unnecessary to use a phonemic trans...

We investigate whether automatic accent identification is more effective for English utterances embedded in a different language as part of a mixed code than for English utterances that are part of a monolingual dialogue. Our focus is on Xhosa and Zulu, two South African languages for which code mixing with English is very common. In order to carry out our investigation, we extract English utte...

English is the only language available for global communication and is used by 1.5 billions of speakers. It is also known to have a large diversity of pronunciation due to the influence of speakers’ mother tongue, called accents. Our project aims at creating a global and speaker-basis map of English accents to be used in learning World Englishes as well as research studies of World Englishes [1...

The purpose of this longitudinal study was to evaluate the influence of age (adult vs. child) and length of residence (LOR) in an L2-speaking country (3 vs. 5 years) on degree of foreign accent in a second language (L2). Korean adults and children living in North America, and age-matched groups of native English (NE) adults and children, recorded English sentences in sessions held 1.2 years apa...