Being a nonnative speaker of a language poses challenges. Individuals often feel embarrassed by the errors they make when talking in their second language. However, here we report an advantage of being a nonnative speaker: Native speakers give foreign-accented speakers the benefit of the doubt when interpreting their utterances; as a result, apparently implausible utterances are more likely to ...

This study assessed the relation between non-native subjects' age of learning (AOL) English and the overall degree of perceived foreign accent in their production of English sentences. The 240 native Italian (NI) subjects examined had begun learning English in Canada between the ages of 2 and 23 yr, and had lived in Canada for an average of 32 yr. Native English-speaking listeners used a contin...

How early in life, and in what situations, are children sensitive to speakers’ accents? Some researchers have suggested that accent is an early-developing, perhaps intrinsic, signal of group membership. However, other studies find little sensitivity to or awareness of accent in young children. Three experiments reported here examine 3-5-yearolds’ comprehension of, and social decision-making wit...

Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is a rare disorder characterized by the emergence of a perceived foreign accent following brain damage. The symptomotology, functional bases, and neural substrates of this disorder are still being elucidated. In this case study, acoustic analyses were performed on the speech of a 46-year old monolingual female who presented with FAS of unknown aetiology. The patien...

A foreign accent involves discrete phonetic features which can be acoustically analyzed. However, these phonetic features are often masked perceptually by other features, such as prosodic features. This study presents an acoustic analysis of the postvocalic /l/ in Chinese learners, as an example, and puts these results into context with a perception test, which targets the overall aspects of an...

The performance of speech recognition systems degrades when speaker accent is diierent from that in the training set. Accent-independent or accent-dependent recognition both require collection of more training data. In this paper, we propose a faster accent classiica-tion approach using phoneme-class models. We also present our ndings in acoustic features sensitive to a Cantonese accent, and po...

This paper aims to examine the contribution of pitch and pitch range to the perception of foreign accent produced by Chinese L2 speakers of German. A perceptual assessment of 8 Chinese speakers was conducted by a panel of 10 German native speakers. Phonetic acoustic analysis was carried out for these 8 Chinese speakers and 7 German speakers for comparison. The results show that the Chinese spea...