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While empirical research on attitudes towards languages and linguistic varieties has become increasingly popular from the 1960s onwards (e.g. Lambert, Hodgson, Gardner, & Fillenbaum, 1960), experimental investigations into the ability to correctly identify the origin of speakers are in comparison still relatively scarce. We know that the ability to correlate a stretch of uncategorised speech (token) with a series of models (types) is experientially acquired in early childhood (e.g. Kristiansen, 2010), but how similar are those abilities in adulthood and across European nations? English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) has become an integral part of the linguistic reality in Europe (and of the linguistic scenario in the entire world) (e.g. Jenkins, Baker, & Dewey, 2018). Whenever we communicate with anyone who is not a speaker of our own native language in any European country, most of the time we communicate in English. But does our L1 accent still shine through? Will we be recognised (and in most cases probably also stereotypically judged) on the basis of just a short stretch of speech when we communicate in ELF? In Part I of this paper we outline the design of the first large-scale pan-European project on L1 and L2 identifications of ELF in Europe, including 785 respondents from 8 countries. Exploratory analyses confirm the hypothesis that statistically significant asymmetries would show up across different European countries or regions. In Part II of this paper we then aim to explain these asymmetries through a multifactorial statistical analysis (Geeraerts, Grondelaers, & Speelman, 1999; Tagliamonte & Baayen, 2012; Speelman, Heylen, & Geeraerts, 2018). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined whether and how English as a foreign language (EFL) learners` perceptions towards their own and others` accent is liable to impact their second language (L2) willingness to communicate (WTC). The content analysis of interviews with 20 EFL learners showed that L2 WTC was amenable to their hegemonic attitudes towards native English accents. As many as four recurring themes arose from the interviews which showed how perceived accent strength can impact L2 WTC. These include: Accent-related stigmas, accent-based disruptiveness, aspiration for showing off one`s accent, and self-perceived communicative competence and self-confidence. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of the findings and outlining avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out to describe the use of a 'Hong Kong accent' by speakers of English in Hong Kong, and to explain its use in relation to the sociolinguistic situation in the territory. A detailed description of both segmental and supra-segmental features of this accent is provided. The paper then attempts to account for the use of a Hong Kong accent by reference to a theoretical framework , which is derived from Le Page's and Tabouret-Keller's (1985) work on 'acts of identity'. In addition, the paper reports on the results of a 'verbal guise' measure designed to test the reactions of university students in Hong Kong to various English accents. The results of a questionnaire administered with the verbal guise provide some evidence of local speakers' 'identification' with the use of a local accent. Educational implications of the findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this qualitative inquiry is to investigate the relationship between accent and identity in English as lingua franca (ELF) communication from the perspective of second language (L2) speakers/learners of English. Learners' view point and overall orientation towards the learning process impacts the learners' overall performance. Being a qualitative inquiry this research could not cover a large number of learners in its span. Ten English Students/learners' data about ELF communication experience was collected by semi-structured interviews at Karachi, Pakistan. The figures revealed a mix perception about the choice of accent in the participants: approximately 55% of the participants went for their natural accent, while about 45% of the participants chose British or American accents. This research is a small contribution to the little investigated relationship of accent and identity in EFL communication. It is recommended by the researchers that there is a need of conducting some quantitative studies seeking learners' perceptions about language learning, which would cover divers and a large number of learns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to focus on the stress pattern in English Language (EL). Learning the rules of stress in EL is a complex phenomenon. This article is an endeavor to look at this complex phenomenon in detail. The paper describes the rules both, in words and sentence levels. It gives information about the placement of stress in content and function words. The issue of primary and secondary stress has been discussed in the article. This research work presents too, the context, in which weak form words are stressed. The whole research work is done with the hope that the non-native speakers of English will get insight in learning the rules of stress and the work can also be utilized as guidelines for more scientific research in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Although English pitch accent detection has been studied extensively, there relatively a few works explore Mandarin stress detection. Moreover, the comparison and analysis between Mandarin stress detection and English pitch accent detection have not been touched for such counterpart tasks. In this paper, we discuss Mandarin stress detection and compare it with English pitch accent detection. The contributions of the paper are two aspects: one is that we use classifier combination method to detect Mandarin stress and English pitch accent by using acoustic, lexical and syntactic evidence. Our proposed method achieves better performance on both the Mandarin prosodic annotation corpus—ASCCD and the English prosodic annotation corpus—Boston University Radio News Corpus (BURNC) when compared with the baseline system. We also verify our proposed method on other prosodic annotation corpus and continuous speech corpus. The other is the feature analysis. Duration, pitch, energy and intensity features are compared for Mandarin stress detection and English pitch accent detection. Based on the analysis of prosodic annotation corpora, we also verify some linguistic conclusions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper provides an introduction to the acoustic–phonetic structure of English regional accents and presents a signal processing method for the modeling and transformation of the acoustic correlates of English accents for example from British English to American English. The focus of this paper is on the modeling of intonation and duration correlates of accents as the modeling of formants is described in previous papers (). The intonation correlates of accents are modeled with the statistics of a set of broad features of the pitch contour. The statistical models of phoneme durations and word speaking rates are obtained from automatic segmentation of word/phoneme boundaries of speech databases. A contribution of this paper is the use of accent synthesis for comparative evaluation of the causal effects of the acoustic correlates of accent. The differences between the acoustics–phonetic realizations of British Received Pronunciation (RP), Broad Australian (BAU) and General American (GenAm) English accents are modeled and used in an accent transformation and synthesis method for evaluation of the influence of formant, pitch and duration on conveying accents. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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Evaluative reactions to language stimuli are presumably dynamic events, constantly changing through time as the signal unfolds, yet the tools we usually use to capture these reactions provide us with only a snapshot of this process by recording reactions at a single point in time. This paper outlines and evaluates a new methodology which employs audience response data collection techniques to capture listeners’ real-time reactions to variation in a speech signal. Using bespoke audience response software administered via the Web, we provide evidence that (1) listeners’ reactions to language data can be captured in real-time and (2) recent innovations in statistical analysis can isolate relevant points at which participants express positive or negative evaluations. In conclusion, we suggest that, given the right stimuli, real-time changes in evaluative reaction can be correlated with linguistic variation and so can be used as a way of uncovering the features that are salient in a given language variety. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: The paralinguistic information in a speech signal includes clues to the geographical and social background of the speaker. This paper is concerned with automatic extraction of this information from a short segment of speech. A state-of-the-art language identification (LID) system is applied to the problems of regional accent recognition for British English, and ethnic group recognition within a particular accent. We compare the results with human performance and, for accent recognition, the ‘text dependent’ ACCDIST accent recognition measure. For the 14 regional accents of British English in the ABI-1 corpus (good quality read speech), our LID system achieves a recognition accuracy of 89.6%, compared with 95.18% for our best ACCDIST-based system and 58.24% for human listeners. The “Voices across Birmingham” corpus contains significant amounts of telephone conversational speech for the two largest ethnic groups in the city of Birmingham (UK), namely the ‘Asian’ and ‘White’ communities. Our LID system distinguishes between these two groups with an accuracy of 96.51% compared with 90.24% for human listeners. Although direct comparison is difficult, it seems that our LID system performs much better on the standard 12 class NIST 2003 Language Recognition Evaluation task or the two class ethnic group recognition task than on the 14 class regional accent recognition task. We conclude that automatic accent recognition is a challenging task for speech technology, and speculate that the use of natural conversational speech may be advantageous for these types of paralinguistic task. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

ABSTRACT: This study assessed the attitudinal responses of 48 Japanese university students towards 10 accented English speech samples across nine evaluative criteria. Of the 10 samples, one was a Japanese-English speech sample (the intracultural familiar), seven were non-native-English samples originating from a variety of Asian countries (intercultural others), and two were native-English samples originating from America and England (preferred intercultural others). Framed within socio-psychological intergroup theories of identity, and current debates concerning English as a Foreign Language (EFL), the results indicate that although the students favoured the native-English speech samples, they were generally unsuccessfully in identifying where the speaker of each speech sample originated. This paper contends that the native English speech samples were afforded a kind of quasi-ingroup status among the Japanese students, while the non-native Asian speech samples were positioned firmly within a distant outgroup category. The results are discussed in relation to the development of positive intercultural relationships, the domestic presence of the foreigner and the implications for the future of ELT within Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper presents a word-independent technique for classifying the syllable stress of spoken English words. The proposed technique improves upon the existing word-independent techniques by utilizing the acoustic differences of various syllable nuclei. Syllables with acoustically similar nuclei are grouped together and a separate stress classifier is trained for each such group. The performance of the proposed group-specific classifiers is analyzed as the number of groups is increased and is also compared with an alternative data-driven clustering based approach. The proposed technique improves the syllable-level accuracy by 5.2% and the word-level accuracy by 1.1%. The corresponding improvements using the data-driven clustering based approach are 0.12% and 0.02%, respectively. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Based on the analysis of 4500 Mandarin speech errors in naturalistic settings, this paper examines the phonological organization of tones in speech production and reports on several significant findings. First, at the level of phonological representation, tone errors occur just as freely as segmental errors and are likewise largely due to an adjacent syllable. In terms of directionality, perseverative tone errors are the most frequent. While substitution errors predominately involve the falling tone, contour tones in turn outnumber level tones. The analysis also indicates that tones in Mandarin do not have the same syntagmatic organizational status as lexical stresses in languages like English, as tones are more closely associated with lexical items in their underlying forms and are part of the lexical organization. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper investigates stress placement in one variety of Black South African English (BSAE), namely Tswana English. Current research points to two possible hypotheses about stress in BSAE. The penult-hypothesis holds that the penult syllable is stressed in BSAE, while the random-hypothesis suggests that a variety of stress assignment strategies are employed by BSAE speakers, without the possibility of predicting stress placement. A data corpus of 333 polysyllabic words was analysed in detail to determine the properties of the Tswana English stress system. These properties were subsequently interpreted by means of Optimality Theory. The major conclusion is that stress is stored lexically in function words, but a coherent system of ranked constraints exists for content words. These constraints account for a very high percentage of the observed data. Both the penult- and random-hypotheses are rejected. It is shown that stress is attracted by the penult, but superheavy final syllables may attract stress to the final syllable, while the presence of certain suffixes may attract stress to the antepenult. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates stress placement in the English of Spanish speakers, Nigerian English and Singapore English. This investigation reveals that they have in common several patterns of stress placement that are distinct from British or American English. We show that these patterns cannot be accounted for by transfer. A different explanation is suggested, one that explains the recurrent patterns in terms of English vowel duration. It is proposed that in determining stress in multisyllabic words, L2 speakers assess the duration of syllable nuclei and assign stress to the syllable containing the longest vowel. In contrast with transfer, which holds L2 speakers' first languages responsible, this proposal attributes the distinct patterns of stress placement to the target language, making possible a unified account of the shared patterns in the three varieties of English. As L2 speakers, regardless of their first languages, grapple with the same target language, it should have a similar effect, giving rise to the common patterns of stress placement in the three varieties of English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the importance of English word-stress in communication. Effects of word-stress misplacement in comprehension; Its difference from other stress-timed language; Emphasis on word-stress to attain intelligible communication.

The aim of this article is to raise awareness of some of the differences between the vowel sounds of Received Pronunciation (RP) and Standard Scottish English (SSE). A similar analysis can be carried out for any English accent, but this article will be most useful for: • Scottish ESOL teachers using an RP chart in the classroom. • non-Scottish ESOL teachers using an RP chart in a Scottish classroom. The intention is not to suggest there is a 'correct' way of speaking but to encourage noticing the differences between the teacher's accent, the local accent and the RP chart and using these observations in teaching. I hope it will be informative and give food for thought. 'I say... you say...' started life as an interactive workshop at the NATECLA Scotland conference in November 2018. As any exploration of pronunciation benefits from discussion, which is not possible in an article, I have posed questions for you to think about at different stages of the article. I hope this will break it down and help you think about what is a big, and rather complicated, topic. So, where do we begin? Have a look at the following pronunciation exercises; they are all based on the pronunciation of single words. Can you do them? If you can't, do you know why not? If the answers are obvious to you, do you know why they might not be obvious to teachers and learners with a Scottish accent? 1. Look at the following words, decide whether the vowel sound (in bold) is /ʊ/ (short) or /uː/ (long): a) book b) shoot c) suit d) could e) foot f) food g) school h) put 2. Odd word out: which word has a different vowel sound, in bold? a) caught b) bought c) cot d) sauce 3. Miming sounds: mime the vowel sounds (in bold) found in the following words. Does your mouth make the vowel sound in one position (single sound) or two (double sound)? Sort the words into two groups, single or double sounds: a) Tree b) price c) face d) cut e) phone 4. Sound hunt: underline /ə/ in the following words (/ə/ is an unstressed vowel sound in English, if you're not sure what it sounds like you can hear it here: www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/pron/features/schwa/) a) teacher b) accountant c) politician d) doctor 5. Minimal pairs: say the following pairs of words and decide which one has a longer vowel sound (in bold): a) i) robe ii) rope b) i) coat ii) code c) i) surf ii) serve d) i) rise ii) rice e) i) beat ii) bee In case you want to check, the answers are at the end and they are also included later in the article in the comparison of RP and SSE vowels. The rest of the article is split into parts one and two. In part one I will give a short introduction to RP vowels and point you in the direction of other resources which you can use if you want to learn more. In the second part, the focus is on some of the most important and common differences between RP and SSE vowels. In part two you can also create a version of the chart for your own accent, if you'd like to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New Orleans accents are sometimes treated as one accent. This study offers several options regarding New Orleans accents to actors, dialect teachers, directors, designers, and coaches for class, stage, or film productions. As a port city on the Mississippi River and Gulf Coast, New Orleans accents share characteristics with many other Southern accents, such as substituting /d/ for /ð/, dropping "g" from "-ing" gerunds, and adding "a-" before a verb, but there are identifiable differences within the city's accents. To examine differences among some New Orleans accents, the Yat and Uptown accents from Alvarez and Kolker's 1985 film Yeah You Rite! were compared with a Cajun French accent and portrayals of the Yat accent in New Orleans comics and newspapers. This study's transcriptions of New Orleans speakers from different neighborhoods document variation in the production of vowels, consonants, and rhoticity. Differences among the three studied accents were noted. However, inconsistences in vowels, consonants, and rhoticity within neighborhoods, and within the same individual's speech, were observed more frequently than expected. Given that accents reflect character and culture, this examination of some characteristics of Yat, Uptown, and Cajun French accents presents options for increased nuance in the representation of New Orleans characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acquiring native-like pronunciation is the epitome of second/foreign language learning, but is hardest to achieve. Recently, it has been recognized that adopting a native-like or localized accent of a second/foreign language can also be a matter of choice, influenced by learners' sense of identity with their local culture - a socio-cultural factor. Taking up this research inclination, the study has inquired if Pakistani ESL learners' sense of cultural identity has any influence on their attitude towards adopting native-like English pronunciation. One hundred and thirty ESL learners from NUML, Islamabad, were surveyed through a questionnaire targeting both the variables of the study - cultural identity and native-like English pronunciation. Twenty of the study participants were interviewed as well. Data gathered from both tools of the study was triangulated to generate the results. Findings revealed that despite identifying strongly with their native culture, Pakistani ESL learners hold a positive attitude towards adopting native-like English pronunciation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: A 5-session twice-weekly clear speech protocol with daily home practice was developed to enable Spanish-accented speakers of English to code-switch for increased listener ease of understanding. This study provides preliminary data to test the hypothesis that this protocol results in increased ease of understanding for native English listeners, not in decreased talker accentedness. Method: Using a single-case experimental design, 6 adult native Spanish speakers with English proficiency participated in the protocol. Ease of understanding and accentedness were probed at least 5 times pretraining, at each training session, and once per week for 5 weeks posttraining. Thirty native English–speaking listeners assessed the probes using 7-point scales for each measure. Results: Ease of understanding improved for all participants (mean improvement = 3.5 points; effect size range = 6.98 to 15.33). Accentedness improved for 4 of 6 participants (mean improvement = 2.3 points; effect size range = 4.04 to 10.48). At the outset, most participants expressed concern that this approach would highlight speech errors. Upon follow-up, all participants reported confidence in using the approach and found it helpful in daily communication. Conclusions: Further research should explore the effects of this protocol on intelligibility and acoustic metrics and their relationship to ease of understanding and accentedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past couple of decades, research has established that (1) infant-directed speech (IDS) facilitates speech, language, and cognitive development; and (2) infants are sensitive to the rhythmic structures in the ambient language. However, little is known about the role of IDS in infants' processing of rhythmic structures. Building on these two lines of research, whether IDS enhances infants' sensitivity to the predominant stress pattern (trochaic) in English was asked. To address this question, 9-month-old American infants were familiarized and tested with both trochaic (e.g., lazy) and iambic (e.g., cartoon) words presented in either IDS or adult-directed speech (ADS). Infants showed listening preference for the trochaic over iambic words when the speech was presented in ADS, but not in IDS. These results suggest that IDS attenuates infants' preference for trochaic stress pattern. Further acoustical analyses demonstrated that IDS provided less salient spectral cues for the contrasts between stressed and unstressed syllables in trochaic words. These findings encourage further efforts to explore the effects of IDS on language acquisition from a broader perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Work in perceptual dialectology has argued that listeners' successful identification of accent areas is facilitated by their geographical proximity to a particular region. Montgomery (2007, 2012) argues that this proximity effect is mediated by a 'cultural prominence' effect, where localities of high cultural salience seem less distant. We explore these claims using an online survey in which listeners were asked to identify the regional origin of speakers of five accents from England's 'linguistic north' (Liverpool, Manchester, Crewe, Stoke-on-Trent and Macclesfield) from audio clips of four different sentences. We show that the proximity and cultural prominence effects are partially supported, and that the proximity effect is driven by listeners' likely contact with/experience of the dialect in question. We also show that listeners react differently to different sentences in the same accent. While some sentences are identified correctly very often, others, even for culturally prominent locations with distinctive accents (i.e. Liverpool), are hardly ever correctly identified. We connect this to the geographical distribution of the linguistic features in the clips, and we argue that the presence, absence and range of individual linguistic features should be systematically considered in all perceptual dialectology work which uses audio stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we examined speaker-dependent (acoustic) and speaker-independent (lexical) linguistic influences on perceived foreign accentedness. Accentedness ratings assigned to Chinese-accented English words were analyzed, taking accentedness as a continuum. The speaker-dependent variables were included as acoustic distances, measured in relation to typical native-speaker values. The speaker-independent variable measures were related to the properties of individual words, not influenced by the speech signal. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this represents the first attempt to examine speaker-dependent and speaker-independent variables simultaneously. The model indicated that the perception of accentedness is affected by both acoustic goodness of fit and lexical properties. The results are discussed in terms of matching variability in the input to multidimensional representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though several studies examined the linguistic features of ASEAN's diversity of English, not many have looked at how and to what extent ASEAN speakers perceive and comprehend the English variety spoken in their own and/or outside their countries within the same region. This qualitative study aims to explore awareness, attitudes, and the level of comprehensibility of a small group of ASEAN speakers towards ASEAN English accents. Twenty students enrolled in a Thai international university participated in this study. They were asked, in a questionnaire and interviews, how they perceived each variety of ASEAN English and if they had difficulty in comprehending it. To examine the participants' ability to identify ASEAN English accents and their levels of comprehensibility, each participant was asked to listen to ten different short articles, which were read and audiotape-recorded earlier by a university student from each of the ten ASEAN countries. The results indicated that the participants' previous experience of being exposed to a certain English variety was a significant factor in determining levels of intelligibility and comprehensibility of a variety. Finally, this study proposes a pedagogical implication for the teaching of English to promote an awareness of and familiarity with ASEAN Englishes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which investigated the attitudes of people in Trinidad towards emerging English standard and evaluated the accents of newscasters. The study asked the subjects to evaluate the presumed different speakers based on social prestige and social attractiveness. Results revealed that a local accent showing many features shared with English-based Creole in Trinidad was disfavoured by the respondents.

This study applies concepts and methods from the domain of Implicit Social Cognition to examine language attitudes toward foreign and U.S. accented speech. Implicit attitudes were measured using an Implicit Association Test (IAT) that incorporated audio cues as experimental stimuli. Explicit attitudes were measured through self-report questionnaires. Participants exhibited a pro-U.S. accent bias on the IAT measure but a pro-foreign accent bias on explicit measures. This divergence supports the conclusion that implicit and explicit attitudes are separable attitude constructs resulting from distinct mental processes and suggests that language attitudes research—which has traditionally measured only explicit attitudes—would benefit by incorporating indirect measures. The Associative-Propositional Evaluation Model is proposed as a comprehensive and consistent theory to explain the cognitive processing of language attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seventeen native English speakers participated in an investigation of language users' knowledge of English main stress patterns. First, they produced 40 two-syllable nonwords of varying syllabic structure as nouns and verbs. Second, they indicated their preference for first or second syllable stress of the same words in a perception task. Finally, they indicated words they considered to be phonologically similar to the nonwords. Analyses of variance on the production and perception data indicated that both syllabic structure and lexical class (noun or verb) had an effect on main stress assignment. In logistic regression analyses on the production and perception responses, predictions of stress placement made by (1) syllable structure, (2) lexical class, and (3) stress patterns of phonologically similar words all contributed significantly and uniquely to the prediction of main stress assignment. The results indicate that phonological theories of English word stress need to allow for multiple, competing, probabilistic factors in accounts of main stress placement including syllabic structure (most notably vowel length), lexical class, and stress patterns of phonologically similar words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines how native English listeners perceive sentences produced by non-native speakers. Effects of target predictability and degree of foreign accent; Perception of speech produced by non-native speakers; Effects of target predictability.

The article begins with reflections on the theory of Chomsky and Halle 1968, which constituted a new departure in phonology. The indebtedness of the theory to Chomsky 1951 is noted, and certain inadequacies in the theory are discussed as well as the ways these were overcome in subsequent work, including Idsardi 1992. The revised theory is illustrated with an improved account of English word stress that includes a new treatment of the "Rhythm Rule," in particular, of contrasts such as ánecdòte vs. eléctròde ; vowel shortening in poststress position (e.g., sálivàte (cf. salíva), ínfamous (cf. fámous)); and "weak" syllable effects (Burzio 1994) (e.g., Lómbardy but Lombárdi). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]