Effects of Rater's Attention on the Perceived Degree of Foreign Accent

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. One task was designed to rate only nonnative accent (Task 1), and the other task was designed to judge their accent while requiring raters to pay attention to the content in an utterance (Task 2). The results showed that the listeners perceived the degree of accent to be weaker when focusing on the content than focusing on only the accent. There was no significant difference in the accent ratings across the nonnative speakers regardless of their English use as EFL (for Japanese and Mandarin speakers) and ESL (for Tamil speakers). Overall findings suggest that the listeners’ perception of foreign accent may differ depending on their direction of focus.