This paper describes the development of the Wildcat Corpus of native- and foreign-accented English,a corpus containing scripted and spontaneous speech recordings from 24 native speakers of American English and 52 non-native speakers of English.The core element of this corpus is a set of spontaneous speech recordings, for which a new method of eliciting dialogue-based, laboratory-quality speech ...

Automatic evaluation of non-native speech accentedness has potential implications for not only language learning and accent identification systems but also for speaker and speech recognition systems. From the perspective of speech production, the two primary factors influencing the accentedness are the phonetic and prosodic structure. In this paper, we propose an approach for automatic accented...

This study investigated perception by non-native listeners of English fricatives produced in clear and conversational speaking styles. We measured babble thresholds for fricative voicing and place of articulation contrasts by Standard German and Swabian German and native American English speakers. Overall, Swabian German speakers performed worse than both native English and Standard German spea...

The unprecedented growth of English and arrival of English as an International Language (EIL) has generated a new fledged argument about English language teachers’ role and status around the world. To date, much of the debate on the native/non-native distinction in EIL settings and factors contributing to sharpen distinctions has remained unsettled. This gap motivated this study on the English ...

Despite the global spread of English, it seems that voices from Persian-speaking teachers concerning English as an international language (EIL) teaching methods and materials are underrepresented. The present study set out to explore how nonnative Persian-speaking English language teachers respond to the increasing global dominance of EIL and native- and non-native-speakers’ language norms with...