This paper, based on a phonetic experiment, depicts a contrastive study on the rhythmic pattern of Chinese learners of English as a foreign language (CL2) as compared with that of the native speakers of both standard British and American English (EL1) in their respective pitch accent distribution patterns, prosodic structures and duration patterns.

The current study investigated the perception of foreign-accented speech by prelingually deaf, longterm cochlear implant (CI) users. CI and normalhearing (NH) listeners made judgements about the intelligibility of short sentences produced by native and non-native speakers of American English. While both CI and NH listeners rated foreign-accented sentences as less intelligible than native senten...

Past research finds that monolingual and bilingual children prefer native speakers to individuals who speak in unfamiliar foreign languages or accents. Do children in bilingual contexts socially distinguish among familiar languages and accents and, if so, how do their social preferences based on language and accent compare? The current experiments tested whether 5- to 7-year-olds in two bilingu...

Productions in a foreign language (L2) are commonly affected by segmental and suprasegmental features of the phonetic/phonological system of the mother tongue (L1). As for the segmental level, the sounds of the L2, which are close or similar to others of the L1, are deeply influenced by the native system; these influences are perceived as foreign accent but could also be acceptable from the poi...

This paper investigates foreign accent by comparing vowel production of native speakers, heritage and non-native learners with data from a large corpus of spontaneous Chinese learner speech. Snippets were evaluated by untrained Mandarin raters on accent ratings and followed up with acoustic analysis of vowel qualities. The rating result showed a high correlation between accent and pronunciation...

Listeners use lexical knowledge to retune phoneme categories. When hearing an ambiguous sound between /s/ and /f/ in lexically unambiguous contexts such as gira[s/f], listeners learn to interpret the sound as /f/ because gira[f] is a real word and gira[s] is not. Later, they apply this learning even in lexically ambiguous contexts (perceiving knife rather than nice). Although such retuning coul...

This study used interval scaling to assess degree of perceived foreign accent in English sentences spoken by native and non-native talkers. Native English listeners gave significantly higher (i.e., more authentic) pronunciation scores to native speakers of English than to Chinese adults who began learning English at an average age of 7.6 years. The results for the "child learners" suggest that ...

Past research provides evidence that children use at least 2 potentially competing strategies when choosing informants: they attend to informants' past accuracy and to their social identity (e.g., their status as native- vs. foreign-accented speakers). We explore how children reconcile these 2 strategies when they are put in conflict and whether children's response changes across development. I...