The general goal of this study was to expand our understanding of what is meant by 'foreign accent'. More specifically, it deals with the role of prosody (timing and melody), which has rarely been examined. New technologies, including diphone speech synthesis (experiment 1) and speech manipulation (experiment 2), are used to study the relative importance of prosody in what is perceived as a for...

This study aims to investigate native speakers’ perception of prosodic variation of Japanese utterances. The pitch contour above the word level is hard to determine due to individual variation or pragmatic and para-linguistic factors. Nevertheless, native speakers’ intonation is relatively consistent as long as the context and intention of the utterance is predetermined. On the other hand, L2 s...

We propose a signal processing method that transforms foreign-accented speech to resemble its native-accented counterpart. The problem is closely related to voice conversion, except that our method seeks to preserve the organic properties of the foreign speaker’s voice; i.e., only those features which cue foreign-accentedness are to be transformed. Our method operates at two levels: prosodic an...

Eleven Dutch secondary school children sang and spoke the lyrics of a number of popular English songs. Their pronunciation accuracy was rated significantly higher in the singing mode by a group of native speakers. Additional perception scores showed that the decrease in Dutch-accentedness must be due to the fact that their foreign accent could not be signaled in the f0 and segment durations dur...

Foreign-accented speech commonly incurs a processing cost, but this cost can be offset when listeners are given informative cues to the speaker's purported ethnicity and/or language background. This study investigates mechanism that underlies facilitatory effect of top-down expectation, evaluating between general adaptation (an across-the-board relaxation phonetic categorization criteria) and t...

This contribution investigates the opinions of 372 first-year students from Ca’ Foscari University Venice about pronunciation and foreign accent in languages chosen as main subjects. Although a native-like is highly valued, do not simply equate good accent-free pronunciation. They are confident assessing other L2 speakers but show considerable uncertainty self-assessment deficits. mostly associ...

This study investigated how the perceived attractiveness of voices was influenced by a foreign language, a foreign accent, and the level of fluency in the foreign language. Stimuli were taken from a French-German corpus of read speech with German native speakers as raters. Additional factors were stimulus length (syllable or entire sentence) and sex (of the raters and speakers). Results with Ge...

ACOUSTIC VOWEL REDUCTION AS A FUNCTION OF SENTENCE ACCENT, WORD STRESS, AND WORD CLASS

Nowadays, large vocabulary speech recognizers exist that are performing reasonably well for specific conditions and environments. When the conditions change however, performance degrades quickly. For example, when the person to be recognized has a foreign accent the conditions could mismatch with the model, resulting in high error rates. The problem in recognizing foreign accented speech is the...

Many adolescents in Sweden speak Swedish with what appears to be a foreign accent. Whereas some people perceive their way of speaking Swedish as the result of imperfect or incomplete learning of Swedish, others argue that they speak a new variety of Swedish. In this paper, several arguments of anecdotal character are tested experimentally in order to investigate whether or not a new variety of ...