This article had two aims: to provide a thorough review of the existing literature examining overall degree of foreign accent in a second language (L2), and to present a new foreign accent experiment. The literature review suggested that a wide variety of variables in#uence degree of foreign accent. These variables include age of L2 learning, length of residence in an L2-speaking country, gende...

This study investigates the relative contributions of global intonation and global segment durations to degree of foreign accent in Norwegian. Speakers of Norwegian as a second language (N2) from different native languages (L1s) plus one native Norwegian (N1) speaker are recorded reading the same sentence. The N2 utterances’ global intonation and global segment durations are manipulated to matc...

Speaker accent is an important issue in the formulation of robust speaker independent recognition systems. Knowledge gained from a reliable accent classification approach could improve overall recognition performance. In this paper, a new algorithm is proposed for foreign accent classification of American English. A series of experimental studies are considered which focus on establishing how s...

A series of experiments investigated the effect of speakers' language, accent, and race on children's social preferences. When presented with photographs and voice recordings of novel children, 5-year-old children chose to be friends with native speakers of their native language rather than foreign-language or foreign-accented speakers. These preferences were not exclusively due to the intellig...

A 40-year-old, non-aphasic, right-handed, and polyglot (L1: French, L2: Dutch, and L3: English) woman with a 12-year history of addiction to opiates and psychoactive substances, and clear psychiatric problems, presented with a foreign accent of sudden onset in L1. Speech evolved toward a mostly fluent output, despite a stutter-like behavior and a marked grammatical output disorder. The psychoge...

We present a voice morphing strategy that can be used to generate a continuum of accent transformations between a foreign speaker and a native speaker. The approach performs a cepstral decomposition of speech into spectral slope and spectral detail. Accent conversions are then generated by combining the spectral slope of the foreign speaker with a morph of the spectral detail of the native spea...

In spoken word identification and memory tasks, stimulus variability from numerous sources impairs performance. In the current study, the influence of foreign-accent variability on spoken word identification was evaluated in two experiments. Experiment 1 used a between-subjects design to test word identification in noise in single-talker and two multiple-talker conditions: multiple talkers with...

This study investigates the acoustic characteristics of non-native speech which give rise to the perception of a foreign accent. Japanese speech samples were collected from L1 English and Mandarin speakers studying Japanese. The acoustic patterns of the L2 and native speech were related to the accentedness ratings of the speech provided by native Japanese listeners. Results indicate the importa...

We present results from a series of 151 speech recognition experiments based on the N4 corpus of accented English speech, using a small vocabulary recognition system. These experiments looked at the impact of foreign accent on speech recognition, both within non-native accented English and across different accents, with particular interest in using context free grammar technology to improve cal...