Standard or prestige accents (e.g., southern British RP, General American) are highly intelligible to a range of native speakers, which may be caused by listener experience (e.g., the accents are frequently heard in the media). The present study investigated the role of experience by testing Mandarin speakers with intermediate English proficiency in terms of their speech-in-noise recognition fo...

Native (L1) listeners are more accurate at understanding speech spoken in their own accent in noise than they are at understanding speech spoken in other L1 or non-native (L2) accents. The present study investigated whether this accent advantage is affected by perceptual adaptation. Standard Southern British English (SE) listeners were presented with L1 and L2 accents in noise, either in single...

This research focuses on the identification and characterisation of accents in French. For both foreign and regional accents, we started with perceptual identification experiments, we measured phonetic features which may characterise these accents using automatic phoneme alignment, and we ranked the most discriminating features by using classification techniques. The following features are perc...

We worked to create an effective classifier for foreign accented English speech in order to determine the origins of the speaker. Using pitch features, we first classify between two accents, German and Mandarin, and then expanded to a set of twelve accents. We achieved a notable improvement over random performance and gained insights into the strengths of and relationships between the accents w...

Welsh and Northern English), and two American ones (New York and South Carolina, to represent Eastern and Southern American); regional features were based primarily on the descriptions in [1], with native-speaker input where possible. The regional accents are abbreviated in this paper as: Br(Sc) = Edinburgh; Br(W) = Cardiff; Br(N) = Leeds; Am(E) = New York; and Am(S) = South Carolina. For the s...

This study investigates to what extent West-African French accents can be distinguished, based on recordings made in Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mali and Senegal. First, a perceptual experiment was conducted, suggesting that these accents are well identified by West-African listeners (especially the Senegal and Ivory Coast accents). Second, prosodic and segmental cues were studied by using speec...

The phonetic realisation of pitch accents associated with little sonorant material varies between languages and dialects. For speakers of Northern Standard German it has been shown that nuclear falling accents are truncated while rising accents are compressed. In order to further investigate effects of the German Swabian dialect native Swabian speakers were investigated with regard to truncatio...

Homonyms are partitioned into smaller groups by their accents. The property of accents in English, Japanese and Chinese languages is different, but has a common role to distinguish homonyms. The difference of the role of accents in the three languages is shown by a parameter of the generalized Stirling distribution, derived from Pitman’s random partition, fitted to dictionary datasets.

Previous studies have shown that even advanced L2 speakers align pitch accents differently from native speakers, and the only possibility for full attainment of L2 is through immersion. This study investigated two groups of five advanced L2 English speakers who first exposed to English through early immersion. Their alignment of prenuclear and nuclear accents was compared with that of the nativ...