Foreign-accented speech can be difficult to understand but listeners can adapt to novel talkers and accents with appropriate experience. Previous studies have demonstrated talker-independent but accent-dependent learning after training on multiple talkers from a single language background. Here, listeners instead were exposed to talkers from five language backgrounds during training. After trai...

Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is a rare acquired neurogenic speech disorder characterised by the emergence of an accented speech. The aim of this study is to describe the speech characteristics of LK, a FAS speaker who also shows fatigue and cognitive difficulties. Perceptual as well as acoustic analyses show that LK’s speech characteristics are comparable to those found in the literature, but ...

Foreign-accented speech is often perceived as more difficult to understand than native speech. What causes this potential difficulty, however, remains unknown. In the present study, we compared acoustic similarity and accent ratings of American-accented Dutch with a cross-modal priming task designed to measure online speech processing. We focused on two Dutch diphthongs: ui and ij. Though both ...

This paper studies the structure of foreign-accented read English speech. A system for accent identification is constructed by combining linguistic theory with statistical analysis. Results demonstrate that the linguistic theory is reflected in real speech data and its application improves accent identification. The work discussed here combines and applies previous research in language identifi...

We investigated the effects of repeating aloud and of an unfamiliar accent on memory for words. At study, native English speakers heard English words spoken by a native speaker of American English or by a foreign national. They listened only for half of the items and they listened and then repeated aloud (produce) for the other half. At test, producing interacted with accent in recognition memo...

In this paper, a detailed acoustic feature study of foreign accent using temporal features, intonation patterns, and frequency characteristics in American English is performed. Using a database which consists of words uttered in isolation, temporal features such as voice onset time, word-nal stop closure duration, and characteristics of duration are investigated. Accent diierences for native-pr...

In foreign-accented speech, pronunciation typically deviates from the canonical form to some degree. For native listeners, it has been shown that word recognition is more difficult for strongly-accented words than for less strongly-accented words. Furthermore recognition of strongly-accented words becomes easier with additional exposure to the foreign accent. In this paper, listeners’ behaviour...

a r t i c l e i n f o Non-native speech is harder to understand than native speech. We demonstrate that this " processing difficulty " causes non-native speakers to sound less credible. People judged trivia statements such as " Ants don't sleep " as less true when spoken by a non-native than a native speaker. When people were made aware of the source of their difficulty they were able to correc...

This paper describes a proposed automatic language accent identification system based on phoneme class trajectory models. Our focus is to preserve discriminant information of the spectral evolution that belong to each accent. Here, we describe two classification schemes based on stochastic trajectory models; supervised and unsupervised classification. For supervised classification, we assume te...

Foreign accent is often thought to be the result of an age-related diminution in the ability to learn to pronounce languages. Existing studies of L2 pronunciation, however, do not seem to support the claim that there is some fundamental difference between children and adults in phonetic learning ability. The continued presence of foreign accent may instead be a consequence of the establishment ...