The Impact of Accent, Noise, and Linguistic Predictability on the Intelligibility of Non-native Speakers of English PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download The Impact of Accent, Noise, and Linguistic Predictability on the Intelligibility of Non-native Speakers of English PDF full book. Access full book title The Impact of Accent, Noise, and Linguistic Predictability on the Intelligibility of Non-native Speakers of English by Kimberly R. Scott. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Kimberly R. Scott Publisher: ISBN: 9781423542049 Category : Cognition Languages : en Pages : 262
Book Description
In many situations today non-native speakers of English must speak English as an international language or as a common language between two non- native speakers. Such communication is often complicated by adverse listening conditions such as noise and high stress levels. This study examined the effects of linguistic predictability and noise factors on the intelligibility of non- native speakers of English with varying degrees of accent when their listeners were native English speakers. Speech recordings were elicited from four adult male native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese and one native speaker of English. Sentences from the Speech Perception in Noise lists were read by each speaker, representing native, mild, mild-moderate, moderate-strong, and strong foreign accents. Sentences were mixed with multi-talker babble with a signal-to-noise ratio of 6 dB, 10 dB, and 15 dB. Target words in half of the sentences were highly predictable, and the remaining half were of low predictability. All 30 listeners were native speakers of English. They wrote down the last word of each SPIN sentence from recordings of random selections of speakers and noise levels and rated spontaneous speech samples for degree of perceived accent and intelligibility pre- and post- SPIN listening task. Analyses of the data suggest that all three factors--accent, noise, and predictability-had a combined effect on the intelligibility of non-native speakers of English. Even the intelligibility of the native speaker was compromised when the signal-to-noise ratio was low and when the linguistic predictability was also low. When the native listener was challenged further by the addition of a foreign accent, intelligibility was even more compromised. This effect was greater as the degree of accent became progressively stronger.
Author: Kimberly R. Scott Publisher: ISBN: 9781423542049 Category : Cognition Languages : en Pages : 262
Book Description
In many situations today non-native speakers of English must speak English as an international language or as a common language between two non- native speakers. Such communication is often complicated by adverse listening conditions such as noise and high stress levels. This study examined the effects of linguistic predictability and noise factors on the intelligibility of non- native speakers of English with varying degrees of accent when their listeners were native English speakers. Speech recordings were elicited from four adult male native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese and one native speaker of English. Sentences from the Speech Perception in Noise lists were read by each speaker, representing native, mild, mild-moderate, moderate-strong, and strong foreign accents. Sentences were mixed with multi-talker babble with a signal-to-noise ratio of 6 dB, 10 dB, and 15 dB. Target words in half of the sentences were highly predictable, and the remaining half were of low predictability. All 30 listeners were native speakers of English. They wrote down the last word of each SPIN sentence from recordings of random selections of speakers and noise levels and rated spontaneous speech samples for degree of perceived accent and intelligibility pre- and post- SPIN listening task. Analyses of the data suggest that all three factors--accent, noise, and predictability-had a combined effect on the intelligibility of non-native speakers of English. Even the intelligibility of the native speaker was compromised when the signal-to-noise ratio was low and when the linguistic predictability was also low. When the native listener was challenged further by the addition of a foreign accent, intelligibility was even more compromised. This effect was greater as the degree of accent became progressively stronger.
Author: Ewa Waniek-Klimczak Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 3642240194 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 245
Book Description
Second language phonology is approached in this book from the perspective of data-based studies into the English sound system as used by native and non-native speakers of the language. The book offers a unique combination of psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic and pedagogical approaches, with individual contributions investigating the effect of selected conditioning factors on the pronunciation of English. With all the richness of approaches, it is a strong phonetic background that unifies individual contributions to the volume. Thus, the book contains a large body of original, primary research which will be of interest to experienced scientist, practitioners and lecturers as well as graduate students planning to embark on empirical methods of investigating the nature of the sound system
Author: Radek Skarnitzl Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1527512967 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 315
Book Description
This book focuses on an increasingly attractive, yet controversial topic of non-native accentedness in speech. The contributors here are aware of the fact that the mechanisms and effects of pronunciation are far too complex to allow for strong and definite claims of any sort, but present research leading to useful answers to relevant questions. The book contributes to the deeper understanding of many aspects of foreign-accented English with reference to clearly described empirical evidence. The volume brings together fourteen chapters organized into four subdivisions, covering conceptual and perceptual issues, questions of segmental and suprasegmental pronunciation features, and methodological and didactic recommendations. As such, it provides a cross-sectional view of the current phonetic and didactic empirical research into the pronunciation of non-native English.
Author: Publisher: Cuvillier Verlag ISBN: 373691976X Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 270
Book Description
The purpose of this study is to measure the intelligibility of Cameroon English speech to British and American English speakers and vice versa, and to analyse the major causes of intelligibility failure when speakers of these varieties of English interact. Focus is on segmental and supra-segmental phonology. The study was motivated by a number of concerns: the trepidation nursed by some scholars that the emergence of non-native varieties around the world would cause English to disintegrate into mutually unintelligible varieties in the way Romance languages devolved from their Latin ancestors; the fact that previous studies on intelligibility were centred on the traditional approach which considers non-native varieties of English to be deficient, and not different from native varieties and the debate on the level of phonological analysis that is considered the greatest threat to intelligibility between native and non-native speakers. Five tests were designed for the study, namely Test I (connected speech), Test II (reading passage), Test III (phonemic contrast elicitation), Test IV (nucleus placement in words) and Test V (nucleus placement in sentences)
Author: John M. Levis Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108416624 Category : Foreign Language Study Languages : en Pages : 319
Book Description
An intelligibility-based approach to teaching that presents pronunciation as critical, yet neglected, in communicative language teaching.
Author: John M. Levis Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company ISBN: 9027257639 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 242
Book Description
Inspired by Murray Munro and Tracey Derwing’s 1995 seminal study of intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness, this book revisits the insights of their original research and presents subsequent studies extending this work to new ways of understanding second language speech. By rejecting the nativeness approach upon which previous pronunciation research and teaching were built, Munro and Derwing’s paper became the catalyst for a new paradigm of pronunciation and speech research and teaching. For the first time, pronunciation researchers had an empirically-motivated set of dimensions for assessing L2 speech. Results of many subsequent studies showed that the original insights of three partially-independent measures are indispensable to language teaching, language assessment, social evaluations of speech, and pedagogical priorities. This monograph offers 9 diverse chapters by leading researchers, all of which focus on intelligibility and or comprehensibility. This volume is essential reading for anyone interested in up-to-date coverage of L2 pronunciation matters. Originally published as special issue of Journal of Second Language Pronunciation 6:3 (2020)
Author: John M. Levis Publisher: Walter de Gruyter ISBN: 1614511764 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
This volume offers a definitive source for understanding social influences in L2 pronunciation, demonstrating the importance of empirical findings from a number of research perspectives, and outlining the directions that future work can take. The aim is to present a coherent argument for the significance of social factors and how they contribute to phonological acquisition.
Author: Ettien Koffi Publisher: CRC Press ISBN: 1000340015 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 332
Book Description
Intelligibility is the ultimate goal of human communication. However, measuring it objectively remained elusive until the 1940s when physicist Harvey Fletcher pioneered a psychoacoustic methodology for doing so. Another physicist, von Bekesy, demonstrated clinically that Fletcher’s theory of Critical Bands was anchored in anatomical and auditory reality. Fletcher’s and Bekesy’s approach to intelligibility has revolutionized contemporary understanding of the processes involved in encoding and decoding speech signals. Their insights are applied in this book to account for the intelligibility of the pronunciation of 67 non-native speakers from the following language backgrounds –10 Arabic, 10 Japanese, 10 Korean, 10 Mandarin, 11 Serbian and Croatian "the Slavic Group," 6 Somali, and 10 Spanish speakers who read the Speech Accent Archive elicitation paragraph. Their pronunciation is analyzed instrumentally and compared and contrasted with that of 10 native speakers of General American English (GAE) who read the same paragraph. The data-driven intelligibility analyses proposed in this book help answer the following questions: Can L2 speakers of English whose native language lacks a segment/segments or a suprasegment/ suprasegments manage to produce it/them intelligibly? If they cannot, what segments or suprasegments do they use to substitute for it/them? Do the compensatory strategies used interfere with intelligibility? The findings reported in this book are based on nearly 12,000 measured speech tokens produced by all the participants. This includes some 2,000 vowels, more than 500 stop consonants, over 3,000 fricatives, nearly 1,200 nasals, about 1,500 approximants, a over 1,200 syllables onsets, as many as 800 syllable codas, more than 1,600 measurement of F0/pitch, and duration measurements of no fewer than 539 disyllabic words. These measurements are in keeping with Baken and Orlikoff (2000:3) and in accordance with widely accepted Just Noticeable Difference thresholds, and relative functional load calculations provided by Catforda (1987).
Author: Ignacio Moreno-Torres Publisher: Frontiers Media SA ISBN: 2889451070 Category : Languages : en Pages : 176
Book Description
Language learning also implies the acquisition of a set of phonetic rules and prosodic contours which define the accent in that language. While often considered as merely accessory, accent is an essential component of psychological identity as it embodies information on origin, culture, and social class. Speaking with a non-standard (foreign) accent is not inconsequential because it may negatively impact communication and social adjustment. Nevertheless, the lack of a formal definition of accent may explain that, as compared with other aspects of language, it has received relatively little attention until recently. During the past decade there has been increasing interest in the analysis of accent from a neuroscientific perspective. This e-book integrates data from different scientific frameworks. The reader will find fruitful research on new models of accent processing, how learning a new accent proceeds, and the role of feedback on accent learning in healthy subjects. In addition, information on accent changes in pathological conditions including developmental and psychogenic foreign accent syndromes as well as the description of a new variant of foreign accent syndrome is also included. It is anticipated that the articles in this e-book will enhance the understanding of accent as a linguistic phenomenon, the neural networks supporting it and potential interventions to accelerate acquisition or relearning of native accents.
Author: Kimberly R. Scott
Author: Kimberly R. Scott
Author: Ewa Waniek-Klimczak
Author: 
Author: Radek Skarnitzl
Author: 
Author: John M. Levis
Author: John M. Levis
Author: John M. Levis
Author: Ettien Koffi
Author: Ignacio Moreno-Torres