In search of cues discriminating West-african accents in French

International audienceThis 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 speech processing methods such as automatic phoneme alignment. Results show that the Senegal accent (with a tendency toward word-initial stress followed by a falling pitch movement) and the Ivory Coast accent (with a tendency to delete/vocalise the /R/ consonant) are most distinct from standard French and among the West-African accents under investigation

Accent identification by adults with aphasia

The UK is a diverse society where individuals regularly interact with speakers with different accents. Whilst there is a growing body of research on the impact of speaker accent on comprehension in people with aphasia, there is none which explores their ability to identify accents. This study investigated the ability of this group to identify the geographical origins of a speaker. Age-matched participants with and without aphasia listened to 120 audio recordings of five speakers each of six accents, reading aloud four sentences each. Listeners were asked to make a forced-choice decision about the geographical origin of the speaker. Adults with aphasia were significantly less accurate than control participants at identifying accents but both groups made the same pattern of errors. Adults with aphasia who are able to identify a new speaker as being from a particular place may draw on this information to help them “tune in” to the accent

Research methods and intelligibility studies

This paper first briefly reviews the concept of intelligibility as it has been employed in both English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and world Englishes (WE) research. It then examines the findings of the Lingua Franca Core (LFC), a list of phonological features that empirical research has shown to be important for safeguarding mutual intelligibility between non-native speakers of English. The main point of the paper is to analyse these findings and demonstrate that many of them can be explained if three perspectives (linguistic, psycholinguistic and historical-variationist) are taken. This demonstration aims to increase the explanatory power of the concept of intelligibility by providing some theoretical background. An implication for ELF research is that at the phonological level, internationally intelligible speakers have a large number of features in common, regardless of whether they are non-native speakers or native speakers. An implication for WE research is that taking a variety-based, rather than a features-based, view of phonological variation and its connection with intelligibility is likely to be unhelpful, as intelligibility depends to some extent on the phonological features of individual speakers, rather than on the varieties per se

Relative Salience of Speech Rhythm and Speech Rate on Perceived Foreign Accent in a Second Language

We investigated the independent contribution of speech rate and speech rhythm to perceived foreign accent. To address this issue we used a resynthesis technique that allows neutralizing segmental and tonal idiosyncrasies between identical sentences produced by French learners of English at different proficiency levels and maintaining the idiosyncrasies pertaining to prosodic timing patterns. We created stimuli that (1) preserved the idiosyncrasies in speech rhythm while controlling for the differences in speech rate between the utterances; (2) preserved the idiosyncrasies in speech rate while controlling for the differences in speech rhythm between the utterances; and (3) preserved the idiosyncrasies both in speech rate and speech rhythm. All the stimuli were created in intoned (with imposed intonational contour) and flat (with monotonized, constant F0) conditions. The original and the resynthesized sentences were rated by native speakers of English for degree of foreign accent. We found that both speech rate and speech rhythm influence the degree of perceived foreign accent, but the effect of speech rhythm is larger than that of speech rate. We also found that intonation enhances the perception of fine differences in rhythmic patterns but reduces the perceptual salience of fine differences in speech rate

A qualitative study of recent journal articles on English as a Lingua Franca

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PERCEPTION OF ACCENTS AND DIALECTS IN ADULTS AND INFANTS

This thesis has been undertaken with the purpose of investigating how adult speech processing systems are affected by. and how they cope with, the presence of different regional and foreign accents in speech, and to investigate the developmental origins of adult accent perception capabilities. Experiments 1 to 4 were designed to investigate the long term effects of exposure to different accents, and whether short term adaptation to an accent was possible, using a lexical decision task. The results demonstrated an effect of accent familiarity but no short term adaptation was evident. Experiments 5 to 7 investigated the short term effects of accents by looking at the length of activation of accent-related information in working memory by using a cross-modal matching task. The results found that selective accent related effects were reduced after a 1500 millisecond delay. Experiments 8 to 11 investigated infants' discrimination abilities for regional and foreign accents using a preferential looking habituation method, and found infants at 5 and 7 months could discriminate their own accent from another, unfamiliar regional accent, but could not discriminate two unfamiliar regional accents at 5 months or a foreign accent from their own at 7 months. Experiments 12 and 13 investigated how accents affected infants' word segmentation abilities with continuous speech at 10 months, and found that segmentation was impaired in the presence of regional and foreign accents. Using these results, the Accent Training Model (ATP) is proposed, which attempts to explain how accent related indexical information is processed in the speech processing system. The findings of the infant studies further our understanding of the effect of indexicat variation in early speech perception