Accent attribution in speakers with Foreign Accent Syndrome

Purpose: The main aim of this experiment was to establish the extent to which the impression of foreignness in speakers with Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS) is in any way comparable to the impression of foreignness in speakers with a real foreign accent. Method: Three groups of listeners attributed accents to conversational speech samples of 5 FAS speakers which were embedded amongst those of 5 speakers with a real foreign accent and 5 native speaker controls. The listener groups differed in their familiarity with foreign accented speech and speech pathology. Results: The findings indicate that listeners’ perceptual reactions to the three groups of speakers are essentially different at all levels of analysis. The native speaker controls are unequivocally considered as native speakers of Dutch while the speakers with a real foreign accent are very reliably assessed as non-native speakers. The speakers with Foreign Accent Syndrome, however, are in some sense perceived as foreign and in some sense as native by listeners, but not as foreign as speakers with a real foreign accent nor as native as real native speakers. This result may be accounted for in terms of the trigger support model of foreign accent perception. Conclusions: The findings of the experiment is consistent with the idea that the very nature of the foreign accent in different in both groups of speakers, although it cannot be fully excluded that the perceived foreignness in the two groups is one of degree

Can children with speech difficulties process an unfamiliar accent?

This study explores the hypothesis that children identified as having phonological processing problems may have particular difficulty in processing a different accent. Children with speech difficulties (n = 18) were compared with matched controls on four measures of auditory processing. First, an accent auditory lexical decision task was administered. In one condition, the children made lexical decisions about stimuli presented in their own accent (London). In the second condition, the stimuli were spoken in an unfamiliar accent (Glaswegian). The results showed that the children with speech difficulties had a specific deficit on the unfamiliar accent. Performance on the other auditory discrimination tasks revealed additional deficits at lower levels of input processing. The wider clinical implications of the findings are considered

Neurogenic foreign accent syndrome: Articulatory setting, segments and prosody in a Dutch speaker

Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) can be defined as a motor speech disorder in which patients develop a speech accent which is notably different from their premorbid habitual accent. This paper aims to provide an explicit description of the neurolinguistic and phonetic characteristics of a female speaker of Belgian Dutch who suffered from neurogenic FAS in which she developed a French/German foreign accent after a left hemisphere stroke. A detailed phonetic analysis of the speaker’s pronunciation errors revealed problems at both the segmental and suprasegmental level. At the segmental level a wide variety of pronunciation errors were observed which are consistent with a tense articulatory setting: creaky voice, strengthening of fricatives into stops and more carefully articulated consonants and vowels. The data suggest that the perception of the French accent may have resulted from a combination of speech pathology features and unaffected regional pronunciation characteristics of the patient’s Standard Dutch. In contrast to the traditional view in the literature that FAS represents a primary dysprosodic disturbance, a detailed analysis of the speaker’s intonation contours by means of the stylization method revealed the entirely correct implementation of the most common pitch contours of Standard Dutch. This unique finding shows that FAS does not by definition follow from disruption of prosodic processing. However, the frequency of occurrence of the different types of pitch contours was clearly deviant since the patient very frequently used the Dutch continuation rise. It is hypothesized that this might represent a deliberate strategy of the speaker to stay in control of the speaking situation by keeping the speaking turn which she is at continuous risk of losing as the result of long and frequent pausing

Phonetic And Acoustic Analyses Of Two New Cases Of Foreign Accent Syndrome

This study presents detailed phonetic and acoustic analyses of the speech characteristics of two new cases of Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS). Participants include a 48-year-old female who began speaking with an Eastern European accent following a traumatic brain injury, and a 45-year-old male who presented with a British accent following a subcortical cerebral vascular accident (CVA). Identical samples of the participants\u27 pre- and post-morbid speech were obtained, thus affording a new level of control in the study of Foreign Accent Syndrome. The speech tasks consisted of oral readings of the Grandfather Passage and 18 real words comprised of the stop consonants /p/, /t/, /k/, /b/, /d/, /g/ combined with the peripheral vowels /i/, /a/ and /u/ and ending in a voiceless stop. Computer-based acoustic measures included: 1) voice onset time (VOT), 2) vowel durations, 3) whole word durations, 4) first, second and third formant frequencies, and 5) fundamental frequency. Formant frequencies were measured at three points in the vowel duration: a) 20%, b) 50%, and c) 80% to assess differences in vowel \u27onglides\u27 and \u27offglides\u27. The phonetic analysis provided perceptual identification of the major phonetic features associated with the foreign quality of participant\u27s FAS speech, while acoustic measures allowed precise quantification of these features. Results indicated evidence of backing of consonant and vowel productions for both participants. The implications for future research and clinical applications are also considered

An exploration of the rhythm of Malay

In recent years there has been a surge of interest in speech rhythm. However we still lack a clear understanding of the nature of rhythm and rhythmic differences across languages. Various metrics have been proposed as means for measuring rhythm on the phonetic level and making typological comparisons between languages (Ramus et al, 1999; Grabe & Low, 2002; Dellwo, 2006) but the debate is ongoing on the extent to which these metrics capture the rhythmic basis of speech (Arvaniti, 2009; Fletcher, in press). Furthermore, cross linguistic studies of rhythm have covered a relatively small number of languages and research on previously unclassified languages is necessary to fully develop the typology of rhythm. This study examines the rhythmic features of Malay, for which, to date, relatively little work has been carried out on aspects rhythm and timing. The material for the analysis comprised 10 sentences produced by 20 speakers of standard Malay (10 males and 10 females). The recordings were first analysed using rhythm metrics proposed by Ramus et. al (1999) and Grabe & Low (2002). These metrics (∆C, %V, rPVI, nPVI) are based on durational measurements of vocalic and consonantal intervals. The results indicated that Malay clustered with other so-called syllable-timed languages like French and Spanish on the basis of all metrics. However, underlying the overall findings for these metrics there was a large degree of variability in values across speakers and sentences, with some speakers having values in the range typical of stressed-timed languages like English. Further analysis has been carried out in light of Fletcher’s (in press) argument that measurements based on duration do not wholly reflect speech rhythm as there are many other factors that can influence values of consonantal and vocalic intervals, and Arvaniti’s (2009) suggestion that other features of speech should also be considered in description of rhythm to discover what contributes to listeners’ perception of regularity. Spectrographic analysis of the Malay recordings brought to light two parameters that displayed consistency and regularity for all speakers and sentences: the duration of individual vowels and the duration of intervals between intensity minima. This poster presents the results of these investigations and points to connections between the features which seem to be consistently regulated in the timing of Malay connected speech and aspects of Malay phonology. The results are discussed in light of current debate on the descriptions of rhythm

The Effects of Mere Exposure on Responses to Foreign-Accented Speech

The present study examined the effects of repeated exposure to the accent (standard American English vs. Asian Indian) of a prospective college professor on participants\u27 cognitive reactions, affective reactions, and passage comprehension. Based on data collected from 115 undergraduate students, results showed that an Asian Indian-accented professor was perceived as being less competent, less likable, but more motivated than a standard American English speaking professor. In addition, the trustworthiness of the Asian Indian-accented professor decreased over time as well as participants\u27 negative opinions of the professor. Finally, the results of the study indicate that when listening to the professor\u27s foreign accent, participants\u27 passage comprehension declined over time. The implications of these findings are discussed

Accented Actors: From Stage to Stages via a Convenience Store

Manole explores how an exilic actor’s foreign accent can evolve from a barrier to working in mainstage theatre to a site of simultaneously acknowledging and negotiating differences between natives and exiles. As a case study, she discusses the career of Nada Humsi, an Arab Canadian born in Syria, who reinvented herself as a hyphenated Arab-Canadian theatre artist. Manole emphasizes not only her professional but also her emotional journey, from a theatre star in her native Syria to a retail associate in a Canadian convenience store, to an actress and an Artistic Associate with the MT Space theatre company in Kitchener, and finally to one of the founders and the Artistic Producer of the KitchenerWaterloo Arab Canadian Theatre/KW-ACT. The second part of the article analyzes Humsi’s performance in Hazim Kamaledin’s Black Spring, where she played both an Iraqi immigrant and an American journalist.Manole explore comment l’accent étranger d’un comédien exilé peut évoluer et passer d’un obstacle au travail sur les scènes conventionnelles à un outil permettant de reconnaître et de négocier les différences entre natifs et exilés. Dans cette étude de cas, Manole étudie la carrière de Nada Humsi, une Canadienne d’origine arabe née en Syrie qui se réinventer en tant qu’artiste de théâtre arabo-canadienne. Manole s’intéresse non seulement au parcours professionnel de Humsi, mais aussi au cheminement intérieur de cette vedette de théâtre en Syrie devenue vendeuse dans un dépanneur au Canada avant de s’associer comme comédienne et adjointe artistique à la compagnie de théâtre MT Space de Kitchener, puis co-fonder la compagnie Kitchener-Waterloo Arab Canadian Theatre/KW-ACT, dont elle est la directrice artistique. En seconde partie de cet article, Manole analyse la prestation de Humsi dans la pièce Black Spring de Hazim Kamaledin, dans laquelle Humsi tenait les rôles d’une immigrée iraqienne et d’une journaliste américaine

Adult Second Language Speakers Who Pass off as Native Speakers: Seeking Plausible Explanations from a Network of Interdisciplinary Research

Normal infants and young children who are exposed to a second language over a substantial period of years in its natural interactive community grow up to speak the second language with the native accent of that language. This is a universal observation, commonly giving rise to a common belief that children ‘are better than adults at language learning’. In some cases, the second language may even replace the first language. By default, being exposed to another language after that ‘early’ age generally leads to speaking that language with a foreign accent. The common explanation for the foreign accent is brain sensory-motor maturity in neural pathways. The phenomenon of foreign accent has received and continues to attract research. On the other hand, a relatively small group of adults present a native-accent pattern. They sound native although they learned the second language at an older age, after the 'critical period' (CP) and/or under less natural contexts. This research focuses on this ‘phenomenal’ group of speakers. The rationale of the focus stems from the fact that these cases are documented in research (e.g., Munoz and Singleton, 2007 and Scovel, 1978) as partial evidence against CP age limits on the plasticity of the human brain for sound perception and sound production. Key words: foreign accent, accent free speech, adult second language speakers, brain structure, brain functio