Infants' Ability to Learn New Words Across Accent

The purpose of this study was to explore the phonetic flexibility of toddlers' early lexical representations. In this study (based on Schmale, et al., 2011), toddlers' ability to generalize newly learned words across speaker accent was measured using a split-screen preferential looking paradigm. Twenty-four toddlers (mean age = 29 months) were taught two new words by a Spanish-accented speaker and later tested by a native English speaker. One word had a phonological (vocalic) change across speaker accent (e.g., [fim]/[feem]), while the other word did not (e.g., [mef]/[mef]). Toddlers looked to the correct object significantly longer than chance only when the target label did not phonemically differ across accent. However, toddlers did not look longer to the non-phonemic target variant than the phonemic variant. High variability between subjects was noted and the potential need for additional exposure prior to testing infants on such a contrast is discussed

The impact of regional accent variation on monolingual and bilingual infants’ lexical processing

Phonetic variation is inherent in natural speech. It can be lexically relevant, differentiating words, as well as lexically irrelevant indexical variation, which gives information about the talker or context, such as the gender, mood, regional or foreign accent. Efficient communication requires perceivers to discern how lexical versus indexical sources of variation affect the phonetic form of spoken words. While ample evidence is available on how children acquiring a single language handle variability in speech, less is known about how children simultaneously acquiring two languages deal with phonetic variation. This thesis investigates how the bilingual language environment affects children’s ability to accommodate accented speech. We consider three hypotheses. One is that bilingual infants may have an advantage relative to monolinguals due to their greater experience with phonetic variability across their two phonological systems. This is because the lexical representations in bilingual children, who have more experience with accent variation than monolingual children, might be more open to phonetic variation than monolinguals. Representations that are more open to variation might lead to higher flexibility in the word recognition of children with multi-accent input (bilinguals), resulting in accommodation benefits when processing an unfamiliar accent. An alternative hypothesis, however, is that bilingual children may have less stable lexical representations than monolinguals because their vocabulary size in each language is smaller. This could lead to processing costs in accent adaptation, resulting in accommodation disadvantages for bilinguals. The third and final hypothesis is that there would be no difference between bilinguals and their monolingual peers. This is because the effects of greater accent experience but less stable lexical representations in bilinguals may essentially neutralise each other, resulting in equivalent accent accommodation by bilinguals and monolinguals. To evaluate these hypotheses, three experiments were conducted with 17- and 25-month-old bilingual and monolingual children. Their ability to accommodate unfamiliar accented speech was analysed based on their language experience, pre-exposure to the unfamiliar accent, the type of phonetic variation (easy versus difficult phonetic change), and the cognitive demands of the experimental procedure. Taken together, the findings of Experiments 1-3 suggest that bilingual language input neither benefits nor hampers accent adaptation in bilingual children relative to monolingual children. The results carry implications for our current understanding of bilingualism and phonological development

Impact of Accent on Receptive Language Assessments for Bilingual Children

Language assessments are used to screen and diagnose children with language disorders. Many speech-language pathologists (SLP) practicing in Spanish in the United States do not speak Spanish as their first language, so they are administering these assessments in accented speech. This study aims to find what effect an SLP’s accent will have on a bilingual child’s language assessment. Initial findings show that participants were largely able to understand words in the L2 accent, with most of the errors due to several repeating consonantal features (i.e., voicing alone; place and manner of articulation). The broader impact of this work is to understand the constellation of phonetic and acoustic differences between L1 and L2 speakers to help SLPs choose which aspects of their pronunciations are most salient and likely to impact test results, which may lead to misdiagnoses

Graduate Student Transcription of Accented Speech

There are many speech sound differences between Standard American English and English spoken by an individual from a different language background, who speaks with an accent. The purpose of this study is to research graduate students\u27 preparedness and ability to transcribe speech from varying cultural backgrounds. A transcription assessment was administered to current speech-language pathology graduate students with results compared to professionals in the field who completed the transcription based on both listening and spectrogram images. Graduate students were also surveyed regarding their phonetics education experiences. Overall, students were able to transcribe accented speech with 64.2% accuracy. Participants’ transcription of consonants (78.1% accuracy) was significantly better than their transcription of vowels (49.1% accuracy). Students used diacritic markers with 0% accuracy. Participant accuracy scores were influenced by the number of phonetics courses they had previously taken, the number of speakers they had experience transcribing, and how comfortable they felt with phonetic transcription. Through analyzing graduate students\u27 transcriptions of accented English speech from native Spanish, Italian, and Chinese speakers, the determination that students were unprepared to phonetically transcribe individuals with diverse linguistic backgrounds was made. Additional educational resources should be provided to students including more diverse transcription practices and diversity-focused continuing education opportunities. Additional research is recommended to include a larger, more diverse sample from an area with a high level of linguistic diversity and to include other speech sound differences and disorders encountered by speech-language pathologists

How Are Nonnative-English-Speaking Teachers Perceived by Young Learners?

The current study examined the effects of Korean elementary school teachers\u27 accents on their students\u27 listening comprehension. It also examined students\u27 attitudes toward teachers with American-accented English (a native speaker model) and Korean-accented English (a nonnative speaker model). A matched-guised technique was used. A Korean American individual recorded texts in both American-accented English and Korean-accented English. The study randomly assigned 312 Grade 6 Korean students to listen to one of these two recorded oral texts and their comprehension was examined. Next, all of the students listened to both accented-English tapes and their attitudes toward the two speakers (which were in fact the same speaker) were examined. Although the popular belief appears to assume that nonnative accented English would produce a negative effect on students\u27 oral skills, the results failed to find any differences in student performance in terms of comprehension. However, the Korean children thought that the American-accented English guise had better pronunciation, was relatively more confident in her use of English, would focus more on fluency than on accuracy, and would use less Korean in the English class. The students also expressed a preference to have the American-accented English guise as their English teacher

The influence of long-term exposure to dialect variation on representation specificity and word learning in toddlers.

Until very recently language development research classified the language learner as belonging to one of two discrete groups – monolingual or bilingual. This thesis explores the hypothesis that this is an insufficient description of language input and that there are sub-groups within the monolingual category based on the phonological variability of their exposure that could be considered akin to that of bilingual toddlers. For some monolingual toddlers, classified as monodialectal, their language exposure is generally consistent, because both of their parents speak the dialect of the local area. Yet for other toddlers, classified as multidialectal, the language environment is more variable, because at least one of their parents speaks with a dialect that differs from the local area. It is considered that by testing this group of multidialectal toddlers it will be possible to explore the effect of variability on language development and how increased variability in the bilingual linguistic environment might be influencing aspects of language development. This thesis approaches the influence of variability from three areas of interest: phonetic specificity of familiar words using a mispronunciation paradigm (Experiments 1 and 2), target recognition of naturally occurring pronunciation alternatives (Experiments 3 and 4) and use of the Mutual Exclusivity strategy in novel word learning (Experiment 5). Results show that there are differences between the two dialect groups (monodialectal and multidialectal) in a mispronunciation detection task but that toddlers perform similarly with naturally occurring pronunciation alternatives and in their application of the Mutual Exclusivity strategy. This programme of work highlights that there is an influence of linguistic variability on aspects of language development, justifying the parallel between bilingualism and multidialectalism

Automatic Pronunciation Assessment -- A Review

Pronunciation assessment and its application in computer-aided pronunciation training (CAPT) have seen impressive progress in recent years. With the rapid growth in language processing and deep learning over the past few years, there is a need for an updated review. In this paper, we review methods employed in pronunciation assessment for both phonemic and prosodic. We categorize the main challenges observed in prominent research trends, and highlight existing limitations, and available resources. This is followed by a discussion of the remaining challenges and possible directions for future work.Comment: 9 pages, accepted to EMNLP Finding

The Processing of Accented Speech

This thesis examines the processing of accented speech in both infants and adults. Accents provide a natural and reasonably consistent form of inter-speaker variation in the speech signal, but it is not yet clear exactly what processes are used to normalise this form of variation, or when and how those processes develop. Two adult studies use ERP data to examine differences between the online processing of regional- and foreign-accented speech as compared to a baseline consisting of the listeners’ home accent. These studies demonstrate that the two types of accents recruit normalisation processes which are qualitatively, and not just quantitatively, different. This provided support for the hypothesis that foreign and regional accents require different mechanisms to normalise accent-based variation (Adank et al., 2009, Floccia et al., 2009), rather than for the hypothesis that different types of accents are normalised according to their perceptual distance from the listener’s own accent (Clarke & Garrett, 2004). They also provide support for the Abstract entry approach to lexical storage of variant forms, which suggests that variant forms undergo a process of prelexical normalisation, allowing access to a canonical lexical entry (Pallier et al., 2001), rather than for the Exemplar-based approach, which suggests that variant word-forms are individually represented in the lexicon (Johnson, 1997). Two further studies examined how infants segment words from continuous speech when presented with accented speakers. The first of these includes a set of behavioural experiments, which highlight some methodological issues in the existing literature and offer some potential explanations for conflicting evidence about the age at which infants are able to segment speech. The second uses ERP data to investigate segmentation within and across accents, and provides neurophysiological evidence that 11-month-olds are able to distinguish newly-segmented words at the auditory level even within a foreign accent, or across accents, but that they are more able to treat new word-forms as word-like in a familiar accent than a foreign accent

Child L2 phonology acquisition under the influence of multiple varieties

PhD ThesisInput variability is vividly present even in L1 acquisition contexts (Foulkes and Docherty 2006), let alone in an FL/ L2 context where learners are exposed to input in one form from fellow students, to a different variety from the local teacher, and possibly another variety from the institutional model which typically represents the “native-standard norm” (Cook 2008; Regan 2013). However, little is currently known about (second) language acquisition in relation to input multiplicity (cf. Siegel 2010). In fact, it is unclear how L2 acquisition models such as the Speech Learning Model (Flege 1995) or Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993) cope with input comprising multiple varieties. Against this backdrop, this study set out to investigate the nature of child L2 phonology acquisition under the influence of multiple varieties and its interface with sociolinguistic factors in Hong Kong (HK). The study looks at L2 English phonology acquisition by Hong Kong Cantonese children when various varieties are present. Specifically, it targets youngsters exposed to Filipino-accented English from live-in housekeepers in addition to the school and community input encompassing UK, US, and HK varieties. Results show that the 31 kindergarteners in their third year of studies aged 4;6 to 6, and the 29 first year secondary school students aged 11 to 14 who had received/were still receiving Filipino-accented English significantly outperformed 34 age-matched controls who were not exposed to such input on a picture-choosing task and a sound discrimination AX3 task targeting Filipino English plosives /p,t,k/ and fricatives /f,v/ (plosive onsets are often unaspirated while /f,v/ are sometimes rendered as [p,b] respectively in this variety (Tayao 2008)). These findings confirm predictions made by L2 speech acquisition theories in that the acquisition of L2 phonology is possible given a sufficient amount of exposure to the target language input. iii However, participants did not produce this variety in the production part of the experiment (a picture naming and a pair matching task) despite showing signs of perceptual knowledge. In addition, a separate instrument (verbal-guise technique) tapping into informants’ attitude towards Filipino-accented English reveals ambivalent attitudes towards this variety, making it challenging for one to resort to speech accommodation (Beebe and Giles 1984) or speech design models (Bell 1984; 2001) for an adequate explanation. This study highlights the complexity involved when multiple varieties are present in the acquisition context, which is arguably the norm rather than the exception in this current age of unprecedented geographic, social, and occupational mobility (Chambers 2002). It also reminds us of the importance of scrutinising from several perspectives the nature of input in L2 phonology (Moyer 2011; Piske and Young-Scholten 2009). Without a clear understanding of the diversity present in the input, it is difficult to make any solid claims about learners’ phonological competence in a given target language. In addition, the seemingly conflicting results on the perceptual and production parts of the study underline how essential it is to analyse the acquisition outcome from several perspectives through task triangulation