Some training procedures applicable to teaching the sound systems and vocabularies of foreign languages.

A student's proficiency in a language is usually assessed by measuring his competence in understanding, speaking, reading, and writing. Foreign language training programs differ in the emphases placed on the development of each of these four basic language skills. Some of these differences are directly related to the specific needs of particular student populations while others are related to the method of instruction the teacher has adopted. [...

Short-term adaptation to accented English by younger and older adults

This study examined the effects of age and hearing loss on short-term adaptation to accented speech. Data from younger and older listeners in a prior investigation [Gordon-Salant et al. (2010). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 128, 444–455] were re-analyzed to examine changes in recognition over four administrations of equivalent lists of English stimuli recorded by native speakers of Spanish and English. Results showed improvement in recognition scores over four list administrations for the accented stimuli but not for the native English stimuli. Group effects emerged but were not involved in any interactions, suggesting that short-term adaptation to accented speech is preserved with aging and with hearing loss

Recognition of accented English in quiet and noise by younger and older listeners

This study investigated the effects of age and hearing loss on perception of accented speech presented in quiet and noise. The relative importance of alterations in phonetic segments vs. temporal patterns in a carrier phrase with accented speech also was examined. English sentences recorded by a native English speaker and a native Spanish speaker, together with hybrid sentences that varied the native language of the speaker of the carrier phrase and the final target word of the sentence were presented to younger and older listeners with normal hearing and older listeners with hearing loss in quiet and noise. Effects of age and hearing loss were observed in both listening environments, but varied with speaker accent. All groups exhibited lower recognition performance for the final target word spoken by the accented speaker compared to that spoken by the native speaker, indicating that alterations in segmental cues due to accent play a prominent role in intelligibility. Effects of the carrier phrase were minimal. The findings indicate that recognition of accented speech, especially in noise, is a particularly challenging communication task for older people

Child phonology /

Proceedings of a conference in a series entitled Communicating by language, sponsored by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, May 28-31, 1978, at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md.Includes bibliographies and indexes.V. 1. Production.V. 2. Perceptio

Recognition of accented English in quiet by younger normal-hearing listeners and older listeners with normal-hearing and hearing loss

This investigation examined the effects of listener age and hearing loss on recognition of accented speech. Speech materials were isolated English words and sentences that featured phonemes that are often mispronounced by non-native speakers of English whose first language is Spanish. These stimuli were recorded by a native speaker of English and two non-native speakers of English: one with a mild accent and one with a moderate accent. The stimuli were presented in quiet to younger and older adults with normal-hearing and older adults with hearing loss. Analysis of percent correct recognition scores showed that all listeners performed more poorly with increasing accent, and older listeners with hearing loss performed more poorly than the younger and older normal-hearing listeners in all accent conditions. Context and age effects were minimal. Consonant confusion patterns in the moderate accent condition showed that error patterns of all listeners reflected temporal alterations with accented speech, with major errors of word-final consonant voicing in stops and fricatives, and word-initial fricatives