Accent evaluation from extemporaneous child speech

• Authors: María Luisa García Lecumberri , Martin Cooke , Christopher Bryant
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

A key issue in judging foreign accent is to isolate the phonetic component from potentially confounding higher-level factors such as grammatical or prosodic errors which arise when using natural sentence-length speech material. The current study evaluated accent and intelligibility ratings of children’s speech for isolated words spliced out of extemporaneous material elicited via a picture description task. Experiment 1 demonstrated that word scores and accent ratings provided by native judges pattern as in earlier studies, validating the use of word-based material derived from natural speech. In a second experiment, listeners rated the degree of foreign accent and comprehensibility for unrelated sequences of 1 to 8 words from the same talker. Degree of foreign accent was judged to increase with sequence length, asymptoting by 2 word sequences, although listeners did not rate the sequence based on the most-accented word it contains. Comprehensibility was judged to be lower as sequence length increased, asymptoting at 4 words. These findings suggest that short sequences of randomly-permuted words extracted from extemporaneous speech can be used for robust accent and comprehensibility judgements whose focus is on the phonetic basis for deviations from the native norm.

Keywords

EN

foreign accent; extemporaneous speech; intelligibility; comprehensibility

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Journal: Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics
• Year: 2015
• Volume: 51
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 227-246

Dates

received

2014-09-10

revised

2015-04-13

accepted

2015-04-14

online

2015-06-30

Contributors

author

María Luisa García Lecumberri

• University of the Basque Country, Vitoria, Spain

author

Martin Cooke

• University of the Basque Country, Vitoria, Spain

author

Christopher Bryant

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/psicl-2015-0010