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1

SOZIOPHONETISCHE UND TRANSLATORISCHE ASPEKTE DES FREMDEN AKZENTS

100%
Bohušová Z.
Germanica Wratislaviensia
|
2010
|
vol. 131
65-73
EN
This paper deals with the issue of foreign accent during interpreting. The attention is focused on the sociophonetic evaluation (acceptance) of the speech of speakers and interpreters by native speakers. The topic is processed from an intercultural and transcultural communication perspective. The author chooses to use the plural form „foreign accents” due to their great variety.
2
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Accent evaluation from extemporaneous child speech

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García Lecumberri M. L., Cooke M., Bryant C.
Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics
|
2015
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vol. 51
|
issue 2
227-246
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.
3
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Assessing FL pronunciation in a semi-immersion setting: The effects of CLIL instruction on Spanish-Catalan learners’ perceived comprehensibility and accentedness

100%
Rallo Fabra L., Juan-Garau M.
Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics
|
2011
|
vol. 47
96
EN
This paper reports research in progress on the effect of content-based learning on speech production by Catalan-Spanish learners of English as a foreign language (FL). The data presented here are part of a longitudinal study which explores the short- and mid-term effects of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), a semi-immersion programme that consists in teaching one or two subjects of the school curriculum entirely in a FL. More specifically, we intended to find out whether there was evidence of gains in intelligibility and foreign accent after one year of CLIL instruction. Two groups of learners varying in amount and nature of formal FL instruction and a control group of native English peers were recorded performing a controlled speaking task at two data collection times separated by one-year interval. The speech samples were assessed by four expert native English judges in terms of degree of comprehensibility and foreign accent. As expected, the read speech samples by the CLIL learners were judged to be more intelligible and less accented than the samples by their peers in conventional formal instruction (FI), but both groups differed significantly from the native English group. No significant short-term improvement in either intelligibility or foreign accent was found after one year of CLIL instruction, suggesting that gains in learners’ pronun-ciation in a content-based learning context are more likely to appear in the mid or long run.
4

Der Einfluss des fremden Akzents in der interkulturellen Kommunikation

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Grzeszczakowska-Pawlikowska B.
Germanica Wratislaviensia
|
2016
|
vol. 141
425-438
DE
Der Gegenstand der interkulturellen Kommunikation, die in verschiedenen institutionalisierten Kommunikationssituationen aktuell einen Normalfall darstellt, bezieht sich nicht nur auf die rein sprachlichen Aspekte. In der multimodal aufgefassten Mündlichkeit sind auch weitere, sprecherische und nonverbale, Kommunikationsanteile von Interesse. Der vorliegende Beitrag, in dessen Fokus der fremde Akzent steht, hat im Allgemeinen zum Ziel, auf Grund ausgewählter Ergebnisse einer audiovisuellen Analyse den Einfluss dieses Phänomens in der interkulturellen Lehr-Lern-Kommunikation (in dem institutionalisierten studentischen Seminarreferat) näher zu beleuchten erläutern. In den Mittelpunkt der Diskussion rücken dementsprechend angenommene Korrelationen zwischen dem fremden Akzent und der allgemeinen Wirkung der Sprecherperson auf den Hörer.
EN
Intercultural communication, which currently constitutes the norm in many institutionalized communicative situations, does not refer purely to speech. According to a multimodal understanding of orality, other speech-related and nonverbal aspects of communication are also of interest. This contribution focuses on the significance of accent in foreign language learning, exploring the influence of this phenomenon on teaching, learning and communication — specifically in the context of the student oral seminar presentation. Discussing selected results of an analysis of audio-visual materials, it centres on the assumed correlations between accent in a foreign language and the general impression made by the speaking person upon the recipient.
5
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Spectral Characteristics of Schwa in Czech Accented English

100%
Volín J., Weingartová L., Skarnitzl R.
Research in Language
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2013
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vol. 11
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issue 1
31-39
EN
The English central mid lax vowel (i.e., schwa) often contributes considerably to the sound differences between native and non-native speech. Many foreign speakers of English fail to reduce certain underlying vowels to schwa, which, on the suprasegmental level of description, affects the perceived rhythm of their speech. However, the problem of capturing quantitatively the differences between native and non-native schwa poses difficulties that, to this day, have been tackled only partially. We offer a technique of measurement in the acoustic domain that has not been probed properly as yet: the distribution of acoustic energy in the vowel spectrum. Our results show that spectral slope features measured in weak vowels discriminate between Czech and British speakers of English quite reliably. Moreover, the measurements of formant bandwidths turned out to be useful for the same task, albeit less direct.
6
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Native Speaker Perceptions of Accented Speech: The English Pronunciation of Macedonian EFL Learners

100%
Kirkova-Naskova A.
Research in Language
|
2010
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vol. 8
1-21
EN
The paper reports on the results of a study that aimed to describe the vocalic and consonantal features of the English pronunciation of Macedonian EFL learners as perceived by native speakers of English and to find out whether native speakers who speak different standard variants of English perceive the same segments as non-native. A specially designed computer web application was employed to gather two types of data: a) quantitative (frequency of segment variables and global foreign accent ratings on a 5-point scale), and b) qualitative (open-ended questions). The result analysis points out to three most frequent markers of foreign accent in the English speech of Macedonian EFL learners: final obstruent devoicing, vowel shortening and substitution of English dental fricatives with Macedonian dental plosives. It also reflects additional phonetic aspects poorly explained in the available reference literature such as allophonic distributional differences between the two languages and intonational mismatch.
7
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Spectral Characteristics of Schwa in Czech Accented English

100%
Volín J., Weingartová L., Skarnitzl R.
Research in Language
|
2013
|
vol. 11
|
issue 1
31-39
EN
The English central mid lax vowel (i.e., schwa) often contributes considerably to the sound differences between native and non-native speech. Many foreign speakers of English fail to reduce certain underlying vowels to schwa, which, on the suprasegmental level of description, affects the perceived rhythm of their speech. However, the problem of capturing quantitatively the differences between native and non-native schwa poses difficulties that, to this day, have been tackled only partially. We offer a technique of measurement in the acoustic domain that has not been probed properly as yet: the distribution of acoustic energy in the vowel spectrum. Our results show that spectral slope features measured in weak vowels discriminate between Czech and British speakers of English quite reliably. Moreover, the measurements of formant bandwidths turned out to be useful for the same task, albeit less direct
8
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Native Speaker Perceptions of Accented Speech: The English Pronunciation of Macedonian EFL Learners

100%
Kirkova-Naskova A.
Research in Language
|
2010
|
vol. 8
41-61
EN
The paper reports on the results of a study that aimed to describe the vocalic and consonantal features of the English pronunciation of Macedonian EFL learners as perceived by native speakers of English and to find out whether native speakers who speak different standard variants of English perceive the same segments as non-native. A specially designed computer web application was employed to gather two types of data: a) quantitative (frequency of segment variables and global foreign accent ratings on a 5-point scale), and b) qualitative (open-ended questions). The result analysis points out to three most frequent markers of foreign accent in the English speech of Macedonian EFL learners: final obstruent devoicing, vowel shortening and substitution of English dental fricatives with Macedonian dental plosives. It also reflects additional phonetic aspects poorly explained in the available reference literature such as allophonic distributional differences between the two languages and intonational mismatch.
9
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Foreign or Native-like? The Attitudes of Czech EFL Learners Towards Accents of English and Their Use as Pronunciation Models

88%
Brabcová K., Skarnitzl R.
Studie z aplikované lingvistiky - Studies in Applied Linguistics
|
2018
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vol. 9
|
issue 1
38-50
EN
Attitudes of language users to English in the international context certainly do not rank among newly studied subjects. One of the frequent caveats of the ongoing research, however, is that it mostly targets university students of English, which may provide a very skewed perspective. This study focuses on young Czech speakers of English who have studied or are studying other disciplines and uses an online survey to examine their attitudes to English pronunciation in general and to their own pronunciation, to various accents of English and also to exposure to model accents. Analyses of 145 respondents show that 70% of them would like to acquire a native-like accent (most frequently General British), even though most of them use English with other foreigners (and not native speakers). They prefer to be exposed to many different accents of English, native and non-native, and believe that learners should themselves choose which accent they want to regard as a model. One of the most important findings concerns the participants’ belief that pronunciation is teachable and that it is worth working on it; this should provide encouragement to teachers of English. In general, our results suggest that the ELF approach and the associated Lingua Franca Core concept do not seem to be relevant for young Czech users of English.
10
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Assimilation of Voicing in Czech Speakers of English: The Effect of the Degree of Accentedness

88%
Skarnitzl R., Šturm P.
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2014
|
vol. 12
|
issue 2
199-208
EN
Czech and English are languages which differ with respect to the implementation of voicing. Unlike in English, there is a considerable agreement between phonological (systemic) and phonetic (actual) voicing in Czech, and, more importantly, the two languages have different strategies for the assimilation of voicing across the word boundary. The present study investigates the voicing in word-final obstruents in Czech speakers of English with the specific aim of ascertaining whether the degree of the speakers’ foreign accent correlates with the way they treat English obstruents in assimilatory contexts. L2 speakers, divided into three groups of varying accentedness, were examined employing categorization and a voicing profile method for establishing the presence/absence of voicing. The results suggest that speakers with a different degree of Czech accent do differ in their realization of voicing in the way predicted by a negative transfer of assimilatory habits from Czech.
11
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Assimilation of Voicing in Czech Speakers of English: The Effect of the Degree of Accentedness

88%
Skarnitzl R., Šturm P.
Research in Language
|
2014
|
vol. 12
|
issue 2
199-208
EN
Czech and English are languages which differ with respect to the implementation of voicing. Unlike in English, there is a considerable agreement between phonological (systemic) and phonetic (actual) voicing in Czech, and, more importantly, the two languages have different strategies for the assimilation of voicing across the word boundary. The present study investigates the voicing in word-final obstruents in Czech speakers of English with the specific aim of ascertaining whether the degree of the speakers’ foreign accent correlates with the way they treat English obstruents in assimilatory contexts. L2 speakers, divided into three groups of varying accentedness, were examined employing categorization and a voicing profile method for establishing the presence/absence of voicing. The results suggest that speakers with a different degree of Czech accent do differ in their realization of voicing in the way predicted by a negative transfer of assimilatory habits from Czech.
12
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Credibility of native and non-native speakers of English revisited: Do non-native listeners feel the same?

88%
Hanzlíková D., Skarnitzl R.
Research in Language
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2017
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vol. 15
|
issue 3
285-298
EN
This study reports on research stimulated by Lev-Ari and Keysar (2010) who showed that native listeners find statements delivered by foreign-accented speakers to be less true than those read by native speakers. Our objective was to replicate the study with non-native listeners to see whether this effect is also relevant in international communication contexts. The same set of statements from the original study was recorded by 6 native and 6 non-native speakers of English. 121 non-native listeners rated the truthfulness of the statements on a 7-point scale. The results of our study tentatively do confirm a negative bias against non-native speakers as perceived by non-native listeners, showing that subconscious attitudes to language varieties are also relevant in communication among non-native speakers.
13
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The effects of explicit pronunciation instruction on the degree of perceived foreign accent in the speech of EFL learners

88%
Algethami G.
Research in Language
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2017
|
vol. 15
|
issue 3
253-263
EN
This paper reports on a study that attempted to examine the effect of explicit pronunciation instruction of some English segments (individual sounds) on the degree of perceived foreign accent in EFL Arab learners’ speech. Nine Arab learners of English in an EFL (English as a foreign language) setting were assigned to two groups, experimental and control. Five utterances loaded with the taught segments were collected from both groups before and after instruction. While the experimental group received instruction on these segments, the control group did not. 13 native English listeners were recruited to rate all the elicited sentences for the degree of perceived foreign accent. The results did not show any effect of explicit pronunciation instruction on the degree of perceived foreign accent, as there were no differences between the ratings before and after the instruction.
14

Is there an interlanguage speech credibility benefit?

75%
Podlipský V. J., Šimáčková Š., Petráž D.
Topics in Linguistics
|
2016
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vol. 17
|
issue 1
30-44
EN
Some (though not all) previous studies have documented the interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit (ISIB), i.e. the greater intelligibility of non-native (relative to native) speech to non-native listeners as compared to native listeners. Moreover, some studies (again not all) found that native listeners consider foreign-accented statements as less truthful than native-sounding ones. We join these two lines of research, asking whether foreign-accented statements sound more credible to non-native than to native listeners and whether difficult-to-process (less comprehensible) utterances are less credible. In two experiments we measure the intelligibility, comprehensibility and credibility of native and foreign-accented statements for native listeners and non-native listeners matched or mismatched in L1 with non-native talkers. We find an ISIB in both matched and mismatched non-native listeners, and an analogous matched comprehensibility benefit. However, we obtain no evidence of an interlanguage speech credibility benefit. Instead, both matched and mismatched non-native listeners tend to trust native statements more (i.e. statements produced by their target-language models). For native listeners, we do not confirm the tendency to mistrust non-native statements, but we do find a moderate correlation between the comprehensibility and credibility of foreign-accented utterances, giving limited support to the hypothesis that decreased perceptual fluency leads to decreased credibility.
15
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The Impact of Rhythmic Distortions in Speech on Personality Assessment

75%
Volín J., Poesová K., Skarnitzl R.
|
2014
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vol. 12
|
issue 3
209-216
EN
The perennial question as to how perceived otherness in speech projects into listener assessment of one’s personality has been systematically investigated within the field of foreign accentedness, vocal communication of affective states and vocal stereotyping. In the present study, we aimed at exploring non-native listeners’ capacity to respond to differences in natural and modified native speech, particularly whether the manipulation of temporal structure in both stressed and unstressed syllables gives rise to any changes in the perception of the speaker’s personality. The respondents’ intuitive judgements were captured in the domain of the ‘nervousness category’ taken from the five-factor model of personality. Our results indicate an effect of temporal modifications on the listeners’ judgements. Analysis of variance for repeated measures confirmed a highly significant shift of personality evaluations towards the undesired traits (e.g., nervousness, anxiety, querulousness). Several interesting interactions with the semantic contents of the utterances and with the intrinsic qualities of the speakers’ voices were also found. We argue that the effects of accented speech go beyond conscious willingness to accept “otherness” and suggest a method for studying them.
16
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The Impact of Rhythmic Distortions in Speech on Personality Assessment

75%
Volín J., Poesová K., Skarnitzl R.
Research in Language
|
2014
|
vol. 12
|
issue 3
209-216
EN
The perennial question as to how perceived otherness in speech projects into listener assessment of one’s personality has been systematically investigated within the field of foreign accentedness, vocal communication of affective states and vocal stereotyping. In the present study, we aimed at exploring non-native listeners’ capacity to respond to differences in natural and modified native speech, particularly whether the manipulation of temporal structure in both stressed and unstressed syllables gives rise to any changes in the perception of the speaker’s personality. The respondents’ intuitive judgements were captured in the domain of the ‘nervousness category’ taken from the five-factor model of personality. Our results indicate an effect of temporal modifications on the listeners’ judgements. Analysis of variance for repeated measures confirmed a highly significant shift of personality evaluations towards the undesired traits (e.g., nervousness, anxiety, querulousness). Several interesting interactions with the semantic contents of the utterances and with the intrinsic qualities of the speakers’ voices were also found. We argue that the effects of accented speech go beyond conscious willingness to accept “otherness” and suggest a method for studying them.
17
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Rysy cizineckého přízvuku ve španělštině českých mluvčích

51%
Černikovská Š., Čermák P.
Časopis pro moderní filologii (Journal for Modern Philology)
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2016
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vol. 98
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issue 1
77-91
EN
The paper focuses on some of the “foreign” phonetic features of L2 Spanish as spoken by Czechs. It presents a qualitative analysis of L2 Spanish production followed by a perception experiment, in which advanced Spanish-speaking Czech listeners reacted to specifically modified items in nonsuggestive contexts. The most salient phenomena in Spanish pronunciation that cause confusion in Czech speakers include r-sounds /ɾ/ and /r/, the position of word-stress and the realization of vowels between two subsequent lexical items. The study shows that these features, having no relevant equivalents in Czech, seem to be relatively problematic for Czech speakers of Spanish. The perception experiment, however, did not confirm that differences in these properties would be relevant for Czech speakers, either on the segmental, or the suprasegmental level (the word-stress). On the other hand, it did demonstrate a difference between the perception of Spanish native and non-native speech, significantly slower reaction times and more variability being associated with the L2 Spanish speakers.
18
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Míra cizineckého přízvuku v češtině polských mluvčích

51%
Veroňková J.
Bohemistyka
|
2022
|
issue 3
463-475
EN
The aim of the study is to try to find sound phenomena that can influence the assessment of the degree of foreign accent among Polish speakers in Czech. The material consists of samples of five native Polish male speakers, from which a perception test was compiled. The degree of foreign accent was assessed by two groups of native Czech speakers (from Bohemia and Ostrava region). Based on the results of the test and perceptual and acoustic analysis, phenomena were determined that could (with varying degrees of certainty) have an influence on the assessment of the foreign accent and which, on the contrary, were not reflected in the assessment. Both the phenomena of prosody, and the pronunciation of segments or their combinatorics contribute to a foreign accent.
CS
Cílem studie je pokusit se nalézt zvukové jevy, které mohou ovlivnit hodnocení míry cizineckého přízvuku u polských mluvčích v češtině. Materiál tvoří vzorky pěti mluvčích mužů s mateřštinou polštinou, z nichž byl sestaven percepční test. Míru cizineckého přízvuku hodnotily dvě skupiny rodilých posluchačů češtiny (z Čech a Ostravska). Na základě výsledků testu a poslechové a akustické analýzy byly určeny jevy, které mohly mít (s různou mírou jistoty) na hodnocení cizineckého přízvuku vliv a které se naopak v hodnocení neodrazily. K cizineckému přízvuku přispívají jak jevy souvislé řeči, tak výslovnost segmentů či jejich kombinatorika.
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