Stereotyping towards the second language accent of second language learners is extensively seen even when the content of learner speech can be understood. Previous studies reported conflicting results on accent perception by speakers of second languages, especially among homogenous learners. In this paper, we conducted a survey and two experiments to test whether Mandarin-speaking advanced learners of English may give harsher accent ratings to their fellow learners than to Standard American English speakers. The survey was designed to understand the L2 listeners' beliefs about accented speech. In Experiment 1, participants rated short audio recordings of L2 learner' and Standard American English speech; in Experiment 2, they did the same in a more detailed word-in-sentence accent rating task. Results showed a markedly high level of perceived L2 accentedness for several learner speech stimuli despite good intelligibility, especially for the strongly-accented Cantonese passage and for specific vowel and consonant types. The findings reveal the existence of native-speakerism in China and highlight existing accent stereotypes. Implications for policymaking and language teaching are discussed.
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
|---|---|
| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10270356 | PMC |
| http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287172 | PLOS |
Publication Analysis
Top Keywords
Similar Publications
Biological, linguistic, and individual factors govern voice qualitya).
J Acoust Soc Am
January 2025
USC Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089-1455, USA.
Voice quality serves as a rich source of information about speakers, providing listeners with impressions of identity, emotional state, age, sex, reproductive fitness, and other biologically and socially salient characteristics. Understanding how this information is transmitted, accessed, and exploited requires knowledge of the psychoacoustic dimensions along which voices vary, an area that remains largely unexplored. Recent studies of English speakers have shown that two factors related to speaker size and arousal consistently emerge as the most important determinants of quality, regardless of who is speaking.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe mediating role of English learning motivation between socioeconomic status and pragmatic awareness.
Front Psychol
January 2025
School of Foreign Languages, Southeast University, Nanjing, China.
Socioeconomic status (SES) has received great attention in learning a second or foreign language (SL/FL). However, little research has investigated the association between SES and SL/FL pragmatic learning, let alone the influencing pathways of SES on SL/FL pragmatic awareness (PA). Therefore, this research aimed to address the link between learners' SES and PA with the mediating effects of learning motivation based on the L2 motivation self-system (L2MSS) theory by surveying 292 Chinese EFL university students.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLinear incrementality in focus and accentuation processing during sentence production: evidence from eye movements.
Front Hum Neurosci
January 2025
Department of Psychology, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China.
Introduction: While considerable research in language production has focused on incremental processing during conceptual and grammatical encoding, prosodic encoding remains less investigated. This study examines whether focus and accentuation processing in speech production follows linear or hierarchical incrementality.
Methods: We employed visual world eye-tracking to investigate how focus and accentuation are processed during sentence production.
An Exploratory Investigation of Heritage and Educational Language Exposures as Factors in Medical Student Spanish Language Proficiency.
J Gen Intern Med
January 2025
Hospital Medicine Service, Immigrant Health and Cancer Disparities Service, Departments of Medicine and Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA.
Background: Prior to enrolling in medical Spanish courses, students typically acquire their Spanish skills either through formal second language education only (L2 learners) or by being exposed to Spanish during childhood at home (heritage learners).
Objective: To categorize the language exposures of medical students who participated in a medical Spanish course and explore the associations of exposures with their medical language proficiency score on the Physician Oral Language Observation Matrix (POLOM).
Setting And Participants: Forty-one fourth-year medical students (2021-2022) self-reported demographics and prior language exposures and participated in videorecorded POLOM-rated Spanish standardized patient encounters.
INSIGHT: Combining Fixation Visualisations and Residual Neural Networks for Dyslexia Classification From Eye-Tracking Data.
Dyslexia
February 2025
Department of Machine Learning and Data Processing, Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic.
Current diagnostic methods for dyslexia primarily rely on traditional paper-and-pencil tasks. Advanced technological approaches, including eye-tracking and artificial intelligence (AI), offer enhanced diagnostic capabilities. In this paper, we bridge the gap between scientific and diagnostic concepts by proposing a novel dyslexia detection method, called INSIGHT, which combines a visualisation phase and a neural network-based classification phase.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWant AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?
Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!