The strength of foreign accent in Czech English under adverse listening conditions

Abstract

The study connects two major topics in current speech research: foreign accentedness and speech in adverse conditions. We parallel the research in intelligibility of non-native speech, but instead of linguistic unit recognition we focus on the perception of the foreign accent strength. First, the question of type and degree of perceptual deficiencies occurring along with certain types of signal degradation is tackled. Second, we measure correlations between the accent ratings and certain candidate phenomena that may influence them, e.g., articulation rate, temporal patterning, contrasts in sound pressure levels on selected syllables and F0 variation. The impacts of different types of signal degradation help to estimate the role of segmental/suprasegmental information in assessments of foreignness in Czech English. The full appreciation of the strength of foreign accent is apparently not possible without fine phonetic detail on the segmental level. However, certain suprasegmental features of foreignness are robust enough to manifest at severe levels of signal degradation. Pairwise variability indices of vowel durations and variation in F0 tracks seem to guide the listener even better in the degraded than in the 'clean' speech signal.

Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review

“…Similarly, due to the paucity of non-native studies, we do not review the effects of noise on speech production. Another area outside the scope of the review is the perception of foreign accent in noise (e.g., Munro, 1998;Burki-Cohen et al, 2001;Rogers et al, 2004;Adank et al, 2009;Volin and ).…”

“…Similarly, due to the paucity of non-native studies, we do not review the effects of noise on speech production. Another area outside the scope of the review is the perception of foreign accent in noise (e.g., Munro, 1998;Burki-Cohen et al, 2001;Rogers et al, 2004;Adank et al, 2009;Volin and ).The review is organised as follows. Three background sections describe the parameters of the task faced by listeners in processing speech (Section 2), what constitutes non-native listening (Section 3), and how adverse listening conditions (noise, reverberation) affect the perception of speech (Section 4).…”

Vowel Perception and Transcription Trainer for Learners of English as a Foreign Language

“…Several specific pronunciation features can be identified as typical of Czech accent in English (Šimáčková and Podlipský 2012). The accent has its typical suprasegmental characteristics (Volín and Skarnitzl 2010), segmental features observable in connected speech (Šimáčková, Kolářová and Podlipský 2014), consonantal features (Skarnitzl and Šturm 2016) as well as vocalic features. Our learners' productions of English vowels, even at the relatively advanced levels of proficiency, continue to betray cross-linguistic influence of the small and relatively symmetrical Czech vocalic system, with vowel length distinctions in five long -short phoneme pairs /iːɪ, ɛːɛ, aːa, oːo, uː -u/.…”

Accent rating by native and non-native listeners

“…Accent rating-the degree of foreign accent or type of accent of a talker-is a perceptual evaluation task that is relevant to a variety of different tasks within speech technology, e.g., in computer assisted language learning [1,2], for accent conversion [3,4], for accent identification [5,6], to reduce the impact of non-native accents on word error rates in ASR [7,8], and in the context of adverse listening conditions [9]. The study presented here was conducted in the context of an EU project which aimed for personalized speech-to-speech translation such that a user's spoken input in one language was used to produce spoken output in another language, while continuing to sound like the user's voice [10].…”