How Do Listeners Distinguish Between Foreign and Native Speakers

Author

Alfredo Gomez, Eastern Kentucky UniversityFollow
Meghan Semenick, Eastern Kentucky UniversityFollow
Sara Incera, Eastern Kentucky UniversityFollow

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Creation Date

Spring 2018

Major

Psychology

Department

Psychology

Degree

Undergraduate

Mentor

Sara Incera

Mentor Department

Psychology

Abstract

At the Multilingual Laboratory we are creating a corpus of sentences designed to help identify the components involved in listeners’ ratings of foreign accents. Pilot 1 focuses on whether listeners are able to distinguish between foreign and native speakers. We will select native speakers whose accents are reliably rated as native (negative rating), and foreign speakers whose accents are reliably rated as foreign (positive rating). Participants will be asked to listen to a 10 second audio clip and then rate the level of accentedness of each speaker on a response bar ranging from -100 (Native) to 100 (Foreign). We predict that participants will be able to reliably rate each speaker and accurately distinguish between foreign and native speakers. Results from this pilot will help select the speakers who will be included in Pilot 1. The goal is to create a corpus of sentences that we can use in future experiments to identify the components involved in listeners’ ratings of foreign accents.