Determinants of English accents

In this study we investigate which factors affect the degree of non-native accent of L2 speakers of English who learned English in school and mostly lived for some time in an anglophone setting. We use data from the Speech Accent Archive containing over 700 speakers speaking almost 160 different native languages. We show that besides several important predictors, including the age of English onset and length of anglophone residence, the linguistic distance between the speaker’s native language and English is a significant predictor of the degree of non-native accent in pronunciation. This study extends an earlier study (Schepens et al., 2013) which only focused on Indo-European L2 learners of Dutch and used a general speaking proficiency measure.

[1]  Gerhard Jäger,et al.  Phylogenetic Inference from Word Lists Using Weighted Alignment with Empirically Determined Weights , 2013 .

[2]  Eliza Margaretha,et al.  Inducing a measure of phonetic similarity from pronunciation variation , 2012, J. Phonetics.

[3]  Martijn Wieling,et al.  Measuring foreign accent strength in English : Validating Levenshtein distance as a measure , 2014 .

[4]  John Nerbonne,et al.  Evaluating the Pairwise String Alignment of Pronunciations , 2009, LaTeCH - SHELT&R@EACL.

[5]  Wilbert Jan Heeringa.  Measuring dialect pronunciation differences using Levenshtein distance , 2004 .

[6]  Brett Kessler,et al.  Computational dialectology in Irish Gaelic , 1995, EACL.

[7]  W. Heeringa,et al.  Perceptive evaluation of Levenshtein dialect distance measurements using Norwegian dialect data , 2004, Language Variation and Change.

[8]  B. Chiswick,et al.  Linguistic Distance: A Quantitative Measure of the Distance Between English and Other Languages , 2004, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[9]  Eric W. Holman,et al.  Evaluating linguistic distance measures , 2010 .

[10]  J. Klugman.  Human Development Report 2011. Sustainability and Equity: A Better Future for All , 2011 .

[11]  Gerhard Jäger,et al.  Support for linguistic macrofamilies from weighted sequence alignment , 2015, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[12]  John Nerbonne,et al.  Advances in Dialectometry , 2015 .

[13]  Steven H. Weinberger,et al.  The Speech Accent Archive: towards a typology of English accents , 2011 .

[14]  S. Wood.  Generalized Additive Models: An Introduction with R , 2006 .

[15]  Vladimir I. Levenshtein,et al.  Binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions, and reversals , 1965 .

[16]  James Emil Flege,et al.  Factors affecting degree of foreign accent in an L2: a review , 2001, J. Phonetics.

[17]  R. Gray,et al.  Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin , 2003, Nature.

[18]  Kenneth Ward Church,et al.  Word Association Norms, Mutual Information, and Lexicography , 1989, ACL.

[19]  H. Akaike.  A new look at the statistical model identification , 1974 .

[20]  April M. S. McMahon,et al.  Language classification by numbers , 2005 .

[21]  Elisabeth Dévière,et al.  Analyzing linguistic data: a practical introduction to statistics using R , 2009 .

[22]  Sharon Unsworth,et al.  An Investigation of Factors Affecting Early Foreign Language Learning in the Netherlands , 2014 .

[23]  Frans van der Slik,et al.  ACQUISITION OF DUTCH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE , 2010, Studies in Second Language Acquisition.

[24]  Carmen Muñoz,et al.  Symmetries and Asymmetries of Age Effects in Naturalistic and Instructed L2 Learning , 2008 .

[25]  R. Dekeyser.  THE ROBUSTNESS OF CRITICAL PERIOD EFFECTS IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION , 2000, Studies in Second Language Acquisition.

[26]  Job Schepens,et al.  The effect of linguistic distance across Indo-European mother tongues on learning Dutch as a second language. , 2013 .

[27]  Douglas C. Walker,et al.  The Pronunciation of Canadian French , 1984 .