Automatically measuring the strength of foreign accents in English

We measure the differences between the pronunciations of native and non-native American English speakers using a modified version of the Levenshtein (or string edit) distance applied to phonetic transcriptions. Although this measure is well understood theoretically and variants of it have been used successfully to study dialect pronunciations, the comprehensibility of related varieties, and the atypicalness of the speech of the bearers of cochlear implants, it has not been applied to study foreign accents. We briefly present an appropriate version of the Levenshtein distance in this paper and apply it to compare the pronunciation of non-native English speakers to native American English speech. We show that the computational measurements correlate strongly with the average “native-like” judgments given by more than 1000 native U.S. English raters (r = -0.8, p < 0.001). This means that the Levenshtein distance is qualified to function as a measurement of “native-likeness” in studies of foreign accent.

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