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      My English sounds better than yours: Second-language learners perceive their own accent as better than that of their peers

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          Abstract

          Second language (L2) learners are often aware of the typical pronunciation errors that speakers of their native language make, yet often persist in making these errors themselves. We hypothesised that L2 learners may perceive their own accent as closer to the target language than the accent of other learners, due to frequent exposure to their own productions. This was tested by recording 24 female native speakers of German producing 60 sentences. The same participants later rated these recordings for accentedness. Importantly, the recordings had been altered to sound male so that participants were unaware of their own productions in the to-be-rated samples. We found evidence supporting our hypothesis: participants rated their own altered voice, which they did not recognize as their own, as being closer to a native speaker than that of other learners. This finding suggests that objective feedback may be crucial in fostering L2 acquisition and reduce fossilization of erroneous patterns.

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          Most cited references32

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          Factors affecting strength of perceived foreign accent in a second language.

          This study assessed the relation between non-native subjects' age of learning (AOL) English and the overall degree of perceived foreign accent in their production of English sentences. The 240 native Italian (NI) subjects examined had begun learning English in Canada between the ages of 2 and 23 yr, and had lived in Canada for an average of 32 yr. Native English-speaking listeners used a continuous scale to rate sentences spoken by the NI subjects and by subjects in a native English comparison group. Estimates of the AOL of onset of foreign accents varied across the ten listeners who rated the sentences, ranging from 3.1 to 11.6 yr (M = 7.4). Foreign accents were evident in sentences spoken by many NI subjects who had begun learning English long before what is traditionally considered to be the end of a critical period. Very few NI subjects who began learning English after the age of 15 yr received ratings that fell within the native English range. Principal components analyses of the NI subjects' responses to a language background questionnaire were followed by multiple-regression analyses. AOL accounted for an average of 59% of variance in the foreign accent ratings. Language use factors accounted for an additional 15% of variance. Gender was also found to influence degree of foreign accent.
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            Perceptual Restoration of Missing Speech Sounds

            R Warren (1970)
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              Perceptual learning for speech.

              Adult language users have an enormous amount of experience with speech in their native language. As a result, they have very well-developed processes for categorizing the sounds of speech that they hear. Despite this very high level of experience, recent research has shown that listeners are capable of redeveloping their speech categorization to bring it into alignment with new variation in their speech input. This reorganization of phonetic space is a type of perceptual learning, or recalibration, of speech processes. In this article, we review several recent lines of research on perceptual learning for speech.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: MethodologyRole: Writing – original draftRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: MethodologyRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Funding acquisitionRole: MethodologyRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA USA )
                1932-6203
                7 February 2020
                2020
                : 15
                : 2
                : e0227643
                Affiliations
                [1 ] Department of Cognitive Science, Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences, University of Malta, Msida, Malta
                [2 ] Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Munich, Germany
                [3 ] Acoustics Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria
                Potsdam University, GERMANY
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4318-0032
                Article
                PONE-D-19-25025
                10.1371/journal.pone.0227643
                7006902
                32032377
                809bac5d-7c5b-4acb-8b99-9fd974c09006
                © 2020 Mitterer et al

                This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 16 September 2019
                : 23 December 2019
                Page count
                Figures: 1, Tables: 1, Pages: 12
                Funding
                Funded by: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
                Award ID: RE 3047/1-1
                Award Recipient :
                Funded by: University of Malta
                Award ID: CGSRP01-19
                Award Recipient :
                ER - grant nr. RE 3047/1-1, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, URL: https://www.dfg.de/, The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. HM - University of Malta Research Grant, CGSRP01-19, www.um.edu.mt, The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
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