This research examines the relationship between British accents and their stereotypes. It looks specifically at the ratings of British and American subjects for a variety of British regional and standard accents, and examines them in contrast with observed stereotypes about these accents. The purpose of this paper is to compare the reactions of British and American participants in order to understand whether the stereotypes associated with these accents are purely socially constructed by British society, or whether qualities of each accent support these stereotypes. Results found a similar trend in the ratings of both American and British participants, though it is hypothesized that this is due to confounding variables.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1980. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 333-339. / by Bruce Philip Hayes. / Ph.D.

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Diss.--Köln--Philosophische Fakultät, 2002. / Bibliogr. p. 263-278.

The increasing number of proficient, non-native English speakers, both in U.S. academic institutions and around the globe, warrants considerable investigation into possible norms developing within non-native to non-native interactions. This report analyzes attitudes toward accent, a prominent indicator of foreignness, within non-native English speaker interactions. It presents relevant research on this topic, and it summarizes some of the major findings of an online survey that examined what attitudes, if any, non-native listeners may form on the basis of accent alone when listening to other non-native English speakers. The results suggest that listeners base attitude judgments more on native-likeness than on intelligibility. Also, speakers’ perceptions of their own non-native accent are more negative than how they actually rate themselves as compared to others. / text

In the past few decades, cognitive psychologists and linguists have shown increasing research interest in the phenomenon of implicit learning, a term generally defined as learning of regularities in the environment without intention and awareness. Some psychologists regard implicit learning as the primary mechanism for knowledge attainment and language acquisition (Reber, 1993), whereas others deny the possibility of learning even simple contingencies in an implicit manner (Lovibond and Shanks, 2002). In the context of language acquisition, while first language acquisition is essentially implicit, the extent to which implicit learning is relevant to second language acquisition remains unclear. Empirical evidence has been found on the implicit learning of grammar/syntactic rules (e.g., Rebuschat & Williams, 2012) and form-meaning connections (e.g., Leung & Williams, 2011) but little investigation of implicit learning has been conducted in the realm of phonology, particularly supra-segmental phonology. Besides, there is still no consensus on the extent to which implicit learning exhibits population variation. This dissertation reports three experiments which aim to 1) address the possibility of learning second language (L2) word stress patterns implicitly; 2) identify relevant individual differences in the implicit learning of L2 word stress rules; and 3) improve measurement of conscious knowledge by integrating both subjective and objective measures of awareness. Using an incidental learning task and a two-alternative forced-choice post-test, Experiment 1 found evidence of learning one-to-one stress-to-phoneme connections in an implicit fashion, and successfully applied the process dissociation procedure as a sensitive awareness measure. Experiment 2 found implicit learning effect for more complicated word stress rules which involved mappings between stress assignment and syllable types/types of phoneme, and integrated verbal reports, confidence ratings and inclusion-exclusion tasks as awareness measures. Experiment 3 explored potentially individual differences in the learning of L2 word stress rules. No correlation was found between learning of L2 word stress and working memory, processing speed and phonological short-term memory, supporting the belief that involvement of working memory in implicit learning is minimal, and the view that different stimuli/task-specific subsystems govern different implicit learning tasks. It is concluded that L2 word stress rules may be learnt implicitly with minimal individual variations. / published_or_final_version / English / Master / Master of Philosophy

Normal Language requires the integration of formal, conceptual, and pragmatic knowledge. It appears to involve the analytic processing of the left hemisphere and the holistic processing of the right. To study hemisphere involvement in language processing, patients with unilateral right or left hemisphere lesions and a matched neurologically normal control group were tested on their ability to perceive stress and intonation contrasts in words and phrases of varying length. The results suggest that both hemispheres are involved in normal language processing, each in a qualitatively different way. Whereas the left hemisphere appears to work from the bottom up, analyzing information sequentially and arriving at the overall pattern, the right hemisphere works from the top down, beginning with the overall pattern and working to fill in the details. Moreover, the importance of each hemisphere's participation may change in response to different grammatical and contexual variables.

This study draws on previous research (e.g., Labov, 1969; Carranza & Ryan, 1975; Brennan & Brennan, 1981; Alford & Strother, 1990) which has revealed and confirmed the many language stereotypes and biases in existence in the United States The present study differs from earlier investigations in that it specifically addresses the current-day attitudes of American English speakers toward a selection of accents that include both native (U.S. regional) and nonnative (foreign or ethnic) accents of English. / The purpose of the present study was to determine the evaluative reactions of an American-born audience toward accented English speech. Fifty-three American college students listened to an audio recording of eight accented English speakers, four representing regional U.S. accent groups and four representing ethnic or foreign accent groups. The students' evaluative reactions indicated favoritism toward the American English speakers with a consistent downgrading of the ethnic speakers. Analysis of the personality ratings suggests that participants based their judgments to some extent on their perceptions of the accented speakers in terms of three dimensions: appeal, accommodation and aspiration. The conceptual affinity of these three dimensions and the subsequent revelation of three-dimensional model of "absolute accommodation" are discussed. / This exploratory study clearly implies a need for further research, particularly into educational programs or interventions aimed at countering the negative attitudes and stereotypes associated with language variety.

This thesis proposes to improve and enrich the expressiveness of English Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis by identifying and generating natural patterns of prosodic prominence. In most state-of-the-art TTS systems the prediction from text of prosodic prominence relations between words in an utterance relies on features that very loosely account for the combined effects of syntax, semantics, word informativeness and salience, on prosodic prominence. To improve prosodic prominence prediction we first follow up the classic approach in which prosodic prominence patterns are flattened into binary sequences of pitch accented and pitch unaccented words. We propose and motivate statistic and syntactic dependency based features that are complementary to the most predictive features proposed in previous works on automatic pitch accent prediction and show their utility on both read and spontaneous speech. Different accentuation patterns can be associated to the same sentence. Such variability rises the question on how evaluating pitch accent predictors when more patterns are allowed. We carry out a study on prosodic symbols variability on a speech corpus where different speakers read the same text and propose an information-theoretic definition of optionality of symbolic prosodic events that leads to a novel evaluation metric in which prosodic variability is incorporated as a factor affecting prediction accuracy. We additionally propose a method to take advantage of the optionality of prosodic events in unit-selection speech synthesis. To better account for the tight links between the prosodic prominence of a word and the discourse/sentence context, part of this thesis goes beyond the accent/no-accent dichotomy and is devoted to a novel task, the automatic detection of contrast, where contrast is meant as a (Information Structure’s) relation that ties two words that explicitly contrast with each other. This task is mainly motivated by the fact that contrastive words tend to be prosodically marked with particularly prominent pitch accents. The identification of contrastive word pairs is achieved by combining lexical information, syntactic information (which mainly aims to identify the syntactic parallelism that often activates contrast) and semantic information (mainly drawn from the Word- Net semantic lexicon), within a Support Vector Machines classifier. Once we have identified patterns of prosodic prominence we propose methods to incorporate such information in TTS synthesis and test its impact on synthetic speech naturalness trough some large scale perceptual experiments. The results of these experiments cast some doubts on the utility of a simple accent/no-accent distinction in Hidden Markov Model based speech synthesis while highlight the importance of contrastive accents.

Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Alberta, 2009. / Title from PDF file main screen (viewed on July 30, 2009). "A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science, Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta." Includes bibliographical references.