Project Description
My project is about foreign accent, which is a “pain” to both adult language learners and listeners of the accented speech. It is understandable that strongly accented speech results in communication difficulty. However, native speakers often detect a foreign accent even from highly proficient bilinguals who have grown up in this country. Is this just a bias due to the bilingual speaker’s appearance, making the listeners hear the “illusionary accent”? Some research has shown that this is indeed the case. On the other hand, another line of research shows that something in the bilingual’s speech is different from that of a monolingual native speaker. My project is part of the latter type of research, which still needs further exploration. The first objective of this project is to identify what makes bilingual speakers’ speech accented. In the past, I collected production data from monolingual native speakers of English and Korean-English bilingual speakers with varying degrees of English proficiency. This 2021 Spring semester I examined a portion of the data focusing on vowels and found that minute acoustic properties, such as pitch and vowel duration, are exhibited differently between the monolingual and the bilingual speakers. This summer, I will examine the portion of the data focusing on consonants and word stress (e.g., banana receives stress on the second syllable), investigating what acoustic deviances exist in these units of speech between the monolingual and the bilingual speakers. The second objective of this project is related to perception. Deviations in the production data are just a potential source of foreign accent. If these deviations are not detected by the listeners, such deviations cannot be attributed as the source of foreign accent. Thus, I will conduct a perception experiment based on the findings from the production study to investigate the relationship between acoustic deviations and the perception of foreign accent.
Tasks and Responsibilites
An undergraduate research assistant will be involved in all aspects of this project (e.g., recruiting participants for the experiment, running the experiment, collecting and analyzing perception data, coding the data, etc.).
Desired Qualifications
Experienced UWM Phonetics lab members and Prof. Hanyong Park will provide needed training for the project (https://sites.uwm.edu/phonetics-lab/).