Foreign Accentedness

Misunderstood ironic intents may injure the conversation and impede connecting with others. Prior research suggests that ironic compliments, a rarer type of irony, are considered less ironic when spoken with a foreign accent. Using more ecologically-valid stimuli with natural prosodic cues, we found that this effect also applied to ironic criticisms, not just to ironic compliments. English native speakers (N = 96) listened to dialogs between Canadian English speakers and their foreign-accented peers, rating targets on multiple scales (irony, certainty in the speaker's intent, appropriateness, and offensiveness). Generalized additive mixed modelling showed that 1) ironic comments were rated lower for irony when foreign-accented, whereas literal comments were unaffected by accent; 2) the listener's political orientation, but not empathy or need for cognitive closure, modulated irony detection accuracy. The results are discussed in terms of linguistic expectations, social distance, cultural stereotypes, and personality differences.

While L2 acquisition by Brazilians has been studied for different languages, the acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese by foreigners has been poorly explored. Recent studies of non-native accented speech in other languages have shown that a foreign accent could largely influence the perception of personal qualities of speakers, and this issue presents a large interest for intercultural research projects. Our research project is focused on Russophone immigrants living in Brazil, bilingual speakers of Russian and Portuguese. The specific aim of the current work is to describe a database containing information about 40 native Russian speakers living in São Paulo for at least six months. Their linguistic and sociocultural profiles are presented, and the experimental protocol of the data collection is described. The protocol included recording speech samples in Russian and in Portuguese and video recordings for further facial expression analysis of bilinguals by the program FaceReader 7.0. The analysis of the sociocultural profiles of the Russophones, presented in the current work, provides a strong basis for the enrichment of the phonetic, sociolinguistic, and nonverbal behavior analysis of these speakers.

Intelligibility of Non-native English: Norms, Attitudes and Listening Comprehension
The use of English as an international language challenges traditional views on effective communication, communicative competence and native-speaker norms. Resulting from the wide-range use of English in international contexts by non-native speakers, learners are exposed to an increasing number of non-native accents. Although accentedness is a salient feature, which is frequently associated with communicative difficulties, it does not necessarily reduce intelligibility. The present study aims to examine the relationship between attitudes connected to non-native accents, perceived comprehensibility and their relationship to actual comprehensibility. The results reveal that native speakers are evaluated more positively both in terms of personal attributes and perceived comprehensibility. In addition, a negative correlation exists between perceived comprehensibility and actual comprehension. Although listeners evaluated non-native speakers less positively than native speakers, they were able to
understand them better. In line with recent studies, these results question native speaker norms and the commonly held belief that accent inevitably causes communication problems, and emphasizes the need for foregrounding intelligibility.

AWEJ Volume.5 Number.2, 2014   
                                                                                                                                                            Pp.167 -186
                                                                                                                                                                                                                     



English Varieties and Arab Learners in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Countries: Attitude and Perception

Wafa Shahada Zoghbor
Zayed University
United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi



Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to explore the attitudes of post-secondary Arab learners towards native and non-native varieties of English. A stimulus tap was incorporated within semi-structured interviews where respondents listened to 6 speakers (an Indian, Arab, Thai, British, American, and Canadian) and then answered 5-Point Likert scale questions. The findings revealed that the interviewees encountered difficulties identifying the speakers’ first languages. Whilst the British and Canadian speakers were perceived more positively than the other speech samples and were easier to understand than the Thai speaker, they were less understandable to the interviewees than the Arab and Indian speakers. The American speaker was perceived less positively than the other speech samples and was also the least understandable. The paper concludes with a discussion of the findings and specific recommendations that could facilitate improving Arab learners’ tolerance of their own (as well as other non-native) varieties of English. The data in this paper forms part of a broader study investigating the attitude of Arab learners towards the shifting ownership of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF).
Keywords: Arab learners; English as a lingua franca (ELF); native speaker (NS) / non-native speakers (NNS) of English; accent; attitude.

"""The current study examined the age of learning effect on second language (L2)  acquisition. The research goals of the study were twofold: to test whether there is an independent age effect controlling for other potentially confounding variables, and to clarify the age effect across L2 grammar and speech production domains.
The study included 118 Mandarin-speaking immigrants and 24 native English speakers. Grammar knowledge was assessed by a grammaticality judgment task, and speech production was measured by native English speaking raters’ ratings of participants’ foreign accents. Results from the study revealed that the age of learning effect was robust for both L2 domains even after controlling for the influences of other variables, such as length of residence and years of education in the United States. However, the age of learning variable had a stronger impact on speech production than on grammar. The
current results support the framework of multiple critical/sensitive periods (Long, 2005; Newport, Bavelier, & Neville, 2001; Werker & Tees, 2005).  """

A review by Alice Henderson about the book by Marnie Reed and me

The Handbook of English Pronunciation is a long-awaited, state-of-the-art reference book which will be a valuable resource for language researchers and teachers alike. It provides an authoritative overview of current knowledge in this field and addresses key pedagogical issues. Readers do not need to be experts in pronunciation to benefit from the book, and reading it will bring home to them how " pronunciation influences all research into, and teaching of, spoken language " (2015: xii). The handbook, skilfully edited by Marnie Reed and John Levis, showcases contributions from 37 experts from around the world in 530 pages. The seven-page Introduction includes some candid comments about the challenges of pulling together contributions from a host of authors, countries and approaches, but—given the variety and richness of Englishes around the world—this diversity is one of the book's major strengths. The main body of the book contains 28 chapters organised into six parts, and each of the parts delves into one aspect of English pronunciation: History, Description, Discourse, Major Varieties, Acquisition, and Teaching. In addition to the bibliography at the end of each chapter, the book provides a comprehensive, 10-page Index that makes it easy for readers to rapidly find what interests them—detailed language descriptions, practical classroom information or further reading suggestions. Showing readers where to find further information as their needs and questions evolve is a key feature of any handbook. Finally, Notes on Contributors (2015: vii–xi) provide useful information about the authors. Part 1 of the handbook—The History of English Pronunciation—opens with a chapter by Jeremy Smith, in which he illustrates the process of historical phonology with three case studies: voiced and voiceless fricatives as examples of the development of new phonemic categories, the relation between digraphs and diphthongs, and the causes and consequences of the Great Vowel Shift. Smith's methodological queries and meta-reflections set the tone for

The sensitivity to others' linguistic backgrounds has real consequences for speakers and listeners alike. People's attitudes to those who speak differently tend to be negative (Gluszek & Dovidio, 2010) and result in stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination in all aspects of everyday life, including education, employment, and the media (Lippi-Green, 2012). Attitudes influence language policies, which, in turn, can dampen or exacerbate the negative consequences of speaking in a non-standard way (Padilla et al., 1991). In the present chapter, we discuss how the social meaning of languages, dialects, and accents shapes the social landscape of the American continents. We focus on education, employment, the role of the media, and language policies. After reviewing current literature, we propose a framework for understanding the relationships between major languages spoken on the American continents and how they may evolve in the future given demographic changes and the increased mobility of the speakers of the various languages.

With the spread of English around the world and the recognition of English as a lingua franca (ELF), a large number of studies have investigated the attitudes of learners towards different varieties of English as well as their related accents. However, this attitude towards L1 accented English within the context of Iran has not been explored yet. Thus, the present study ecologically investigated the attitudes of Iranian English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners towards their L1-accented English based on Bronfenbrenner's (1993) nested ecosystems model consisting of micro-, meso-, exo-, and macro-systems. To do this, a triangulation of data collection using an attitudinal questionnaire distributed among 157 respondents (118 female and 39 male) and semi-structured interviews with 60 participants (38 female and 22 male) were collected. The findings indicated a dominant emerging pattern of preference for native-like accent within the ecology of Iran along with the acknowledgement of L1 accented English. Maintaining linguistic security and self-confidence as well as teachers' role and materials used within the microsystem of the class, learners' background experiences within the mesosystem, policies of English language institutes at the exosystem, and the public view towards accent at the macrosystem contributed to the emerging pattern of preference for native-like accent within the context of Iran.

The present study looks at role of attitudes and identity from nonnative speakers (NNSs) of English from Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Korea and Iran towards their English accents and of other NNSs concerning their English accents and how the results fit into Jenkins’ (2005) ideas of lingua franca English which focused on their attitudes to identification with NNS and native speaker (NS) English accents, their perceptions of others’ attitudes and identification, and their beliefs about teaching these accents. From the ten participants, six of them are English teachers or tutors while four are non English teachers. The results of this study suggest that two participants did not like their own accents, while eight of them did not have any problems with theirs. Five participants favored the British English accents while others prefer the American and Scottish English accents; one even chose to like her own NNS English accent. Regarding other group’s accents; four participants accepted th...

Previous research on the perception of foreign accent has focused on the ratings of native and near-native listeners and few studies have explored the perception of degree of foreign accent by nonnative listeners, despite the fact that it could shed light on what language learners perceive as foreign-accented and potentially tell us about their developing system. The present dissertation aims to investigate the perception of degree of foreign accent in Spanish by both native and nonnative listeners, exploring the effects of various listener-specific characteristics, including proficiency, on listeners’ perception. This thesis also explores the role of VOT and speech rate in nonnative listeners’ perception of foreign accent in Spanish, two cues that have been found to influence native listeners’ perception of foreign-accented English in previous studies.
In order to accomplish these goals the read speech of 2 native and 2 nonnative Spanish speakers, in addition to 11 distracter speakers, was recorded and Praat’s duration tool was used to create VOT and rate-modified versions of the read sentences. A total of 26 native speakers and 140 nonnative learners of Spanish heard and rated 210 modified and unmodified utterances on a 9-point scale of degree of foreign accent. The statistical analyses revealed significant differences between native and nonnative listeners’ ratings of unmodified speech. In the analyses that compared listener ratings of modified and unmodified utterances, both sets of listeners rated speech as more accented when it had longer (less native-like) VOTs and when it was slower. Conversely, listeners also rated nonnative speech as less foreign-accented when it was reproduced with shorter VOTs and at a faster rate. A number of listener-specific factors including proficiency, course enrollment, pronunciation training, comprehension, and native dialect exposure were also found to be significant predictors of listeners’ foreign accent perception. The results show that both linguistic and listener characteristics affect the perception of foreign accent by native and nonnative listeners of Spanish, and that contrary to previous findings these two listener groups do not necessarily perceive degree of foreign accent the same.

In the current study, native (L1) Castilian Spanish judges listen to a variety of L1 and second language (L2) speakers reading a paragraph in Spanish and rate the level of foreign accent. They also identify, when possible, the speaker's dialect of Spanish, providing commentary on the reasons for their choice. This study measures the effects of both listener and speaker characteristics on foreign accent rating and dialect identification. The listener characteristics of residential history and experience with L2 Spanish significantly affect foreign accent ratings. Speaker characteristics including motivation to speak a particular dialect, L2 proficiency level, social networks, and the production of regional features are also explored. All have significant effects on foreign accent ratings.

There are two orthographic systems, Zhuyin fuhao (hereafter Zhuyin) and Hanyu pinyin (hereafter Pinyin), used to represent the pronunciation of Mandarin in Chinese communities around the world. The Language Research Centre at the University of Calgary was contracted by a public school board of a Canadian city to conduct research into these two systems. This research was to focus on the following questions: (1) do students who receive instruction in Mandarin using Zhuyin have a less of an English accent when speaking Mandarin than those who are taught using Pinyin; and (2) does the difference, if it exists, result from the difference in teaching methodologies (i.e., the different orthographic system used). We collected data from children in different schools in different regions in Canada who were taught using one of Zhuyin or Pinyin. We interviewed children in grades 1, 4, and 6, who were randomly selected to participate in this project. Data on both orthographic systems was collected. In order to answer question (1), the authors made audio recordings of the children while they were engaged in a short conversation. These tapes are being assessed later by native Mandarin speakers (from a variety of regions) to see if some children have more of an English accent when speaking Mandarin than others. An Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was conducted to see if there is any correlation between method of instruction and degree of global accent. In order to answer question (2) the authors collected additional data. This data was collected in the form of a questionnaire that the parents filled out. In the paper, the authors introduce the research questions, describe methodology used, and report on the results of the analysis of the data collected.

Recent research on the use of English in L2 and English as an International Language contexts reflects a shift from the nativeness principle towards focus on intelligibility and establishing which aspects of non-native pronunciation promote intelligibility and communicative success (Levis, 2005). Discourse competence and discourse intonation have been foregrounded as core components of communicative competence (Chun, 2002). The present study focuses on the use of intonation in marking information structure and the realization of such prominence through nuclear pitch accent by native and non-native speakers. 10 conversations among 10 native and 10 non-native speakers from the Wildcat Corpus of Native-and Foreign-Accented English (Van Engen et al., 2010) were analyzed in order to map differences between native and non-native speakers in the use of f0 and intensity to mark new information. The data suggest that native speakers use f0 as the main cue, whereas non-native speakers do not rely exclusively on f0 but exploit the joint effect of an increased f0 and intensity.

Misunderstood ironic intents may injure the conversation and impede connecting with others. Prior research suggests that ironic compliments, a rarer type of irony, are considered less ironic when spoken with a foreign accent. Using more ecologically-valid stimuli with natural prosodic cues, we found that this effect also applied to ironic criticisms, not just to ironic compliments. English native speakers (N = 96) listened to dialogs between Canadian English speakers and their foreign-accented peers, rating targets on multiple scales (irony, certainty in the speaker's intent, appropriateness, and offensiveness). Generalized additive mixed modelling showed that 1) ironic comments were rated lower for irony when foreign-accented, whereas literal comments were unaffected by accent; 2) the listener's political orientation, but not empathy or need for cognitive closure, modulated irony detection accuracy. The results are discussed in terms of linguistic expectations, social distance, cultural stereotypes, and personality differences.

In this paper I present some phonetic and phonological phenomena which systematically recur in the foreign accent of Italian speakers of different origin. The aim of the paper is to argue in favour of the existence of a common “Italian foreign accent”, which may offer a new and unusual approach to the synchronic phonology of Italian. The conclusions of the research show that the Italian accent can be determined only at the phonological level, for example through various phonological processes related to the syllabic structure of Italian.

This study examines language attitudes towards different varieties of English through listener judgments of speaker and speech traits; in addition, the study explores the relationship of these judgments to the
intelligibility, as well as the perceived accentedness and
comprehensibility, of varieties of Asian English and General American English. While a great deal of research has examined the intelligibility, accentedness, and comprehensibility of English, including varieties of
Asian English, no research to date has examined the relationship between language attitudes and the aforementioned dimensions of Asian English speech. That is, little is known about how listeners’
judgments regarding speaker and speech traits relate to intelligibility, as well as how such judgments relate to the way in which the listener evaluates the accentedness and comprehensibility of the speaker’s speech. The current study addresses these issues through an
examination of listener reactions to three varieties of Asian English (Hong Kong English, Singapore English, and China English), as well as American English.

Learning a foreign language usually requires learning novel phoneme categories. Learning novel phoneme categories occurs either by concentrating on acoustic patterns that are ignored in the native language (L1) or by ignoring acoustic patterns that exist in the native language, hence by combining more than one native language phoneme into a second language (L2) phoneme. Roughly this means that the listener needs to either combine L1 phoneme
categories or make finer differences than in L1. These acoustic pattern differences can be predicted with contrastive linguistic analysis.
According to Finnish language books for Hungarian learners, vowel category boundary comparisons and descriptions of the Hungarian phoneme inventory, the vowel categories that are the most problematic for Hungarian learners of Finnish are the front vowels /e, ӕ/ and the back vowels /ɑ, o/. Perfect phonetic equivalents for the Finnish /e, ӕ/ do not exist in standard Hungarian. 4 Hungarian students participated the experiment. They heard 24 question answer pairs in Finnish and imitated the answers as well as read the same sentences. One vowel in each sentence - read and imitated - was acoustically analyzed.
First two formants of the vowels were measured and put into a vowels space illustration.
It seems that the imitated vowels are scattered over a larger area across the vowel frequencies chart compared to the read vowel realizations. It also seems as if the subjects’ L1 phoneme categories were affecting or directing their reading, whereas the imitated native model was directing the imitating.

The present study looks at role of attitudes and identity from nonnative speakers (NNSs) of English from Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Korea and Iran towards their English accents and of other NNSs concerning their English accents and how the results fit into Jenkins’ (2005) ideas of lingua franca English which focused on their attitudes to identification with NNS and native speaker (NS) English accents, their perceptions of others’ attitudes and identification, and their beliefs about teaching these accents. From the ten participants, six of them are English teachers or tutors while four are non English teachers. The results of this study suggest that two participants did not like their own accents, while eight of them did not have any problems with theirs. Five participants favored the British English accents while others prefer the American and Scottish English accents; one even chose to like her own NNS English accent. Regarding other group’s accents; four participants accepted th...

Research on the age of learning effect on second language learners’ foreign accents utilizes human judgments to determine speech production outcomes. Inferences drawn from analyses of these ratings are then used to inform theories. The present study focuses on rater differences in the age of learning effect research. Three groups of raters who differed in their native language background and language experience participated in the study: inexperienced native English speaker (NES) raters, experienced NES raters, and advanced nonnative English speaker (NNES) raters. All raters evaluated 64 speech samples taken from both NESs and NNESs who varied in their age of arrival in the second-language-speaking country. Results from the study showed that experienced NES raters were better than the other two rater groups at distinguishing NESs from NNESs. Although no rater group differences were found in scaling speakers’ foreign accents or in their interrater reliability, inexperienced NES raters were stricter in their ratings than both experienced NES raters and advanced NNES raters. Implications for research on age of learning effects are discussed.

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) studies how social dominance and power are discursively enacted through, for example, discourse’s influence on attitudes, beliefs, and ideologies. Yet, various critics have charged that CDA’s generalizations, drawn from textual analysis, conflate analysts’ own interpretations with those of ‘typical’ readers. We examine one example of this: Subtirelu’s (2015) study of comments about instructors’ language and ethnicity on RateMyProfessors.com. We use Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk to test Subtirelu’s claim that ostensibly neutral or positive comments about language are taken up negatively by readers. Our experiments find that comments in which instructors’ accents are mentioned but not disparaged (e.g., ‘She has an accent, but…’) lead readers to be slightly less willing to take a course from the instructor than when information about the instructor’s accent is withheld. We also present a post hoc analysis designed to examine whether other textual featur...

While L2 acquisition by Brazilians has been studied for different languages, the acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese by foreigners has been poorly explored. Recent studies of non-native accented speech in other languages have shown that a foreign accent could largely influence the perception of personal qualities of speakers, and this issue presents a large interest for intercultural research projects. Our research project is focused on Russophone immigrants living in Brazil, bilingual speakers of Russian and Portuguese. The specific aim of the current work is to describe a database containing information about 40 native Russian speakers living in São Paulo for at least six months. Their linguistic and sociocultural profiles are presented, and the experimental protocol of the data collection is described. The protocol included recording speech samples in Russian and in Portuguese and video recordings for further facial expression analysis of bilinguals by the program FaceReader 7.0....

ABSTRACT The present study looks at role of attitudes and identity from nonnative speakers (NNSs) of English from Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Korea and Iran towards their English accents and of other NNSs concerning their English accents and how the results fit into Jenkins’ (2005) ideas of lingua franca English which focused on their attitudes to identification with NNS and native speaker (NS) English accents, their perceptions of others’ attitudes and identification, and their beliefs about teaching these accents. From the ten participants, six of them are English teachers or tutors while four are non English teachers. The results of this study suggest that two participants did not like their own accents, while eight of them did not have any problems with theirs. Five participants favored the British English accents while others prefer the American and Scottish English accents; one even chose to like her own NNS English accent. Regarding other group’s accents; four participants accepted the different accents as they are familiar with the situation due to the fact that they are nonnative speakers as well. However six participants did considered the variety of accents were a bit difficult to understand. For participants who were English teachers and three non teachers, they considered that accent and pronunciation should be close to “the original and correct English” or “Standard English.” Nevertheless for two other participants who were non teachers believed that accents should not be a problem in teaching the language.

This chapter looks into the ways Serbian foreign accent in English is exploited in film industry, as represented by one of the internationally renowned actors of South Slavic language background. Carefully selected audio recordings are analyzed from a segmental viewpoint, with the help of acoustic phonetics tools, and also from an auditory perspective, where necessary. The main aim of this chapter is to explore how a non-native accent as Serbian is twisted for this purpose, and which phonetic features, if any, are most suited to achieve an atmosphere of a strong Russian accent in English.

Prejudice against a social group may lead to discrimination of members of this group. One very strong cue of group membership is a (non)standard accent in speech. Surprisingly, hardly any interventions against accent-based discrimination have been tested. In the current article, we introduce an intervention in which what participants experience themselves unobtrusively changes their evaluations of others. In the present experiment, participants in the experimental condition talked to a confederate in a foreign language before the experiment, whereas those in the control condition received no treatment. Replicating previous research, participants in the control condition discriminated against Turkish-accented job candidates. In contrast, those in the experimental condition evaluated Turkish- and standard-accented candidates as similarly competent. We discuss potential mediating and moderating factors of this effect.

Previous studies in interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit (ISIB) did not separate the effects of shared knowledge of L1 in non-native talkers from those of listeners through extensive exposure to accented L2 speech, which is crucial to the mechanism underlying ISIB. This preliminary study attempts to tease apart the two by comparing perception accuracy of Mandarin-accented English words among Mandarin listeners, English listeners who have not learned Mandarin, and learners of Mandarin who had varied amount of exposure to Mandarin-accented English. Consistent with previous studies, Mandarin listeners showed highest accuracy. For word pairs contrasting voiceless and voiced velar stop in coda position, learners of Mandarin who had greater exposure to Mandarin-accented English showed higher accuracy than learners who had less exposure. These results support ISIB for Mandarin and suggest that ISIB is more likely to stem from exposure to accented L2 speech than from shared knowledge alone.

Oral fluency and foreign accent distinguish L2 from L1 speech production. In language testing practices, both fluency and accent are usually assessed by raters. This study investigates what exactly native raters of fluency and accent take into account when judging L2. Our aim is to explore the relationship between objectively measured temporal, segmental and suprasegmental properties of speech on the one hand, and fluency and accent as rated by native raters on the other hand. For 90 speech fragments from Turkish and English L2 learners of Dutch, several acoustic measures of fluency and accent were calculated. In Experiment 1, 20 native speakers of Dutch rated the L2 Dutch samples on fluency. In Experiment 2, 20 different untrained native speakers of Dutch judged the L2 Dutch samples on accentedness. Regression analyses revealed, first, that acoustic measures of fluency were good predictors of fluency ratings. Second, segmental and suprasegmental measures of accent could predict som...

This is a survey designed to assess the effects that the self-perception of a non-native accent, when speaking a foreign language, may have on a person's willingness to communicate. In particular, this survey is designed for native Arabic-speakers who speak English as a foreign language. I welcome feedback on this survey to improve its validity. The survey has not yet been implemented; the link to it will be shared here some time in April, 2016. Note that it may not remain active past June of 2016.

Previous research on the perception of foreign accent by nonnative listeners generally focused on the perception of very few highly proficient individuals and ESL learners, while fewer studies have reported on the perception of foreign accent by classroom language learners. The present study investigates the effects of grammatical proficiency, study abroad experience, and pronunciation instruction experience on the perception of degree of foreign accent by 160 nonnative listeners who were primarily classroom learners of Spanish. The results show that nonnative listeners’ ratings of foreign accent in Spanish varied as a result of proficiency, study abroad, and pronunciation instruction. This line of research is relevant to language teaching because it examines what nonnative
listeners at different stages of development perceive as foreign-accented.

Misunderstood ironic intents may injure the conversation and impede connecting with others. Prior research suggests that ironic compliments, a rarer type of irony, are considered less ironic when spoken with a foreign accent. Using more ecologically-valid stimuli with natural prosodic cues, we found that this effect also applied to ironic criticisms, not just to ironic compliments. English native speakers (N = 96) listened to dialogs between Canadian English speakers and their foreign-accented peers, rating targets on multiple scales (irony, certainty in the speaker's intent, appropriateness, and offensiveness). Generalized additive mixed modelling showed that 1) ironic comments were rated lower for irony when foreign-accented, whereas literal comments were unaffected by accent; 2) the listener's political orientation, but not empathy or need for cognitive closure, modulated irony detection accuracy. The results are discussed in terms of linguistic expectations, social distance, cultural stereotypes, and personality differences.

Oral fluency and foreign accent distinguish L2 from L1 speech production. In language testing practices, both fluency and accent are usually assessed by raters. This study investigates what exactly native raters of fluency and accent take into account when judging L2. Our aim is to explore the relationship between objectively measured temporal, segmental and suprasegmental properties of speech on the one hand, and fluency and accent as rated by native raters on the other hand. For 90 speech fragments from Turkish and English L2 learners of Dutch, several acoustic measures of fluency and accent were calculated. In Experiment 1, 20 native speakers of Dutch rated the L2 Dutch samples on fluency. In Experiment 2, 20 different untrained native speakers of Dutch judged the L2 Dutch samples on accentedness. Regression analyses revealed, first, that acoustic measures of fluency were good predictors of fluency ratings. Second, segmental and suprasegmental measures of accent could predict some variance of accent ratings. Third, perceived fluency and perceived accent were only weakly related. In conclusion, this study shows that fluency and perceived foreign accent can be judged as separate constructs.

Keywords: foreign accent, L2 specific fluency, native raters, perception of L2 speech, second language learners