Pilot 1: How do listeners distinguish between foreign and native speakers?

At the Multilingual Laboratory we have created a corpus of sentences designed to help identify the components involved in listeners’ ratings of foreign accents. Pilot 1 focused on whether listeners are able to distinguish between foreign and native speakers. We have selected native speakers whose accents are reliably rated as native (negative rating), and foreign speakers whose accents are reliably rated as foreign (positive rating). Participants were asked to listen to a 10 second audio clip and then rate the level of accentedness of each speaker on a response bar ranging from -100 (Native) to 100 (Foreign). We predicted that participants would be able to reliably rate each speaker and accurately distinguish between foreign and native speakers. The goal is to create a corpus of sentences that we can use in future experiments to identify the components involved in listeners’ ratings of foreign accents. We did exclude five (5) pairs due to incorrect ratings of accentedness. Forty-five (45) pairs of speakers were then used for Pilot 2.https://encompass.eku.edu/swps_undergraduategallery/1238/thumbnail.jp