Audience Design in Non-native Speech

Papers and Presentations

Dmitrieva, O., Ling Law, W., Lin, M., Wang, Y., Conklin, J., Kentner, A. (2015) Language attitudes and listener-oriented properties in non-native speech. Presented at the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Glasgow, Scotland, UK. [slides] [paper]

Conklin, J.,Kentner, A., Law, W.L., Lin, M., Wang, Y., Dmitrieva, O. (2015) Audience design in non-native speech. Presented at the 169th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. [poster]


Acoustic Properties of Foreigner-Directed Speech

This work was done in collaboration with Rebecca Scarborough, Jason Brenier, Yuan Zhao, and Lauren Hall-Lew

While surveying the literature on foreigner-directed speech we noticed that in many studies participants were instructed to speak 'as though to a non-native speaker' while no actual foreigner was present during the recording. We designed the study to investigate whether acoustic properties of speech changed depending on the presence or absence of the actual interlocutor, foreign or native. Our results showed that participants spoke slower, using longer stressed vowels, when addressing non-native listeners. There were also dignificant acoustic differences between speech addressed to imagined and real listeners: the participants used slower, more hyperarticulated speech when addressing imaginary listeners, demonstrating that data collected in the imagined-listener condition are not acoustically identical to the data collected in the situation of real interpersonal communication.

Related Papers and Presentations

Scarborough, R., Brenier, J., Zhao, Y., Hall-Lew, L., Dmitrieva, O. (2007) An acoustic study of real and imaginary foreigner-directed speech. Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Saarbrucken, Germany. [pdf]

Scarborough, R., Dmitrieva, O., Hall-Lew, L., Zhao, Y., Brenier, J. (2007) An acoustic study of real and imaginary foreigner-directed speech. The 153d Annual Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), Salt Lake City. [poster]

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