Computational Linguistics Colloquium

Thursday, 6 February 2014, 16:15
Conference Room, Building C7.4

Sink positive: the case of interdental fricatives in foreign–accented English

Understanding a second language (L2) speaker is often perceived to be more difficult than understanding a native (L1) speaker. Speech from L2 speakers typically deviates from the standard pronunciation of a target language, i.e., it is foreign–accented, and the deviations can easily obstruct the complex processes of comprehension. Recent research, however, has shown that we can rapidly overcome initial processing difficulties and adapt to foreign–accented speech, both when listening to our native language and when listening to a second language. In this talk I will discuss underlying mechanisms and boundaries of this adaptation process and present data from a series of experiments on English interdental fricatives. Interdental fricatives are difficult for many L2 speakers of English, and learners often replace English "th" with other consonants, with different substitution preferences across accents. The results suggest an interesting difference in the use of knowledge about segmental variations, with L2 listeners being able to use this knowledge for immediate form activation but not for meaning activation.

If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact Jürgen Trouvain.