A Study Of Foreign Accent In The Speech Of Chinese EFL Learners From The Perspective Of Listeners’ Perception

Foreign accent refers to the deviation of the speaker’s pronunciation from thenorms of Second Language (L2) due to the influence of his/her mother tongue.Foreign accent can affect speech comprehensibility and even lead to change inlisteners’ language attitudes. In the context of globalization, Chinese learners ofEnglish as a foreign language (EFL) are presenting themselves on diverse occasionswith a certain degree of foreign accent. What are the features of foreign accent ofChinese EFL learners? How do listeners perceive such kind of accent? How dolisteners of different backgrounds react to it? A series of questions remind us of thefact that research in foreign accent is of not only great necessity but much urgency.With relatively large amount of research abroad in both theoretical and practical sense,perception studies in foreign accent are rarely found in China though. Based on theperception models of speech categories, the present study aims to investigate listeners’perception of foreign accent in the speech of Chinese EFL learners.12dialogues/sentences with an average of20words and a mean duration of8080.22milliseconds were selected from the reading section of the English SpeechCorpus of Chinese Learners (ESCCL). Representing the basic English sentencepatterns, they were employed as the perception materials in the present study. Each ofthe dialogues/sentences was read by two speakers respectively, which thus comprisedtwo types of speech forms of the dialogue/sentence. Two new types of speech formsof each dialogue/sentence were synthesized by means of purposefully modifying thepitch parameter with the help of the Praat software. Together with thedialogues/sentences read by one English native speaker, five types of speech forms ofthe same dialogue/sentence were ultimately obtained. For convenience, the speechforms were recognized simply as Good Articulation with Good Intonation (GAGI),Good Articulation with Poor Intonation (GAPI), Poor Articulation with GoodIntonation (PAGI), Poor Articulation with Poor Intonation (PAPI), and the EnglishOriginal (EO) respectively, based on their different closeness to the English speech categories. Therefore, there were60speech stimuli in this research. Taking thesespeech stimuli as the perception materials, this study designed the perceptionexperiment with the E-prime software and explored the perception of foreign accentby90listeners, who were divided into four groups, namely the English Teacher (ET)group, the English Student (ES) group, the Chinese Teacher (CT) group and theChinese Student (CS) group. Specifically, this study aims to answer the followingthree research questions:(1) What are the influences of articulation and intonation onlisteners’ perception of foreign accent produced by Chinese EFL learners?;(2) Whatare the influences of listener factors on their perception of foreign accent produced byChinese EFL learners?; and (3) What are listeners’ language attitudes towards accentas well as their cognitive modes in accent perception?Research results show that both articulation and intonation can influencelisteners’ perception of foreign accent, with articulation playing a significant role inthis process. The better the articulation conforms to the English pronunciation norms,the lower the degree of the perceived accent is. When articulation keeps the same, themore proper intonation can lower the degree of perceived accent. What’s more, theinfluence of intonation depends on different groups of listeners: for the ET, ES andCT groups, its influence is not significant, while for the CS group, its influence issignificant when articulation conforms to the pronunciation norms in enumeratingsentences and complex sentences.Concerning listener factors, listeners’ native language can significantly influencetheir perception of accent. The English listeners are more sensitive to foreign accentthan the Chinese listeners. Teaching experience (mainly referring to amount ofexposure to foreign accent here) does not have a significant influence on accentperception, and its restricted influence is mainly concerned with listeners’tolerance offoreign accent. The ET group tends to be more tolerant of heavy accent than the ESgroup, whereas the CT group tends to be less tolerant than the CS group, showingstrong effects of mother tongue on accent perception and great emphasis on accuracyof L2forms in L2formal instruction in China. Finally, gender has a significantinfluence on listeners’ perception of GAGI, GAPI and EO, and female listeners generally tend to be more sensitive and tolerant than males.As for the cognitive modes in accent perception, a majority of listeners adopt aninteractive way which involves both bottom-up and top-down cognitive processes,suggesting that speech comprehensibility and accent stereotyping can exert someinfluence on listeners’ accent perception. When listeners judge the degree ofaccentedness, they are often tempted to compare the sound input with the Englishspeech prototypes set in their own minds. Different degrees of accentedness reflectdifferent perception distances between sound input and relevant speech prototypes inthe target language, and different perception distances explain the variation inperception sensitivity between English listeners and Chinese listeners. In addition,comparison of response time in accent perception shows differences in degrees ofboth accent perception difficulty and listeners’sensitivity. Results of the interview andthe questionnaire show that the listeners’native language is a very influential factor intheir language attitudes towards foreign accent, the English listeners being moretolerant than the Chinese listeners. The listeners’ teaching experience also influencestheir attitudes: the ET group is generally more tolerant of accent than the ES group,while it is the opposite in the Chinese listeners’ case. In general, listeners’ perceptionof accent depends to a large extent on their sensitivity and tolerance, in which theformer, playing a first and foremost part, is closely related to listeners’ nativelanguage, while the latter, next to sensitivity, is more associated with languageattitudes and linguistic experience.This study employs both quantitative and qualitative methods to investigatelisteners’ perception of foreign accent. The qualitative analysis lends supports to thequantitative results, making them more tenable and convincing. The present studyprovides a new perspective for Second Language Phonological Acquisition (SLPA)research in China, promotes the theoretical development in phonological acquisitionin a large sense. Moreover, this research is of much value and great help topronunciation teaching, speech evaluation and phonetic textbook compiling.