This study investigated the attitudes of 90 Thai learners toward English accents in relation to differing fields and stages of study, using a verbal-guise test (VGT) and a questionnaire. Respondents listened to and evaluated five speakers of English as a native language (ENL): American English (AmE) and British English (BrE), a second language…

"Bucktee" is one of several lexical items associated with 'Toronto Slang' -- the emically-given name for an enregistered set of lexical items associated with Multicultural Toronto English (MTE), a multiethnolect spoken by young people in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), originating in the many and varied multicultural and multilingual…

Purpose: Supportive semantic and syntactic information can increase children's and adults' word recognition accuracy in adverse listening conditions. However, there are inconsistent findings regarding how a talker's accent or dialect modulates these context effects. Here, we compare children's and adults' abilities to capitalize on sentence…

The emergence of AI writing assistants has raised concerns about their potential impact on language diversity, preservation, and education. This paper examines the capabilities and limitations of AI writing assistants in generating dialectic text in response to academic and professional writing prompts. The study uses a concordance tool to conduct…

Purpose: This preliminary research examined (a) the perception of two common sources of indexical variability in speech--regional dialects and foreign accents, and (b) the relation between indexical processing and sentence recognition among prelingually deaf, long-term cochlear implant (CI) users and normal-hearing (NH) peers. Method: Forty-three…

Purpose: This study examined the production of morphosyntactic markers by school-age children with and without developmental language disorder. Comparisons were made between students who speak mainstream American English (MAE) dialects and nonmainstream American English (NMAE) dialects. Method: First- and second-grade students (N = 82) completed…

Prior work demonstrated that toddlers can learn words from a speaker with a foreign accent and generalize that learning to the native accent when the accented variation does not cross phoneme boundaries. The current study explores the situation in which a vowel in the foreign accent is produced such that it could be confused with a different…

How and when do children become aware that speakers have different accents? While adults readily make a variety of subtle social inferences based on speakers' accents, findings from children are more mixed: while one line of research suggests that even infants may be acutely sensitive to accent unfamiliarity, other studies suggest that 5-year-olds…

The many permutations of spoken English have called for an interrogation into the notions of 'standard English' and 'native accents'. Despite their problematic nature, these terms remain commonly used, and familiarity with 'standard', inner-circle varieties of English is typical among L2 English speakers, differences in education and language…

Purpose: The aim of the current study was to examine /l/ developmental patterns in young learners of Southern American English, especially in relation to the effect of word position and phonetic contexts. Method: Eighteen children with typically developing speech, aged between 2 and 5 years, produced monosyllabic single words containing singleton…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to evaluate children's use of semantic context to facilitate foreign-accented word recognition in noise. Method: Monolingual American English speaking 5- to 7-year-olds (n = 168) repeated either Mandarin- or American English-accented sentences in babble, half of which contained final words that were highly…

This study investigated the developmental trajectories of three perceptual domains related to regional dialect competence: the linguistic domain, tested through an intelligibility in noise task; the objective indexical domain, tested through locality judgments and a free classification task; and the subjective indexical domain, tested through…

We live in a society where standard accents are highly valued. Generally, people who speak with a Standard English accent are seen through a positive lens linguistically; those whose English is accented are stigmatized. Accent discrimination affects linguistic minorities from diverse linguistic and ethnic backgrounds, including foreign-accented…

Recent language attitude research has attended to the processes involved in identifying and evaluating spoken language varieties. This article investigates the ability of second-language learners of English in Spain (N = 71) to identify Received Pronunciation (RP) and General American (GenAm) speech and their perceptions of linguistic variation…

This study investigates how second language (L2) listeners' perception is affected by two factors: the listeners' experience with the target dialect -- North American English (NAE) vs. Standard Southern British English (SSBE) -- and talkers' language background: native vs. non-native talkers; i.e. interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit…