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…

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…

The teaching of native-like accents has been the aim of many EFL educationists long ago; however, this concept is heading towards a major change. Hence, the idea of this paper is based on Jenkins' (2000 & 2002) theory of English as an International Language (EIL). Jenkins' theory analyses the use of English by non-natives speakers (NNS) where…

Listeners can explicitly categorize unfamiliar talkers by regional dialect with above-chance performance under ideal listening conditions. However, the extent to which this important source of variation affects speech processing is largely unknown. In a series of four experiments, we examined the effects of dialect variation on speech…

The ability of speakers to exaggerate speech sounds ("hyperarticulation") has led to the theory that the targets themselves must be hyperarticulated. Johnson, Flemming, and Wright (1993) found that perceptual "best exemplar" choices for vowels were more extreme than listeners' own productions. Our first experiment, using their…