Journal of Second Language Pronunciation - Online First

The present study investigated the attitudes of long-time residents of Quebec City towards French Lx economic immigrants settling into their community. We evaluated the speech of four linguistic groups (English, Spanish, Mandarin and Farsi) using the verbal-guise methodology. Listeners were presented with 10 audio-only stimuli (1 male and 1 female speakers from each group and 2 distractors) and 10 combined audio-visual stimuli (1 male and 1 female Quebec French speakers associated with photographs from our target language groups). After hearing each excerpt, listeners rated the speakers on their perceived characteristics. Results showed that the combined stimuli were evaluated more favorably than the audio-only stimuli. We also found that female voices were significantly better evaluated than those of men. Last, listeners showed preferences towards Spanish and Farsi groups over English and Mandarin, and specifically towards female voices. The evaluations thus seem to reflect past and present stereotypes circulating in the community.

The present study investigated whether age of acquisition (AOA) is a significant predictor of the extent to which Korean learners of English perceive and produce two nonnative vowels and the extent to which their speech perception and production accuracy are linked. A total of 100 Korean learners of English with a varying range of AOA participated in the study by completing perception and production measurement tasks. Overall, there were significant AOA effects found in the case of Korean participants who moved to Canada before the age breakpoint range of 17.0 to 25.5, after which AOA failed to be a significant predictor of their perception and production accuracy. In addition, compared to late second language (L2) learners, early L2 learners more consistently demonstrated instances of significant perception-production correlation. This study concludes by highlighting the role of AOA in L2 speech acquisition, supporting the existence of a critical period for intelligible L2 pronunciation.

This study investigated listener-based assessment of the job performance of second language (L2) speakers employed as customer service agents in outsourced foreign-based call centers, focusing on agents’ job performance as a function of the comprehensibility, fluency, and accentedness of their speech. Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform, 116 native English-speaking listeners evaluated two-minute recordings of actual customer service conversations featuring 18 Filipino agents, assessing them for three global speech dimensions (comprehensibility, accentedness, and fluency) and three performance indicators, including agents’ confidence, competence, and listeners’ interest in future communication with agents (a measure capturing customer patronage). Comprehensibility and fluency consistently predicted how the listeners assessed the agents on all job performance scales, and accentedness was additionally associated with how strongly the listeners wished to communicate with the agents. Findings generally highlight the importance of fluent and comprehensible L2 speech in workplace settings.