The speech of second language learners is often influenced by phonetic patterns of their first language. This can make them difficult to understand, but sometimes for listeners of the same first language to a lesser extent than for native listeners. The present study investigates listeners’ awareness of the accent by asking whether accented speech is not only more intelligible but also more acceptable to nonnative than native listeners. English native speakers and German learners rated the goodness of words spoken by other German learners. Production quality was determined by measuring acoustic differences between minimal pairs with “easy” versus “difficult” sounds. Higher proficient learners were more sensitive to differences in production quality and between easy and difficult sounds, patterning with native listeners. Lower proficient learners did not perceive such differences. Perceiving accented productions as good instances of L2 words may hinder development because the need for improvement may not be obvious.

Second language (L2) learners often speak with a strong accent, which can make them difficult to understand. However, familiarity with an accent enhances intelligibility. We propose that L2 learners are even more familiar with their own accented speech patterns and may thus understand self-produced L2 words better than others' accented productions, presumably because of adaptation. This hypothesis was tested by asking German learners of English to identify English words from minimal pairs that are distinguished by difficult L2 sound contrasts. Words had been spoken by the learners themselves or other learners who produced the contrasts equally well. Self-produced words were identified significantly better than others' productions. A second experiment revealed that better producers can exploit acoustic cues in perception more than poor producers, especially when the produced acoustic cues to the minimal pairs were clearly differentiated. The self-benefit, however, did not depend on production skills. We conclude that L2 learners adapt not only to their L1 accent in general but also to their own specific speech patterns. Speculating about L2 acquisition more generally, these results may raise the question whether adaptation to own, accented productions may be one reason why learners have difficulties to improve their pronunciation, since they may not notice a need to improve. (PsycINFO Database Record

Second language (L2) learners are often aware of the typical pronunciation errors that speakers of their native language make, yet often persist in making these errors themselves. We hypothesised that L2 learners may perceive their own accent as closer to the target language than the accent of other learners, due to frequent exposure to their own productions. This was tested by recording 24 female native speakers of German producing 60 sentences. The same participants later rated these recordings for accentedness. Importantly, the recordings had been altered to sound male so that participants were unaware of their own productions in the to-be-rated samples. We found evidence supporting our hypothesis: participants rated their own altered voice, which they did not recognize as their own, as being closer to a native speaker than that of other learners. This finding suggests that objective feedback may be crucial in fostering L2 acquisition and reduce fossilization of erroneous patterns.

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The question of how listeners deal with different phonetic variant forms for the same words in perception has sparked great interest over the past few decades, especially with regard to lenited and regional forms. However, the perception of free variant forms of allophones within the same syllable position remains surprisingly understudied. Because of this, in the present study, we investigate how free allophonic variation in the realization of the German rhotic (/r/) impacts spoken word recognition for native German listeners and two groups of non-native listeners (French and Italian learners of German). By means of a visual-world eye-tracking task, we tested the recognition of spoken German words starting with /r/ when the rhotic was produced either as the more canonical variant, the uvular fricative [ʁ] which is considered the German standard, or as an alveolar trill [r], a common realization in the south of Germany. Results showed that German listeners were more efficient at recognizing /r/-initial words when these were produced with the uvular fricative than with the alveolar trill. French listeners did not differ from German listeners in that respect, but Italian listeners showed exactly the opposite pattern: they showed an advantage when words were produced with the alveolar trill. These findings suggest that, for native listeners, the canonicity of the variant form is an important determiner of ease of recognition, even in the absence of orthographic or perceptual motivations for the primacy of canonical variants for this particular example of variation. For non-native listeners, by contrast, results are better explained by the match of the different allophones to the canonical realization of /r/ in their native language than by the status or frequency of the allophones in the non-native language itself.