This paper reports on a study into the reactions of 'native' speakers of British English to Dutch-English pronunciations in the onset of a telephone sales talk. In an experiment 144 highly educated British professionals who were either familiar or not familiar with Dutch-accented English responded to a slight Dutch English accent, a moderate Dutch English accent or a 'Standard British English accent' (BrE). These accents were rated on the personality traits status and affect, on their intelligibility (orthographic transcription), comprehensibility (identification of key words), and interpretability (paraphrasing the purpose of the message). Although British English was more intelligible and comprehensible than both Dutch English accents, all three accents were equally interpretable. The results indicated that a British English pronunciation evoked more status than both Dutch English accents, and both British English and the slight Dutch English accent commanded more affect than the moderate Dutch English accent.

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How well L2 English is understood and how L2 English speakers perceive one another within varying communication contexts has been studied relatively rarely, even though most speakers of English in the world are L2 speakers. In this matched-guise experiment (N = 1699) the effects of L1 and L2 English accents and communication context were tested on speech understandability (intelligibility, comprehensibility, interpretability) and speaker evaluations (status, affect, dynamism). German (N = 617), Spanish (N = 540), and Singaporean listeners (N = 542) were asked to evaluate three accents (Dutch-accented English, standard British English, standard American English) in three communication contexts (Lecture, Audio Tour, Job Pitch). The main finding is that the Dutch-accented English accent was understood as well as the two L1 English accents. Furthermore, Dutch-accented English evoked equally positive evaluations to the two L1 English accents in German listeners, and more positive evaluations than the two L1 English accents in Spanish and Singaporean listeners. These results suggest that accent training aimed at achieving an L1 English accent may not always be necessary for (Dutch) English language learners, especially when they are expected to mostly interact with other L2 speakers of English. More generally, our results indicate that L2 English speakers' understanding and their evaluation of L1 and L2 Englishes would not seem to reflect traditional language norms. Instead, they seem to reflect the socio-cultural embedding of a language norm in a Lingua Franca English speech community that does not view accent varieties as a hindrance to successful communication.

The aim of this study was to assess Dutch listeners’ responses to native-accented Englishes compared with Dutch-accented English in terms of speech understandability and speech evaluations in three professional communication contexts. In a matched-guise experiment Dutch listeners (N=392) responded to a Dutch English, a standard British and American accent in terms of speech understandability (intelligibility, comprehensibility, interpretability) and speaker evaluations (status, affect, dynamism). Dutch listeners evaluated these accents in three communication contexts: Lecture, Audio Tour, Job Pitch. Only context affected speech understandability: comprehensibility and interpretability were higher for the Lecture compared to the Audio Tour and the Job Pitch. Accent only negatively affected status evaluations for Dutch-accented English. Context only evoked more affect in the Audio Tour and the Lecture than in the Job Pitch. Our main conclusion is that Dutch-accented English negatively impacts status, but not understanding, affect and dynamism. Context impacts understanding and affect.

Individualized tutoring and feedback by trained language instructors are known to be optimal for language learning. Providing them is timeconsuming and costly, however, and therefore not feasible for the majority of language learners. This applies particularly to pronunciation, where corrective feedback should ideally be synchronous, which makes it even more difficult to provide it adequately in the classroom. Recent systems for computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) that make use of automatic speech recognition (ASR) offer new ways of providing tailored feedback on second language pronunciation. In this paper, we present our new project, My Pronunciation Coach, in which we are developing an ASR-based CAPT program that specifically caters to learners of English with Dutch as their mother tongue. The pronunciation coach software uses speech technology algorithms to detect pronunciation errors. Feedback on these errors is given through an interface in an easily understandable manner and remedial exercises are provided accordingly.

We investigated to what extent responses (N=6617) by four non-native English listener groups (The Netherlands: n=1701; Germany: n=1606; Spain: n=1647; Singapore: n=1663) assigned nativeness to standard, native British and American English accents, compared with a typical Dutch English accent. We assessed to what extent assigned nativeness impacted speaker evaluations (status, affect, dynamism), and to what extent a speaker's voice influenced speaker evaluations by analyzing listener responses to verbal and matched guises. Results showed that perceptions of a speaker's nativeness significantly impacted speaker evaluations on all dimensions, and therefore we conclude that speaker evaluations are also based on perceptions of the nativeness of a speaker. In addition, speaker evaluations were influenced by a speaker's voice to such an extent that this can lead to significantly more positive/negative speaker evaluations of both native and non-native English speakers. Finally, this study confirms the relevance and superiority of the matched-guise technique in accentedness research, compared with the verbal-guise technique, since the former successfully minimizes the actual impact of voice.

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