In each of three experiments, 24 students judged the accentedness present in the speech of eight Spanish-English bilinguals. Ss gave magnitude estimations and also squeezed a hand dynamometer to indicate the amount of accentedness in the reading of an English passage by each of the speakers. There was significant agreement among Ss regarding the speech samples with each scaling method, and interscale agreement was good. Power functions fitted to the data had exponents falling in the range expected from earlier psychophysical studies. Scale values correlated significantly with the frequency of accented pronunciations by the speakers as judged by two independent judges. The use of these scaling methods for future research on linguistic features of accent and on the relation between accent and language attitudes is discussed.
Stevens attributed individual differences in power function exponents mainly to differences in "the regression effect" and suggested that balancing for regression may largely do away with individual differences. Cross-modality matches of loudness to apparent time duration, and vice versa, were repeated over six sessions for each of 20 5s with 24 hr. between sessions. Individual differences, indicated by analysis of variance, Kendall's W, and significant positive correlations across sessions, occurred before and after regression balances. Group exponents for duration matches increased over sessions, but those for loudness matches and those obtained by regression balance did not change significantly.
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