Strength of British English accents in altered listening conditions.

ABSTRACT: This work is concerned with the processing or representational level at which accent forms learned early in life can change and with whether alteration to a speaker's auditory environment can elicit an original accent. In Experiment 1, recordings were made of an equal number of (1) speakers living in the home counties (HC) of Britain (around the London conurbation) who claimed to have retained the accent of the region that they originally had come from, (2) speakers who stated that they had lost their regional accent and acquired an HC accent, and (3) native HC speakers. They read two texts in a normal listening environment. Listeners rated the similarity in accent between each of these texts and all the other texts. The results showed that in the normal listening conditions, the speakers

SUBMITTER: Howell P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1885474 | biostudies-literature | 2006 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature