Presentation: Sally
Summary: Hsiao-chien
The present study was a part of the project of the Wildcat Corpus of native- and foreign-accented English in searching the further goal of creating a model of speech communication that integrates speech perception and production mechanisms with contact-induced sound changes. Using the framework of the corpus, the authors adopted two principles. “Talker-listener alignment” implies that speakers were from the same native language background. There are in total four types of conversations: native+native (N-N), non-native+non-native (NN1-NN1), native+non-native (N-NN), and non-native+non-native (NN1-NN2). Second, the corpus includes both scripted and spontaneous speech recordings. A new dialogue elicitation, the Diapix task, was developed. This task is a spot-the-difference game involving a pair of pictures and a pair of participants.
The authors recruited 24 native speakers of American English and 52 non-native speakers of English. The subjects were asked to cooperate with one other talker (of the same gender) in the Diapix task and then read a set of scripted English materials. In the Diapix task, all pairs of speakers were able to identify the differences, and the median score was 10 for all pair types. This indicates the meaningful comparisons of communicative efficiency across pair types. There were four sub-results: (1) The task completion showed that N-N pairs were faster than the other three pairs. The variance was much larger for the three groups involving NN talkers compared with the N-N group. (2) The analysis of balance of speech determined that N-N pairs were the least balanced group. However, the N partners spoke less than the NN partners in N-NN pairs. (3) The number of types in the conversations was similar among all pair types, but the word type-to-token ratios suggested that N-N pairs were more efficient than the other pairs. Moreover, compared to the native speakers in N-N pairs, natives in N-NN pairs had a greater amount of repetition in their interaction with non-native speakers. Non-natives in the N-NN pairs also had higher type-to-token ratios than non-natives in the NN1-NN2 condition. (4) The N-N pairs tended to proceed systematically, followed by N-NN pairs, and NN-NN pairs. Overall communicative efficiency was consistent with the pattern of alignment, in which N-N pairs were the most efficient, followed by N-NN pairs, NN1-NN1 pairs, and NN1-NN2 pairs.
