Abstract
‘Foreign accent’ is a term popularly used to refer to the characteristics of L2 speech that make it noticeably different from that of native speakers of a particular community (Munro, Derwing and Sato, 2006). Foreign accent can be defined as ‘non-pathological speech produced by second language learners that differs in partially systematic ways from the speech characteristics of native speakers of a given dialect’ (Southwood and Flege, 1999, p. 335). Munro and Derwing (1999/1995) define accentedness as a listener’s perception of how different a speaker’s accent is from that of the L1 community. It should be noted that, while a ‘foreign accent’ can result in what come across as mispronunciations in many cases, it is not necessarily always the case. As an example, if a Spanish speaker pronounces unaspirated /p/, /t/ or /k/ sounds where a native English speaker would aspirate, this might be noticed by a listener, but not processed as a blatant mispronunciation.
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Kennedy, A.S. (2015). Non-Native Accent and Listener Perceptions of Grammaticality. In: Mompean, J.A., Fouz-González, J. (eds) Investigating English Pronunciation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137509437_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137509437_6
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