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Modeling credibilityAcoustic perceptual correlates of news reading by native and non-
native speakers
A. De Meo, E. Pellegrino, M. Pettorino, M. VitaleUniversity of Naples L’Orientale
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Credibility assessment
• Message credibility is generally agreed to result from an interaction of – message characteristics (related to message
content, encompassing factors such as plausibility, internal consistency, and quality)
– receiver characteristics (e.g., cultural background, previous beliefs)
– source characteristics (e.g., expertise, trustworthiness, regiornal or foreign accent)
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speaker’s accent
• Foreign accent, i.e. the acoustic features of an utterance (segmental and/or suprasegmental) perceptually different from the average production of a native speaker, may impact speaker’s credibility because it activates prejudices and stereotypes
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research questions• What happens to credibility, when stereotypes
about non-native speakers are neutralized by presenting the message as created by a native speaker and simply delivered by a non-native speaker?
• Does foreign accent make the speech harder to be processed?
• Does this processing difficulty make the foreign accented speech harder to be believed as hypothesized by the theory of “processing fluency”?
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processing fluency• According to the socio-psychological concept of
“processing fluency”, the way stimuli are judged depends on the cognitive load involved in the input processing.
(Oppenheimer 2008; Schwarz 2004, Reber & Schwarz, 1999 )
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5 PERCEPTUAL TESTS (1275 listeners)
• Test 1: 4 voices (2 NS and 2 Chinese NNS C1 level, mild & strong FA); 301 Italian listeners
• Test 2: 5 female voices (1 NS and 4 NNS with a strong foreign accent, A2-B1 levels); 265 Italian listeners
• Test 3: test 1 voices, with tonal range and silent pauses artificially increased and decreased through WinPitch; 120 Italian listeners
• Test 4: test 2 voices, with errors and disfluencies removal, segmental duration and tonal range cloned from the native voice using Praat (transplantation); 270 Italian listeners
• Test 5: 1 female native voice, L1 Italian; 319 Italian listeners
research design
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research design• test 1 and 2: NATURAL SPEECH - L2 Italian– Focus on degree of foreign accent:2 NNS with same L1, Chinese, male and female, same age, both advanced learners of L2 Italian (C1), differing only for the degree of foreign accent (F = strong, M = mild).– Focus on different L1s and on different L2 levels of
competence:4 NNS with a strong foreign accent, all female voices, same age, diverging for level of competence (two A2 and two B1), and L1s (A2: Arabic and Japanese, B1: Chinese and Vietnamese).
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research design• test 3 and 4: SYNTHESIZED SPEECH - L2 Italian– Focus on prosody:
manipulation of tonal range and silent pauses (2 Chinese NNS and 2 Italian NS)
– Focus on segmental and suprasegmental anomalies:• segmental errors and disfluencies removal• segmental duration cloning from the native voice• tonal range cloning from the native voice(4 NNSs and 1 NS)
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research design• test 5: NATURAL and SYNTHESIZED SPEECH - L1 Italian
– Focus on L1 anomalies and disfluencies:• transplanted disfluent speech• elicited disfluent speech(1 NS of Italian)
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• bizarre-but-true news from around the world read in Italian
• organized in form of radio news magazines, pretending to make a survey on media reliability, in order to avoid to focus the attention on foreign voices
corpus
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• degree of perceived accent (native accent, mild foreign accent, strong foreign accent)
• comprehensibility, i.e. listener’s estimation of difficulty in understanding an utterance (poor, sufficient, good)
• credibility of each news item (true, false)
perceptual assessment
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RESULTS
test 1-4L2 Italian
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0306090
"poor comprehensibility" "strong foreign accent"false
the worst non-native voice of the corpusArabic L1, A2 of L2 Italian - CEFR
• high percentage of disfluencies (35%)• low degree of comprehensibility (92% “poor”)
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IT_M IT_F CH_M CH_F0
20
40
60
80
100
"poor comprehensibility" "strong foreign accent"false
NS and NNS (C1 of L2 Italian - CEFR)
• no disfluencies• high degree of comprehensibility (96-98% “good”)
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TEST 1-4 (L2 Italian)
• variation in credibility is not exclusively dependent on the message content;
• credibility is rather delivered by the comprehensibility level of the utterance;
• comprehensibility, in turn, is primarily affected by the features often characterizing the L2 speech: the more the disfluencies, wrong pauses, interruptions and anomalous tonal variations, the lower the comprehensibility.
results
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• The reason of the mistrust of the listener to the message should therefore not be sought in the opposition “foreign/native”, but rather in the degree of comprehensibility of the utterance and, therefore, in the level of difficulty encountered in its decoding.
results
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What happens if the native speaker is as disfluent as the non-native speaker?
test 5 - L1 Italian
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• 1 Italian NS (female)• corpus– 4 bizarre-but-true news– natural speech
• elicited disfluencies (reading distance: greater than the optimal)
• plain reading
– synthesized speech• transplantation of non-native anomalies and disfluencies
(Arabic speaker, A2 CEFR, highly disfluent) on the Italian plain reading
materials and methods
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– Anomalies (segmental duration, pitch contour)
– Disfluencies (repetitions, vocalizations, nasalizations, interruptions, etc.)
transplanting NNS features
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spoken time composition
17
2459
elicited disfluent speech
% silences % disfluencies% phonation
13
25
62
transplanted disfluent speech
% silences % disfluencies% phonation
• comparable speech time composition• segmental and prosodic differences
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• 50 native Italian listeners– 2 groups
• 8 news– 4 transplanted disfluencies– 4 elicited disfluencies– 2 random orders (2 transp. + 2 elicit.)
• degree of foreign accent (FA)– native accent, mild foreign accent, strong foreign
accent
pretest
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pretest
elicited transplanted0
102030405060708090
100
55
1
41
44
94
foreign accent degree (average values - %)
native accent mild foreign accent strong foreign accent
Chinese C10
20
40
60
80
100
0
47 53
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• 319 listeners– 4 homogeneous groups, aged 21-24, M/F,
university students• 8 items - 4 different orders– 4 news - plain reading (PR)– 4 news - elicited disfluencies (ED)
• assessment– foreign accent (native accent, mild FA, strong FA)– comprehensibility (poor, sufficient, good)– credibility (true, false)
perceptive test
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perceived accentglobal values - %
plain reading disfluent reading0
102030405060708090
100 96
52
4
43
05
native accent mild foreign accent strong foreign accent
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comprehensibilityglobal values - %
plain reading disfluent reading0
102030405060708090
100 92
127
71
1
16
good sufficient poor
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credibilityglobal values - %
plain reading disfluent reading0
102030405060708090
100
64
3736
63
TRUE FALSE
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plain re
ading
disfluent r
eading
04080
native accent good comprehensibilityTRUE
first second0
20
40
60
80
100
plain reading (NS)
first second0
20
40
60
80
100
disfluent reading (NS)
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in conclusion
• Current findings indicate that there is a direct relationship between comprehensibility and credibility, supporting the “processing fluency” theory
• Low comprehensibility affects credibility of both native and non-native disfluent speech
• A NNS having a strong foreign accent but an advanced level of L2 competence has the same chance of communication success of a NS, in terms of credibility
• There is only an indirect relationship between foreign accent and credibility, mediated by comprehensibility
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ReferencesDe Meo, A. (2012), “How credible is a non-native speaker? Prosody and surroundings”,
in Methodological Perspectives on Second Language Prosody. Papers from ML2P 2012, Padova: CLEUP, pp. 3-9. http://www.maldura.unipd.it/LCL/ML2P/proceedings.html
De Meo, A., Pettorino, M., Vitale, M. (2012), “Non ti credo: i correlati acustici della credibilità in italiano L2”, in G.Bernini, C. Lavinio, A. Valentini, M. Voghera (a cura di) Atti dell’XI Congresso dell’Associazione Italiana di Linguistica Applicata, “Competenze e formazione linguistiche. In memoria di Monica Berretta”. Guerra Edizioni, Perugia, pp. 229-248.
De Meo, A., Vitale M., Pettorino, M., Martin, P., (2011), “Acoustic-perceptual credibility correlates of news reading by native and chinese speakers of Italian”, in Wai-Sum Lee e Eric Zee (eds.), Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, Hong kong, Cina, pp: 1366-1369.
Gluszek, A., Dovidio, J.F. (2010), “The way they speak: Stigma of non-native accent in communication”. Personality and Social Psychology Review 14, pp. 214-237.
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Lev-Ari, S., Keysar, B. (2010), “Why don’t we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46, pp. 1093-1096.
Pettorino, M., De Meo, A., Pellegrino, E., Salvati, L., Vitale, M. (2011), “Accento straniero e credibilità del messaggio: un’analisi acustico-percettiva”, in B. Gili Fivela, A. Stella, L. Garrapa, M. Grimaldi (eds.), Contesto comunicativo e variabilità nella produzione e percezione della lingua, Proceedings of the 7th Conference of the Italian Association for Speech Sciences (AISV 2011), Roma: Bulzoni editore, CD (9 pp.).
Pettorino, M., De Meo, A., Vitale, M. (2012), “Transplanting credibility into a foreign voice. An experiment on synthesized L2 Italian", in H. Mello, M. Pettorino, T. Raso (eds.), Speech and Corpora, Proceedings of the 7th GSCP International conference, Firenze: Firenze University Press, pp. 281-284.
Reber, R., Schwarz, N. (1999), “Effects of perceptual fluency judgements of thruth. Consciousness and Cognition 8, pp. 338-342.
Thorne, S. (2005), “Accent pride and prejudices: Are speakers of stigmatized variants really less loyal?”. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 12, pp. 151-166.
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Thank you!