Passing for a native speaker

Data analysis

The participants’ answers to the second question about identifying the origin of the speakers in Experiment 2 were systematized: spelling mistakes/typing errors, such as ‘Gertmany’ for ‘Germany’ or ‘Inida’ for ‘India’ were corrected; if a participant offered two responses such as ‘New Zealand or Australia’, the first one was recorded as it was assumed to be the first reaction; ‘not sure’ and the like were equalled to ‘no response’. Next, the answers were categorized by region: Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, New Zealand, Pacific islands, South America, and UK & Ireland. All the cities, countries, or broader areas, such as ‘Eastern Europe’, which are geographically located within those regions were assigned to the categories. Answers with ethnicity details were subsumed under the country category so that ‘African American’ or

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‘Asian American’ were added to the North America category and Māori NZ to the New Zealand one. ‘North America’ included Canada and the USA while Mexico was added to the ‘South America’ category as the main distinction in the perception of the accent from those countries that is relevant to this study is native-likeness. ‘Europe’ included continental Europe and Russia. ‘UK & Ireland’ included Great Britain and Ireland. If the response was too ambiguous to be placed unequivocally, such as ‘northern hemisphere’ or ‘western country’, it was added to the ‘no response’ category.

For the purposes of this study, Africa, Asia, Europe, Pacific islands, and South America were assigned the label NNES; Australia, North America, and UK & Ireland - the label NS of a different dialect; and New Zealand – NS of the same dialect. South Africa was subsumed under ‘Africa’.5 _{Countries of the outer circle (Kachru, 1992), where English has an official status, such} as Singapore, Hong Kong, or India, were not given a separate category. For the purpose of this analysis, only assignments to countries within the inner circle (Australia, NZ, North America, UK & Ireland) were considered examples of passing for a native English speaker.

Results and discussion

To address the matter of variation in passing in different situations experimentally, the four different settings were compared in terms of the passing performance. The categories of passing for a NS of the same dialect, passing for a NS of a different dialect, not passing, and no response for all the NNESs are plotted in Figure 4.6, which suggests that the speakers passed for a NS most often in the services setting and least often in the university setting.

5 _{South Africa has 11 official languages including English, so it is impossible to know whether the listeners meant}

that the speaker is a NNES or a NES of a different variety. However, as under 10% of South Africans speak English as a first language (Statistics South Africa, 2012), I add it to the NNES category.

82 Figure 4.6: Passing in different settings

Fitting a statistical model to these data allows us to check the observed difference for significance while controlling for other factors. To do this, the ‘no response’ data were excluded, and a binomial mixed effects model was fit to the data with passing (inclusive of NS of the same or different dialect; following Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam, 2009) vs not passing as the binary dependent variable. Fixed effects were of three types: those pertaining to the individual clips, the speakers, and the listeners. The independent variables pertaining to the individual clip included

setting of recording, length of clip in words (Nwords), length of clip in seconds, rate of speech

(words per second), mean log CELEX frequency of CELEX content words in the clip (Baayen, Piepenbrock, & Gulikers, 1995), and progression through the experiment (from 1 to 96; to control for a potential familiarization or fatigue effect). The independent variables pertaining to the speakers were sex, L1, proficiency, age of acquisition (age at which they first lived in an English-speaking country for a minimum of 6 months), and length of residence in an English-

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speaking country (rounded up to the next full year). As for the listeners, the independent variables were age and sex.

Additionally, because the setting variable was of the main interest for this study, two-way interactions between setting and all other variables were included into the model as fixed effects. A significant interaction between setting and another variable would mean that there is variation in how different settings affect passing performance in conjunction with other variables. Speaker, listener, and individual clip were introduced as random effects, and setting was introduced as a random slope for listener (Barr et al. 2013). If a fixed effect or an interaction was found non- significant, the model was re-run without it and the new and the previous models were compared with an ANOVA. The significantly better or simpler model was kept, and the pruning cycle was repeated.

Table 4.4 represents the final model. The university setting for higher proficiency speakers was chosen as the reference level (the Intercept). The estimate column in the table represents the log odds of the dependent variable being one factor rather than the other. Positive values in the column mean a higher chance of passing under a certain condition while negative values mean a lower chance of passing. For example, the estimate for the lower proficiency speakers in the university setting is negative at -3.955 and is significantly different from the baseline, as indicated in the Significance column, which means that, unsurprisingly, lower proficiency speakers were less likely to pass for a native speaker, and as the interaction between proficiency and setting was not significant, it was uniformly so across the settings.

Table 4.4: Model summary for accentedness ratings of NNESs in different settings

Estimate Standard error z value Pr(>|z|) Significance

(Intercept) -0.525 0.668 -0.787 0.431 proficiency_lower -3.955 0.912 -4.337 0.000 *** setting_family 1.010 0.386 2.616 0.009 ** setting_friends 0.436 0.373 1.170 0.242 setting_services 0.739 0.402 1.840 0.066 Nwords 0.676 0.356 1.898 0.058 progression 0.311 0.152 2.041 0.041 * settingfam:Nwords -0.962 0.457 -2.108 0.035 *

84 settingfr:Nwords -0.145 0.509 -0.285 0.775 settingser:Nwords -0.884 0.397 -2.229 0.026 * setting_family:progression -0.481 0.212 -2.272 0.023 * setting_friends:progression -0.223 0.210 -1.063 0.288 setting_services:progression -0.133 0.207 -0.643 0.521 Note. * p<0.05; ** p<0.01, *** p<0.001

Setting was found to be a significant predictor so that clips recorded in the family setting were more likely to be judged native-like than the ones in the university setting. It may be that being recorded in a comfortable environment speaking informally on a familiar topic created favorable conditions for passing. The services and friends settings were predicted to be

conducive to passing by Piller (2002), but the friends setting was not significantly different from the university setting at all, and the services setting only exhibited a trend (p=0.066) towards being more helpful to passing. This offers only weak experimental support to the claims made in self-reports about variation in passing for a NS (in Piller, 2002 and Section 5.2).

There was a trend for longer clips in the university setting being conducive to passing for a native speaker more often (p=0.058); however, it participated in a significant interaction and longer clips in the family and services settings were less likely to pass for a native speaker. Progression into the perceptual test was significant such that clips further along in the experiment were more likely to be judged native-like, possibly as the listeners relaxed their criteria after hearing more and more different accents from several varieties. It also participated in a significant interaction such that the clips in the family setting further along in the experiment were significantly less likely to be judged native-like. This means that the setting effect for the family setting was waning with more exposure to accented speech.

To sum up, as suggested by some previous literature, the perception experiment revealed within-speaker variation in passing by setting. However, Piller (2002) suggested that the services setting would be favorable to passing, but in the experiment the services setting only exhibited a trend towards being more native-like. Additionally, Piller (2002) argued that communication with friends can exert a positive effect, yet this setting did not reach significa nce here. The family setting was the only one to reach significance. I leave it to future research to fully corroborate or refute Piller’s (2002) claims.

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