Patterns in passing for a native speaker in experimental conditions

9. What is the variation in NNESs’ passing for a NS of different English dialects? 10. What are some factors that contribute to a successful passing performance?

11. What are some of the elements that listeners notice in the input when a speaker succeeds or fails at passing?

The results of Experiment 2 suggest that there is a lot of variation in passing for a native speaker. First of all, NNESs can pass for both NSs of the same dialect and NSs of a different dialect. The patterns in passing for a native speaker of the same or different dialect suggest that, while some speakers may be using a ‘mixed’ accent as their target or an intermediate step in accent acquisition, some do not incorporate features of other dialects and are more commonly judged to be a NNES or a NS of the same dialect. It was tentatively suggested that the

incorporation of certain stereotypical features of other dialects can benefit passing for a NS of a different dialect.

This study also compared the speakers’ self-reports of passing to those in Piller (2002) and found certain regularities: the speakers in both studies believed that service encounters and communication with strangers was conducive to passing. The statistical analysis of passing in the four different settings supported Piller’s (2002) claims that certain environments can be

conducive to passing. Unlike qualitative predictions, however, service encounters were not judged to be significantly more native-like compared to the university setting.

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The listeners’ comments revealed rater reliance on a number of linguistic and extra- linguistic factors. The linguistic ones included mention of segments, suprasegmentals, grammar, and vocabulary. The analysis of listeners’ use of examples (imitation) highlighted the importance of salient elements. The extralinguistic comments revealed rater consideration of socio-cultural information in the task. The results of this study suggest that passing for a native speaker is a highly variable phenomenon with many speaker-, listener-, and situation-dependent factors affecting it. The next section compares and contrasts within-speaker variation in production and perception of NNESs.

6.2 General discussion

6.2.1 Variation in production

This study is the most thorough investigation of situational style-shifting in L2 speakers to date, comparing shifts in a number of monophthongs in the speech of 12 NNESs of two different language backgrounds. The found incremental variation on the accentedness continuum from more L1-like to more L2-like production suggests that L2 speakers can use this accentedness continuum for sociolinguistic positioning on top of the sociolinguistic variation found in the L1 community, a Type 3 variation. This finding highlights the role of L2 speakers as independent and creative users of a language who can employ resources unavailable to its L1 speakers and underlines the importance of regarding L2 speakers as such. Moreover, accounts of L1 variation, such as audience design (Bell, 1984) and identity construction (Eckert, 2000) were fruitfully applied to L2 sociolinguistic variation in this thesis, which once more puts L1 and L2 speakers on a similar level. This study exemplifies how sociolinguistic tools, most often used to study of L1 variation, can be successfully applied to L2 variation.

6.2.2 Variation in perception

The role of listener expectation in perception surfaces in this thesis and confirms earlier observations of its profound effect on foreign-accented speech perception (Lindemann & Subtirelu, 2013). Reverse-linguistic stereotyping (Rubin, 1992) is intricately connected with

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listener expectation and predicts that assumed speaker-related social information (e.g., ethnicity) will influence perceived phonetic information (e.g., foreign accentedness); that is listener

expectation to hear accented speech when they see an Asian speaker will effect this auditory illusion even when the speech sample is standard-accented. Audiovisual mismatch (McGowan, 2011), on the other hand, predicts that a mismatch between auditory and visual information can affect perceived accentedness. The results of my study supported the audiovisual mismatch effect; however, these two accounts need not contradict each other as the mismatch between auditory and visual information can only be defined as a mismatch due to expectation of certain perceptual conditions. That is an Asian face and standard-accented speech can only be

considered a mismatch if there is an expectation of an Asian face appearing with foreign- accented speech. One may attempt to extrapolate the mismatch / incongruence effect between expected and perceived information beyond audiovisual data.

The experiments investigating the effect of setting on accentedness perception have also highlighted the role of listener expectation and experience supporting previous literature on speaker- and stimulus- independent factors (Lindemann & Subtirelu, 2013; Levi et al., 2007). My experiments found that the services and the family settings were more conducive to a less accented rating compared to the university setting. From the point of view of the listener, there may be an expectation to hear standard-accented speech in the university setting with its scientific topics and technical vocabulary. Hearing foreign-accented speech might have

constituted a mismatch or incongruity effect in that setting then. I have also attempted to use a mismatch effect and expectations argument to explain speaker sex by setting and listener L2 knowledge by setting interactions (see Section 4.2.2).

Literature on L1 linguistic behavior has often used expectations which are formed by previous experience to explain variation in multiple domains (e.g., Hay, Warren et al., 2006; Niedzielski, 1999 discussed above). Weatherholtz, Walker, Melvin, Royer, & Clopper (2014) argued that recent experience with and dialect priming influenced intelligibility of that dialect in noise. Fine, Jaeger, Farmer, & Qian (2013) found that syntactic comprehension is affected by expectations based on, for example, language statistics. Nass & Brave (2005) reported on a number of different studies investigating machine voice perception and concluded that incongruous voice characteristics and various types of information such as personality, and consequently, an inconsistency between people’s expectations and perceived speech, affect

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people’s behavior. The results presented in this thesis suggest that similar theoretical and experimental tools can be used to discuss perception of both L1 and L2 speech.