Foreign Accent Perception

Book excerpt: The phenomenon of foreign accents and their perception have received considerable attention from pronunciation specialists and academic researchers working within different fields of study, such as phonetics, phonology, foreign language teaching, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, social psychology, anthropology, and even law. The reason for this widespread interdisciplinary interest is caused by the fact that, in addition to revealing the speaker’s origin, accent carries significant social connotations and evokes various ethnic, racial, religious and socio-economic stereotypes. This book represents the largest, up-to-date qualitative and quantitative investigation into the accentedness, acceptability, intelligibility and comprehensibility of Polish English of three groups of native speakers, the English, the Irish and the Scottish, comparing the ways in which it is perceived by members of three nations and establishing pronunciation priorities. The book will be of interest not only to phoneticians, pronunciation specialists and sociolinguists, but also to EFL teachers and students.