Material

The material for this experiment consisted of 9 recordings of the same text read by 8 European exchange students and 1 Swede (all female) studying at Växjö University during the spring term 2004. Their participation was voluntary. The text used is entitled “The Rainbow Passage” and, in its entirety, includes all the sounds of English. In this experiment, however, only the first two paragraphs were used. These recordings were not altered or controlled in any way in regard to time, rate of speaking, or pitch in order to produce the most natural recording possible. The speaking time for the first paragraph ranged between 30 and 46 seconds for each speaker while the time for the second paragraph ranged between 25 and 38 seconds. Also, each speaker was given the text to review for only a few minutes before recording with the possibility to ask questions about pronunciation or meaning. The result was a somewhat spontaneous reading by each speaker.

Speakers

These nine speakers were located, interviewed, and recorded within their residence halls. All 9 speakers were women between the ages of 21 and 31 currently studying at Växjö University. Excluding the Swedish speaker, they had been in Sweden for a time period of between 2 months and 1 year. All nine speakers were studying a subject other than English and had not studied English since high school. Questions were also asked that involved if, how, when, and where they had spent time in English-speaking or other foreign countries. Of the 9 speakers, 3 of them (Spain, Poland, Germany) had spent 2 months in an English-speaking country (vacation/working) while the remaining 6 had spent less than a month in an English-speaking country. Also, the women from France, Poland, and Germany had spent one month or more in a non-English-speaking foreign country. All nine women classified their English as Intermediate or Advanced and agreed that they had a typical foreign accent in English for a person from their country. The recordings were placed in the following order: Germany, Portugal, France, Poland, Sweden, Spain, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands. No control was made for age of learning, years of formal instruction, learning aptitude, order influence, or for the fact that inclusion or exclusion of one voice or accent may affect judgements of those remaining.

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