Taking a holistic approach to characterizing heritage accent
Ji Young Kim, UCLA
The way we speak is a reflection of our language experience. While we all have an accent, accent is perceived when someone’s speech is different from the expected variety, be it standard, regional, native or monolingual, depending on the population of interest. Heritage speakers (i.e., early bilinguals whose home language is distinct from the societally dominant language) are considered to sound differently from homeland speakers who are often set as the baseline group. Heritage speakers’ unique way of pronouncing certain sounds or “heritage accent” is important in understanding the role of bilingualism and language contact in phonetic variation.
Research on heritage language speech sounds has demonstrated several areas of divergence from homeland varieties, which is generally done by comparing heritage speakers’ production of individual sounds to that of homeland speakers. While this process is important in identifying phonetic features that lead to perceived heritage accent, it faces challenges, as there are numerous phonetic features that may individually or collectively contribute to heritage accent. In this presentation, I will discuss a holistic approach to characterizing heritage accent, such as global accent rating of resynthesized speech and comprehensive analysis of multiple speech sounds, that can complement existing methods in heritage accent research.
Sponsored by the Anonymous Fund and the Department of Spanish & Portuguese