Accent, Comprehensibility, and Confidence in Second and Third Languages of Adolescents: How Do They Relate to Language Proficiency and Language Interactions?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: This study examines the degree to which adolescents in Iceland are judged by native Icelandic speakers to have a foreign accent both in Icelandic and in English, two languages that are learned under different conditions, as the community and school language, and through school and incidental exposure. METHOD: Fifty-eight adolescents, 27 with Icelandic as their first language (L1), 21 as their second language (L2), and 10 as one of two L1s read passages in Icelandic and English. Twelve untrained native speakers of Icelandic rated the degree of foreign accent, comprehensibility, and confidence level and selected from multiple-choice options what they thought was the L1 of the speakers. RESULTS: Significant group differences were found in Icelandic but not in English. L2 speakers had a significantly greater foreign accent than the other groups in Icelandic; however, there was substantial overlap with some L2 speakers judged to be native and some L1 speakers judged as nonnative. All groups had a significantly greater accent in English than in Icelandic. Accent was judged more sternly than comprehensibility and confidence and related differently to vocabulary proficiency. CONCLUSIONS: Accent is typically not considered in studies of bilingual attainment in children for purposes of clinical assessment or educational placement but should be given closer attention. The study confirms previous findings that many young L2 learners have a detectable foreign accent. The overlap with L1 speakers also raises questions about the ideal of a native accent. More research is needed on how accent relates to bilingual and multilingual proficiency and on its impacts on comfort level, ease of communication, choice of language, and language exposure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".