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Language Variation - European Perspectives VII: Selected papers from the Ninth International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 9), Malaga, June 2017
Edited by Juan-Andrés Villena-Ponsoda, Francisco Díaz Montesinos, Antonio Manuel Ávila-Muñoz and Matilde Vida-Castro
[Studies in Language Variation 22] 2019
► pp. 119–132

Chapter 7
ASPA Tools or how to measure foreign-accentedness and intelligibility in an objective manner

| Universidad Rey Juan Carlos I, Spain

Dialectometry has traditionally been examined from the perspective of the dialects and accents of a single language or related languages. However, foreign accents still remain understudied within this paradigm (see section 2 and Wieling et al. 2014 for an exception).

In this chapter we present ASPA Tools (Accented-Speech Phonetic Alignment), a web application which measures phonetic distances between foreign-accented speech and a standard pronunciation. Unlike similar instruments (Visual DialectoMetry or Gabmap), ASPA Tools measures the degree of intelligibility of non-native English speech in relation to English as a Lingua Franca (ELF).

We use Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) and two variations of the Levenshtein Distance (LD) to examine the pronunciation of a group of speakers and compare it to a given ELF standard. Furthermore, ASPA Tools objectively measures the prototypical pronunciation of the group, which allows researchers to analyse the most salient deviations from the ELF standard.

Keywords: Lectometry, intelligibility, foreign accents, ELF, ASPA Tools, prototipicality
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Existent dialectometric tools
  • 3.English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and the Lingua Franca Core (LFC)
  • 4.Prototype Theory applied to (foreign) accents
  • 5.Technical characteristics of ASPA Tools
    • 5.1Input/Output data
    • 5.2Algorithms
  • 6.Conclusions and future perspectives
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 December 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.22.07jur
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