The current study aims to help language teachers set priorities for their instruction by identifying the segmental and structural aspects of pronunciation that are most foreign-accented to native speakers of American English. The current study employed a perception experiment. 100 speech samples selected from the Speech Accent Archive (Weinberger 2016) were presented to 110 native American English listeners who listened to and rated the foreign accentedness of each sample on a 9-point rating scale. 20...

Anthropogenic noise imposes novel selection pressures, especially on species that communicate acoustically. Many animals – including insects, frogs, whales, and birds – produce sounds at higher frequencies in areas with low-frequency noise pollution. Although there is support for animals changing their vocalizations in real time in response to noise (i.e., immediate flexibility), other evolutionary mechanisms for animals that learn their vocalizations remain largely unexplored. We hypothesize that cultural selection for signal structures less masked by...