Malachi Henry

• Master of Arts
• PhD Candidate at Indiana University Bloomington

Unfamiliar accents can cause word recognition challenges, particularly in noisy environments, but few studies have incorporated quantitative pronunciation distance metrics to explain intelligibility differences across accents. To address this gap, intelligibility was measured for 18 talkers-- two from each of three first-language, one bilingual, an...

Children exhibit preferences for familiar accents early in life. However, they frequently have more difficulty distinguishing between first language (L1) accents than second language (L2) accents in categorization tasks. Few studies have addressed children's perception of accent strength, or the relation between accent strength and objective measur...

Segmental and suprasegmental cues can both contribute to listeners’ accent strength and distance judgments. This study examined the influence of a suprasegmental cue—rhythm—on listeners’ judgments of accent distance. Rhythm was quantified using two measures of variability in vocalic interval duration: normalized pairwise variability index (nPVI) an...

First (L1) and second language (L2) pronunciations that diverge more segmentally from the local accent are rated as more distant. However, fewer studies have addressed relations between suprasegmental features, such as intonation, and accent distance. We examined the relation between perceived accent distance and four suprasegmental measures: time...

Condensed Abstract: Despite strides in recent years, evidence-based practice (EBP) remains an elusive goal for speech-language pathologists in certain practice settings (e.g., Brumbaugh & Smit, 2013, Heilman & Bertone, 2021, Greenwell & Walsh, 2021). Challenges that speech-language pathologists face in implementing evidence-based practice have been...

Abstract: Native speakers of English typically acquire most consonants by age 6 (Crowe & McLeod, 2020). Some children fail to follow typical developmental trajectories, and may be diagnosed with a speech sound disorder (SSD) which is a detriment to their perceived intelligibility. In comparison to their typically developing (TD) counterparts, child...

Recent studies have sought to more thoroughly examine rhoticity among non-white Bostonians (Nagy andIrwin, 2010; Browne andStanford, 2018), as the city becomes more racially and ethnically diverse. We build upon Browne and Stanford (2018), which found that Black Bostonians (African American [AA] and Caribbean American [CA]) were more r-ful than Whi...

Abstract: The presence and strength of an accent are prominent indexical characteristics of speech for adults. Children are also sensitive to the presence of native and nonnative accents, but little is known about their perceptions of accent strength. Children utilize their knowledge of accents to make a variety of social judgments about relationsh...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Adults are sensitive to the presence and strength of accents different from their own. Children also are sensitive to the presence of unfamiliar accents, but much less is known about their awareness of accent strength. To address this gap, this study used a ladder task, in which listeners rank talkers based on their percei...