How does accent training differ for beginner vs advanced learners

Accent training for beginner learners and advanced learners differ mainly in focus, complexity, and methods used.

For beginner learners, accent training emphasizes:

• Perception of basic sounds and phonemes of the target language.
• Production practice using simple consonant-vowel (CV) or consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) syllable structures.
• Basic drills and repetition to build foundational pronunciation skills.
• Use of computer programs and controlled environments to improve sound discrimination and articulation.
• Focus on overcoming major phonetic differences from the learner’s native language to the target language sounds. ^{1, 2}

For advanced learners, accent training usually involves:

• Fine-tuning and polishing pronunciation, intonation, and rhythm.
• More complex and natural speech contexts, including connected speech and variations in prosody.
• Increased focus on fluency and speech naturalness along with accent reduction.
• Use of advanced techniques such as deep learning-based feedback, detailed acoustic analysis, and accent conversion technologies.
• Greater emphasis on subtle pronunciation differences, including stress, intonation patterns, and native-like speech flow. ^{3, 4}

In summary, beginner accent training addresses foundational sound perception and production, while advanced training focuses on refinement, fluency, and native-like pronunciation nuances. Beginner learners rely more on basic phonetic drills and recognition, whereas advanced learners engage with sophisticated methods aiming at accent fine-tuning and speech naturalness. This staged approach helps learners progress from fundamental skills to advanced mastery in accent and pronunciation. ^{2, 4, 1, 3}

References

• Effects of HVPT on perception and production of English fricatives by Japanese learners of English

• Powerful and Effective Pronunciation Instruction: How Can We Achieve It?

• Using deep learning to classify English native pronunciation level from acoustic information

• Computer-assisted Pronunciation Training — Speech synthesis is almost all you need

• 23 Questions of fluency in Australian languages revitalisation

• Language learning and teaching – theory and practice

• AccentSpeech: Learning Accent from Crowd-sourced Data for Target Speaker TTS with Accents

• World Englishes: Speaking with Accents

• TTS-Guided Training for Accent Conversion Without Parallel Data

• Voice-preserving Zero-shot Multiple Accent Conversion

• Linguistic-Acoustic Similarity Based Accent Shift for Accent Recognition

• Speaking and Hearing With an Accent

• Improving Accent Identification and Accented Speech Recognition Under a Framework of Self-supervised Learning

• Non-parallel Accent Transfer based on Fine-grained Controllable Accent Modelling

• AccentFold: A Journey through African Accents for Zero-Shot ASR Adaptation to Target Accents

• Accented Speech Recognition With Accent-specific Codebooks

• DEVELOPING PRONUNCIATION SKILLS THROUGH APPLICATION TO ENHANCE SPEAKING ABILITY: SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW

• Improving Self-supervised Pre-training using Accent-Specific Codebooks

• Influential Factors in Oral English Learning

• Accent-VITS:accent transfer for end-to-end TTS