Acoustic correlates of accentedness and intelligibility of Spanish-accented English vowels

Abstract

The present study investigated the acoustic characteristics of English vowels produced by native speakers of Spanish and the relationship between the acoustic properties of non-native vowel production and perceived accentedness and intelligibility. Twelve native speakers of Spanish were recorded producing monosyllabic words in list format. Individual vowel tokens from a variety of consonant environments were identified and acoustic analyses were conducted, including measures of duration and formant (F1, F2, F3) frequency. Listener ratings of accentedness and intelligibility were obtained from a separate set of sentence-length utterances. The analyses showed that average overall vowel duration as well as the duration of individual vowels was positively correlated with judgments of accentedness and negatively correlated with overall sentence intelligibility. Speakers who were judged to be more accented and less intelligible produced vowels of longer duration than speakers who were judged to be less accented and more intelligible. Analyses of spectral characteristics and comparisons to native English speakers’ vowel productions will also be reported. These findings suggest that the temporal properties are one aspect of non-native vowel productions that significantly contribute to the perception of accentedness as well as to the overall intelligibility of individual native Spanish speakers.