Comparative acoustic analyses of non-native English: The search for systematic variation

Abstract

Previous research has shown that exposure to multiple foreign accents facilitates adaptation to an untrained novel accent (Baese-Berk et al. 2013). The explanation offered is that L2 speech varies systematically, such that there are commonalities in the productions of non-native speakers, regardless of their language background (e.g. L2 speech is slower and many of English's contrasts are difficult for speakers of other languages). The current work conducted a systematic acoustic comparison between two native English speakers and six non-native accents that closely matched those used in Baese-Berk et al. (2013). All talkers, taken from the Wildcat Corpus, were male, and the non-native voices had comparable foreign accentedness ratings (Van Engen et al. 2010). VOT and formant values of stressed and unstressed vowels were analyzed, comparing each non-native accent to the native English talkers. Additionally, pairwise variability indices were calculated for vocalic and consonantal intervals as measures of rh...