Exploring the skill of being "good with accents": A study of monolingual English speakers' ability to reproduce a novel foreign accent

Abstract

We collected production data from monolingual English speakers who were trained to produce a foreign accent of English, specifically Russian English (RE). First, the subjects read a paragraph in their own accent (baseline). Second, they listened to recordings of English sentences produced by a native speaker of Russian; next, the sentences were replayed, and the subjects imitated each sentence after hearing it. Finally, they were instructed to read the baseline sentences again (without audio prompts), trying their best to reproduce the RE accent. Several acoustic analyses are underway, addressing (a) vowel characteristics, (b) realization of stops, and (c) intonation patterns. Preliminary results show considerable differences in speakers' performance. The questions we address based on the data collected are (1) is there a continuous or more categorical change in speakers' ability to reproduce the RE accent? (2) which aspects of RE are most salient to native English speakers?, and (3) is there a correlation in quality and quantity such that speakers who pick up on more cues also produce them in more native-like manner? Our goal is to develop an algorithm to predict a given speaker's accentedness, and compare its performance with native speakers' accentedness ratings in a follow-up perceptual experiment. We collected production data from monolingual English speakers who were trained to produce a foreign accent of English, specifically Russian English (RE). First, the subjects read a paragraph in their own accent (baseline). Second, they listened to recordings of English sentences produced by a native speaker of Russian; next, the sentences were replayed, and the subjects imitated each sentence after hearing it. Finally, they were instructed to read the baseline sentences again (without audio prompts), trying their best to reproduce the RE accent. Several acoustic analyses are underway, addressing (a) vowel characteristics, (b) realization of stops, and (c) intonation patterns. Preliminary results show considerable differences in speakers' performance. The questions we address based on the data collected are (1) is there a continuous or more categorical change in speakers' ability to reproduce the RE accent? (2) which aspects of RE are most salient to native English speakers?, and (3) is there a correlatio...