Foreign accent strength and intelligibility at the segmental level

Abstract

The relationship between strength of foreign accent and intelligibility is not straightforward. This relationship resists a simple characterisation due in part to the multiplicity of cues that carry accent in the word- and sentence-level materials typically used in the study of accent. One of the principal conveyors of accent is the phonetic segment. The current study attempts to isolate this segmental contribution to foreign accent and consequently measure the relationship between segmental accent and intelligibility for listeners with differing linguistic correspondence to the target and accented language. English, Spanish and Czech listeners identified English words in which the initial consonant was either intact, or had been replaced by a Spanish-accented counterpart; in a second task, they rated the accent strength of the same tokens. All speech material was produced by an English-Spanish bilingual talker. Overall, Spanish listeners displayed a smaller loss of intelligibility due to the accented segment than native English listeners, while the Czech cohort experienced the largest intelligibility loss. However, the relationship between accent strength and intelligibility loss was not linear, varying with phoneme identity and its role in a listener's first language. These findings suggest that how accented and intelligible a sound is depends strongly on the interactions between the phonological systems of speakers and listeners.