Production and perception of authentic and feigned Spanish accent

Abstract

This experiment will be undertaken in order to examine the ability of native English speakers to distinguish between authentic and feigned Spanish accent. To that end, 50 English CVC words produced by 6 native Spanish speakers and 6 native English speakers will be recorded. The same six native English speakers will also be asked to produce the same words using self-determined Spanish-accented English. The English consonants chosen for analysis are [p/b, t/d, k/g] and the vowels chosen are [i,e,æ,u] and their lax counterparts. These consonants and vowels were chosen because they have been shown to be problematic for native speakers of Spanish learning English. The production experiment included the acoustic measurement of VOT and closure duration for the stop consonants and F1, F2, and duration for the vowels. The perception experiment will be conducted using ten native English speakers, five of whom are familiar with Spanish and five who are naïve. Listeners will hear the three types of speech (authentic Spanish accent, authentic American English accent, and feigned Spanish accent) and rate the degree of accentedness using a five-point scale. Results of the perception experiment will be examined and discussed in relation to the production data.