The perception of foreign-accented speech

Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to assess the contribution of various phonetic and phonological factors to the perception of global foreign accent. Two native Spanish speakers of fluent but heavily accented English recorded English phrases containing sounds or sequences of sounds whose production is characteristically difficult for native speakers of Spanish. Investigated factors included: those affecting syllable structure (initial epenthetic schwa, non-initial epenthetic schwa (-ed ending)); those affecting vowel quality (vowel reduction, tense-laxness); those affecting consonants (final /s/ deletion, manner (/t∫−∫/), fricative voicing (/z-s/), stop voicing); and those affecting stress (lexical stress and phrasal stress). English-speaking listeners rated extent of foreign accent of the Spanish phrases as originally produced and as edited acoustically. Listeners were sensitive to syllable structure factors, final /s/ deletion, consonant manner, and lexical and phrasal stress, but were not sensitive to voicing differences.