The Role of Prosody in the Perception of Foreign Accent and Comprehensibility: Prosody-Corrected-L2 Speech vs. Prosody-Distorted-L1 Speech

Abstract

Lee, Joo-Kyeong. 2013. The Role of Prosody in the Perception of Foreign Accent and Comprehensibility: Prosody-Corrected-L2 Speech vs. Prosody-Distorted-L1 Speech. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 39-1, 155-179. This work attempts to investigate the role of prosody in the perception of foreign accent and comprehensibility when native English L1 talkers' speech is distorted and Korean L2 talkers' speech is corrected in prosody. In order to see how prosody alone contributes to the judgment of foreign accent, both L1 and L2 speech was synthesized in such a way that the prosodic information was transplanted between L1 and L2 speech. More specifically, duration and pitch were corrected or distorted individually as well as in composition to see which prosodic parameter would have more influence on L2 foreign accent and comprehensibility. Overall, prosodically synthesized L1 and L2 speech did not show statistically significant differences from L1 and L2 speech, which suggested that segments played a dominant role over prosody. Moreover, foreign accent was rated statistically higher when L1 speech was distorted by L2 duration, but pitch did not make any significant differences. When L2 speech was corrected by L1 prosody, either L1 duration or pitch did not improve the L2 foreign accent. This was interpreted as indicating that speech rate played a more significant role than intonation and that L2 speech was not readily corrected by L1 prosody because its segmental deviance might mask prosodic improvement. Moreover, the scores of comprehensibility did not pattern with those of foreign accent; therefore, there was no correlation between foreign accent and comprehensibility. This supports Munro & Derwing (1999). (University of Seoul)