The Contribution of Prosody to the Perception of Foreign Accent

Abstract

Abstract The general goal of this study was to expand our understanding of what ismeant by ‘foreign accent’. More specifically, it deals with the role of prosody (timingand melody), which has rarely been examined. New technologies, includingdiphone speech synthesis (experiment 1) and speech manipulation (experiment2), are used to study the relative importance of prosody in what is perceived as aforeign accent. The methodology we propose, based on the prosody transplantationparadigm, can be applied to different languages or language varieties. Here,it is applied to Spanish and Italian. We built up a dozen sentences which are spokenin almost the same way in both languages (e.g. ha visto la casa del presidenteamericano ‘you/(s)he saw the American president’s house’). Spanish/Italian monolingualsand bilinguals were recorded. We then studied what is perceived whenthe segmental specification of an utterance is combined with suprasegmental featuresbelonging to a different language. Under these conditions, results obtainedwith Spanish and Italian listeners suggest that prosody is important in identifyingSpanish-accented Italian and Italian-accented Spanish.