On Non-Native Listeners’ Ability to Identify Prominence and Pitch Accents in English Monologic Speech

Abstract

A comparative perceptual study involving two experimental groups with different native languages (Russian and Czech) shows that phonologically trained non-native speakers of English are good at identifying basic suprasegmental features of the English language, namely prominence (sentence stress) and accent types, which potentially makes it possible to use their prosodic annotations when validating cross-language intonation research. The occasional failure of both experimental groups to identify certain accent types is explained in the study by the annotators’ mother tongue’s prosodic interference: Czech and Russian speakers rely on different acoustic cues when identifying prosodic features in their native languages and transfer this habit to the discrimination of English prosodic characteristics. The study demonstrates that when a prosodic cue is not marked in the speaker’s mother tongue, it will likely be ignored in the foreign language.