Production and Perceptual Correlates of Spanish-accented English
نویسنده
چکیده
This study attempted to identify the acoustic deviations in the speech of Spanish-accented speakers of English and their influence on the native perception of accentedness. Recordings of eight multisyllabic target words spoken in sentences by 22 Spanish speakers of English and five native speakers of American English were analyzed for temporal acoustic differences. Acoustic deviations in Spanish-accented speech included overall word duration, unstressed vowel duration, stressed-unstressed (S/U) vowel duration ratios, Voice Onset Time (VOT) and closure duration in intervocalic flaps/stops. Native listeners listened to the nonnative samples and assigned a range of ratings of accentedness. Results showed that the accentedness ratings were correlated to varying degrees with each of overall word duration, S/U vowel duration ratios, VOT duration, and closure duration of intervocalic /t/. Overall, results suggest that Spanishaccented English is characterized by systematic temporal differences from native American English, and that these temporal differences are related to the perception of accentedness as judged by native AE listeners.
منابع مشابه
PROCESSING TIME EFFECTS OF SHORT-TERM EXPOSURE TO FOREIGN-ACCENTED ENGLISH by Constance
Non-native speech can cause perceptual difficulty for the native listener, but experience can moderate this difficulty. This study explored the perceptual benefits of brief exposure to non-native speech. A cross-modal word matching paradigm was used to investigate perception of foreign-accented speech by native English listeners during the first moments of exposure. In 5 experiments, processing...
متن کاملThe Effects of Language Experience and Speech Context on the Phonetic Accommodation of English-accented Spanish Voicing.
Native speakers of Spanish with different amounts of experience with English classified stop-consonant voicing (/b/ versus /p/) across different speech accents: English-accented Spanish, native Spanish, and native English. While listeners with little experience with English classified target voicing with an English- or Spanish-like voice onset time (VOT) boundary, predicted by contextual VOT, l...
متن کاملPerceptual adjustment to foreign-accented English with short term exposure
Non-native, or 'foreign-accented,' speech deviates from native pronunciation norms, and these deviations can cause perceptual difficulty for listeners. However, there is reason to believe that non-native speech can be learned by the adult perceptual system. The present study investigated perceptual learning of foreignaccented speech with very limited experience. Sixteen auditory sentences were ...
متن کاملForeign Accents in Synthetic Speech: Development and Evaluation
This paper addresses the generation and evaluation of foreign-accented speech in concatenative text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. We describe three possible methods of building a Spanish-accented English voice, and evaluate and compare them with respect to preference, intelligibility, and smoothness. Effects of speaking rate and content are also examined. It is found that although using an unmodif...
متن کاملPerceptual adaptation to non-native speech.
This study investigated talker-dependent and talker-independent perceptual adaptation to foreign-accent English. Experiment 1 investigated talker-dependent adaptation by comparing native English listeners' recognition accuracy for Chinese-accented English across single and multiple talker presentation conditions. Results showed that the native listeners adapted to the foreign-accented speech ov...
متن کامل