Strong influence of prosody on the perception of foreign accent

This study investigates the acoustic characteristics of non-native speech which give rise to the perception of a foreign accent. Japanese speech samples were collected from L1 English and Mandarin speakers studying Japanese. The acoustic patterns of the L2 and native speech were related to the accentedness ratings of the speech provided by native Japanese listeners. Results indicate the important role that prosodic features play in affecting perception of foreign accent across different L1 backgrounds. They also indicate intriguing cross-linguistic differences: vowel production was related to English accent, whereas consonant production was related to Chinese accent in Japanese.