Perceptual Assessment of the Degree of Russian Accent

This paper deals with the perceptual assessment of Russian-accented Estonian. Speech samples were recorded from 20 speakers with a Russian background; clips of about 20 seconds from each speaker were selected for this perceptual study. The accentedness was rated in two tests: first, 20 native Estonian speakers judged the samples and rated the degree of foreign accent on a six-point interval scale; secondly, two experienced phoneticians carried out a perceptual study of the same samples and compiled the list of pronunciations errors. The results of both listening tests were highly correlated – the higher the degree of accentedness given to a L2-speaker by naïve listeners, the more pronunciation errors were found by trained experts. The classification of most frequent pronunciation errors based on acoustic-phonetic features is given, as well.