Role of segmental and suprasegmental cues in the perception of maghrebian-acented French

The general objective of this study is to clear up the relative importance of prosody in the identification of a foreign accent. The methodology we propose, based on the prosody transplantation paradigm, can be applied to different languages or language varieties. Here, it is applied to Magrhrebianaccented French: we wanted to study what is perceived when the segmental and suprasegmental characteristics of Maghrebian and native French speakers are crossed. Results obtained with French listeners (accent degree rating task) and Algerian listeners (origin identification task) converge and suggest that the articulation of phonemes overrides prosody to account for Maghrebian accents in French.