The Contribution of Prosody to the Perception of Foreign Accent
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Philippe Boula de Mareüil
Abstract
The general goal of this study was to expand our understanding of what ismeant by ‘foreign accent’. More specifically, it deals with the role of prosody (timingand melody), which has rarely been examined. New technologies, includingdiphone speech synthesis (experiment 1) and speech manipulation (experiment2), are used to study the relative importance of prosody in what is perceived as aforeign accent. The methodology we propose, based on the prosody transplantationparadigm, can be applied to different languages or language varieties. Here,it is applied to Spanish and Italian. We built up a dozen sentences which are spokenin almost the same way in both languages (e.g. ha visto la casa del presidenteamericano ‘you/(s)he saw the American president’s house’). Spanish/Italian monolingualsand bilinguals were recorded. We then studied what is perceived whenthe segmental specification of an utterance is combined with suprasegmental featuresbelonging to a different language. Under these conditions, results obtainedwith Spanish and Italian listeners suggest that prosody is important in identifyingSpanish-accented Italian and Italian-accented Spanish.
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© 2006 S. Karger AG, Basel
Articles in the same Issue
- Original Paper
- Is Vowel Normalization Independent of Lexical Processing?
- Children’s Production of Word Accents in Swedish Revisited
- The Contribution of Prosody to the Perception of Foreign Accent
- Further Section
- Publications Received for Review
- Index autorum Vol. 63, 2006
- Contents Vol. 63, 2006
Articles in the same Issue
- Original Paper
- Is Vowel Normalization Independent of Lexical Processing?
- Children’s Production of Word Accents in Swedish Revisited
- The Contribution of Prosody to the Perception of Foreign Accent
- Further Section
- Publications Received for Review
- Index autorum Vol. 63, 2006
- Contents Vol. 63, 2006
