Sentence Durations and Accentedness Judgments Z.S. Bond, Verna Stockmat, Dace Markus Ohio University, University of Latvia RESULTS ABSTRACT Talkers in a second language can frequently be identified as speaking with a foreign accent. It is not clear to what degree a foreign accent represents specific deviations from a target language vs. more general characteristics. We examined the identifications of native and non-native talkers by listeners with various amount of knowledge of the target language. Native and non-native speakers of Latvian provided materials. All the non-native talkers spoke Russian as their first language and were long-term residents of Latvia. A listening test, containing sentences excerpted from a short recorded passage, was presented to three groups of listeners: native speakers of Latvian, Russians for whom Latvian was a second language, and Americans with no knowledge of either of the two languages. The listeners were asked to judge whether each utterance was produced by a native or non-native talker. The Latvians identified the non-native talkers very accurately, 88%. The Russians were somewhat less accurate, 83%. The American listeners were least accurate, but still identified the non-native talkers at above chance levels, 62%. Sentence durations correlated Major (1987) found that native speakers could distinguish Brazilian Portuguese accented English from American English using pronunciations of two contrasting vowels, // and /ae/. Native listeners employ multiple sources of information, from paralinguistic to phonetic, in making foreign accent judgments. Cunningham-Andersson and Engstrand (1989) found that the more segmental deviations in a passage, the more likely listeners are to identify the speech as accented. Magen (1989) found that listeners were sensitive to a variety of segmental and suprasegmental properties such as syllable structure, vowel and consonant quality, and stress placement. Munro (1995) reports that listeners were able to identify foreign-accented speech even without clear information about segmentals. Munro and Derwing (2001) found that listeners could make reliable judgments of accentedness based on speaking rate. FIGURE 1 Both Latvian and Russian listeners who knew the target language could identify talkers as native or non-native speakers with a high degree of accuracy. American listeners identified accurately native speakers and Russians who indicated that their proficiency in Latvian was low. They failed to identify relatively high proficiency Russian talkers. FIGURE 2 Latvian listeners gave native Latvians the highest evaluations and distinguished between low-proficiency and high-proficiency Russian talkers. Russian listeners gave high evaluations to Russians and relatively low evaluations to Latvians. METHOD LISTENING MATERIALS Sentences read by ten ethnic Russian talkers and by ten native Latvians. Russian talkers represented different levels of proficiency. Talkers were both males and females, ranging in age from retirees to high school students. Two sentences for each talker. The forty sentences were randomized on a test recording; practice items were included. PROCEDURE Thirty-one monolingual Americans, students at Ohio University evaluated each speech sample as produced by a native or non-native talker. Twenty monolingual Americans from the same population evaluated each talker on a 7-point scale. Twelve ethnic Russians and 28 Latvians, long-term residents of Riga. For each speech sample, the listeners tested in Latvia indicated whether they thought the talker was a Latvian or a Russian and evaluated speech samples on a 7-point scale CONCLUSION Fluency provides a basis of judgment for both native and non-native listeners. Phonological knowledge is available only to speakers of a language. The Russians’ imperfect phonological knowledge may have lead to divergent evaluations. OBJECTIVE Our objective was to vary listener knowledge of the target language in order to obtain an assessment of language-specific vs. universal indicators of accentedness. Latvian was the target second language; listeners evaluated speech samples produced either by native speakers or by ethnic Russians for whom Latvian is a second language. REFERENCES Cunningham-Andersson, Una and Olle Engstrand, Perceived strength and identify of foreign accent in Swedish, Phonetica 46 (1989) 138-154. Flege, James Emil, The detection of French accent by American listeners, Jl. of the Acoustical Society of America 76 (1984) 692-707. Magen, Harriet S. The perception of foreign-accented speech, Journal of Phonetics 26 (1998) 381-400. Major, R., Phonological similarity, markedness, and rate of second language acquisition, Studies in Second Language Acquisition 9 (1987) 63-82. Munro, Murray J., Nonsegmental factors in foreign accent: Ratings of filtered speech, Studies in Second Language Acquisition 17 (1995) 17-34. Munro, Murray J. and Tracey M. Derwing, Modeling perceptions of the accentedness and comprehensibility of L2 speech: The role of speaking rate, Studies in Second Language Acquisition 23 (2001) 451-468. Scovel, Thomas. Differentiation, recognition, and identification in the discrimination of foreign accents (pp. 169-181). In J. Archibald, ed., Phonological Acquisition and Phonological Theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995. INTRODUCTION Native listeners are extremely accurate in discriminating between native and non-native speech even from minimal information. For example: Scovel (1995) reports greater than 95% accuracy in distinguishing native from non-native speech samples. Flege (1984) found that listeners were able to recognize accented spoken samples of their native language within 30 ms, basing their judgments on phonetic cues present in fragments of syllables. Template design only ©copyright 2008 • Ohio University • Media Production • 740.597-2521 • Spring Quarter Research for this project was supported by a grant from the International Research & Exchanges Board, with funds provided by the US Department of State (Title VII).