Foreign accent

Abstract

This paper investigates how speakers can be classified into native and non-native speakers of a language on the basis of acoustic and perceptually relevant features in their speech. It describes some of the most salient acoustic properties of foreign accent, based on a comparative corpus analysis of native and non-native German and English. These properties include the durational features vowel reduction, consonant cluster reduction and overall speech rate as well as the intonational variables pitch range and pitch movement. The paper further presents an experiment demonstrating that perceptual judgments of foreign accent correlate primarily with the speakers' speech rate. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.