Perceptual identification and phonetic analysis of 6 foreign accents in French

ABSTRACT A perceptual experiment was designed to determine to what extent naive French listeners are able to identify foreign accents in French: Arabic, English, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. They succeed in recognizing the speaker’s mother tongue in more than 50% of cases (while rating their degree of accentedness as average). They perform best with Arabic speakers and worst with Portuguese speakers. The Spanish/Italian and English/German accents are the most mistaken ones. Phonetic analyses were conducted; clustering and scaling techniques were applied to the results, and were related to the listeners’ reactions that were recorded during the test. They support the idea that differences in the vowel realization (especially concerning the phoneme /y/) seem to outweigh rhythmic cues. Index Terms : perception, foreign accent, non-natif French.intervocalic intervals via “Pairwise Variability Indices” (PVI), 1. INTRODUCTION Can we recognize the origin of a speaker from a speech sample? This is possible in some cases: recent exper-iments confirmed it on regional accents in English [1] and French [2]. What is less known is the extent to which machine and naive listeners are able to identify foreign accents, especially in French. The aim of this article is to fill this lack and to examine the contribution of different linguistic levels (vowel quality and rhythm) to the human perception of a foreign accent. Prelimi-nary work suggests that vowel quality allow the identification of the origin of a foreign accent in French better than prosody does [3] [4]. Also, in the field of foreign-accented speech most studies concentrate on segmentals (the phoneme string, especially vowels [5]. Nevertheless other studies like [6] showed that for learners of French as a foreign language, the mother tongue prosody remains underlying in speech, in the absence of a specific training. This aspect is to be developed. So as to conduct perceptual tests, our interest focused on accents with which French people would be most familiar: Arabic, English, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. The choice of these languages was made by pooling statistics on immigration and tourism in France. We recorded spontaneous and read speech of about forty speakers of these different mother tongues. The influence of the phonological system of the mother tongue (L1) on the perception and the production of a second language (L2) is addressed in a number of (psycho)linguistic studies on non-native speech: the fact that, for instance German possesses a /y/ in its phonemic inventory whereas in English (even though a close sound can be heard in a word like