Prosodic analysis of foreign-accented English

Abstract This study compares utterances by Vietnamese learners of Australian English with those of native subjects. In a previous study the utterances had been rated for foreign accent and intelligibility. We aim to find measurable prosodic differences accounting for the perceptual results. Our outcomes indicate, inter alia, that unaccented syllables are relatively longer compared with accented ones in the Vietnamese corpus than those in the Australian English corpus. Furthermore, the correlations of syllabic durations in utterances of one and the same sentence are much higher for Australian English subjects than for Vietnamese learners of English. Vietnamese speakers use a larger range of f0 and produce more pitch-accents than Australian speakers. Index Terms: foreign accent, prosodic analysis 1. Introduction Although foreign accent is most readily associated with segmental deviations from the native norm, prosodic differences certainly account for many difficulties in understanding accented speech (see, for instance, [1][2]). In the current study we examine speech collected from Vietnamese learners of Australian English. In previous work the data have been assessed by native listeners for intelligibility and strength of foreign accent on a scale from 1 to 5 [3]. We now attempt to perform a prosodic analysis of the recordings and compare them with corresponding utterances by native Australian subjects in order to establish objective parameters that best reflect foreign accent, as well as are correlated with the subjective measures of foreign accent and intelligibility. Whereas English is often classified as a stress-timed language, Vietnamese is a syllable-timed tone language, a contrast which obviously poses a number of prosodic problems for learners of the other language.