ANALYSIS OF PROSODIC FEATURES OF NATIVE AND NON-NATIVE SPONTANEOUS SPEECH

•The frequency of prosodic events has an impact on the perception of nativeness and fluency: – Liscombe (2007): distances between high boundary tones correlates with higher pronunciation scores. – Rosenberg (2009): higher rate of pitch accenting for of Mandarin Chinese reading English segments These stuides rely on ToBI annotations. How do these labels apply to non-native speech? •Native/non-native speech also differs in terms of fine phonetic detail: – Levow (2009) found that native speakers employ larger changes in pitch to mark pitch accents than non-native speakers.