Testing the effects of segmental and suprasegmental phonetic cues in foreign accent rating. An experiment using prosody transplantation

In this study the prosody transplantation (PT) method is used to compare the effects of segmental and prosodic information on the perception of foreign accented English. The main hypothesis is that segmental information has the strongest effect in the perception of foreign accent (FA), followed by segmental duration and intonation. PT is used to manipulate a set of read sentences produced by Italian speakers of English L2 and native British English speakers in both possible directions: native prosody was transplanted on non‐native segments and non‐native prosody on native segments. Duration and f0 values were transplanted both as a bundle (full prosody transplant) and selectively. The stimuli were presented to 21 British English native listeners in a perception experiment, where the subjects were asked to rate the degree of foreignness. The results showed that segmental information has the strongest effect in FA perception. However, the two prosodic cues tested also played a role: duration and f0 changed significantly the perception of FA, not only when transplanted together, but also when transplanted selectively. However, the results showed that duration has only a slightly stronger effect when compared to intonation. Further research is required to verify if this tendency means that segmental duration is a stronger cue when compared to intonation in the detection of Italian accent in English.