The Contribution of Prosody to the Perception of Foreign Accent

The general goal of this study was to expand our understanding of what is meant by 'foreign accent'. More specifically, it deals with the role of prosody (timing and melody), which has rarely been examined. New technologies, including diphone speech synthesis (experiment 1) and speech manipulation (experiment 2), are used to study the relative importance of prosody in what is perceived as a foreign accent. The methodology we propose, based on the prosody transplantation paradigm, can be applied to different languages or language varieties. Here, it is applied to Spanish and Italian. We built up a dozen sentences which are spoken in almost the same way in both languages (e.g. ha visto la casa del presidente americano 'you/(s)he saw the American president's house'). Spanish/Italian monolinguals and bilinguals were recorded. We then studied what is perceived when the segmental specification of an utterance is combined with suprasegmental features belonging to a different language. Under these conditions, results obtained with Spanish and Italian listeners suggest that prosody is important in identifying Spanish-accented Italian and Italian-accented Spanish.