Perceiving unstressed vowels in foreign-accented English

J Acoust Soc Am. 2011 Jan;129(1):376-87. doi: 10.1121/1.3500688.

Abstract

This paper investigated how foreign-accented stress cues affect on-line speech comprehension in British speakers of English. While unstressed English vowels are usually reduced to /ə/, Dutch speakers of English only slightly centralize them. Speakers of both languages differentiate stress by suprasegmentals (duration and intensity). In a cross-modal priming experiment, English listeners heard sentences ending in monosyllabic prime fragments--produced by either an English or a Dutch speaker of English--and performed lexical decisions on visual targets. Primes were either stress-matching ("ab" excised from absurd), stress-mismatching ("ab" from absence), or unrelated ("pro" from profound) with respect to the target (e.g., ABSURD). Results showed a priming effect for stress-matching primes only when produced by the English speaker, suggesting that vowel quality is a more important cue to word stress than suprasegmental information. Furthermore, for visual targets with word-initial secondary stress that do not require vowel reduction (e.g., CAMPAIGN), resembling the Dutch way of realizing stress, there was a priming effect for both speakers. Hence, our data suggest that Dutch-accented English is not harder to understand in general, but it is in instances where the language-specific implementation of lexical stress differs across languages.

MeSH terms

  • Acoustic Stimulation
  • Adolescent
  • Adult
  • Audiometry, Speech
  • Comprehension
  • Cues*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Multilingualism*
  • Phonetics*
  • Psychoacoustics
  • Reaction Time
  • Speech Acoustics*
  • Speech Intelligibility*
  • Speech Perception*
  • Time Factors
  • Young Adult