Foreign accent strength and intelligibility at the segmental level
Speech Communication 137 : 70–76 (2022)
Abstract
The relationship between strength of foreign accent and intelligibility is not straightforward. This relationship
resists a simple characterisation due in part to the multiplicity of cues that carry accent in the word- and
sentence-level materials typically used in the study of accent. One of the principal conveyors of accent is the
phonetic segment. The current study attempts to isolate this segmental contribution to foreign accent and
consequently measure the relationship between segmental accent and intelligibility for listeners with differing
linguistic correspondence to the target and accented language. English, Spanish and Czech listeners identified
English words in which the initial consonant was either intact, or had been replaced by a Spanish-accented
counterpart; in a second task, they rated the accent strength of the same tokens. All speech material was produced
by an English-Spanish bilingual talker. Overall, Spanish listeners displayed a smaller loss of intelligibility
due to the accented segment than native English listeners, while the Czech cohort experienced the largest
intelligibility loss. However, the relationship between accent strength and intelligibility loss was not linear,
varying with phoneme identity and its role in a listener’s first language. These findings suggest that how accented
and intelligible a sound is depends strongly on the interactions between the phonological systems of speakers and
listeners