The perception of foreign accented speech. Segmental and suprasegmental features affecting degree of foreign accent in L2 Italian

The factors affecting the degree of foreign accent have been a matter of debate for years. This study is intended to investigate the role of suprasegmental and segmental features that make L2 Italian speech perceptively deviating from Italian native speech. Fifty-six Italian listeners listened to the excerpts of read speech produced by 8 Chinese learners and 2 Italian native speakers and rated them for degree of accentedness. The L1 and L2 corpora were spectro-acoustically analyzed. At suprasegmental level, we calculated the following rhythmic and prosodic parameters: articulation and speech rate, fluency, tonal range, percentage of silence and mean duration of empty pauses. At segmental level, we measured the duration of stressed and unstressed vowels and syllables and the length of stressed open and closed syllable. We also considered the syllable composition and pronunciation mistakes. The comparison between the results of the perception test and the data from the spectro-acoustic analyses have shown that both some suprasegmental parameters (i.e. fluency, tonal range and composition of speech time) and some segmental ones (i.e. duration of stressed and unstressed vowels and syllables, percentage of mispronunciations mistake) are relevant features differentiating the strength of perceived foreign accent of Chinese speakers.