The detection of French accent by American listeners

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Abstract
The 5 experiments presented here examine the ability of listeners to detect a foreign accent. Computer editing techniques were used to isolate progressively shorter excerpts of the English spoken by native speakers of American English and French. Native English-speaking listeners judged the speech samples in 1- and 2-interval forced-choiced tests. They were able to detect foreign accent equally well when presented with speech edited from phrases read in isolation and produced in a spontaneous story. The listeners accurately identified the French talkers (63-95% of the time) no matter how short were the speech samples presented: entire phrases (e.g., "2 little dogs"), syllables (/tu/ or /ti/), portions of syllables corresponding to the phonetic segments /t/, /i/, /u/, and even just the first 30 ms of "two" (roughly, the release burst of /t/). Both phonetically trained listeners familiar with French-accented English and unsophisticated listeners were able to accurately detect accent. Listeners may develop very detailed phonectic category prototypes against which to evaluate speech sounds occurring in their native language.

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