Prosodic analysis of foreign-accented English

Abstract

This study compares utterances by Vietnamese learners of Australian English with those of native subjects. In a previous study the utterances had been rated for foreign accent and intelligibility. We aim to find measurable prosodic differences accounting for the perceptual results. Our outcomes indicate, inter alia, that unaccented syllables are relatively longer compared with accented ones in the Vietnamese corpus than those in the Australian English corpus. Furthermore, the correlations of syllabic durations in utterances of one and the same sentence are much higher for Australian English subjects than for Vietnamese learners of English. Vietnamese speakers use a larger range of f0 and produce more pitch-accents than Australian speakers