The Perceptual Effect of L1 Prosody Transplantation on L2 Speech: The Case of French Accented German

Abstract

Research has shown that language learners are not only challenged by segmental differences between their native language (L1) and the second language (L2). They also have problems with the correct production of suprasegmental structures, like phone/syllable duration and the realization of pitch. These difficulties often lead to a perceptible foreign accent. This study investigates the influence of prosody transplantation on foreign accent ratings. Syllable duration and pitch contour were transferred from utterances of a male and female German native speaker to utterances of ten French native speakers speaking German. Acoustic measurements show that French learners spoke with a significantly lower speaking rate. As expected, results of a perception experiment judging the accentedness of 1) German native utterances, 2) unmanipulated and 3) manipulated utterances of French learners of German suggest that the transplantation of the prosodic features syllable duration and pitch leads to a decrease in accentedness rating. These findings confirm results found in similar studies investigating prosody transplantation with different L1 and L2 and provide a beneficial technique for (computer-assisted) pronunciation training.

Foreign Accent Conversion by Synthesizing Speech from Phonetic Posteriorgrams

“…Early attempts at accent conversion used voice morphing [3,[6][7][8] to control the degree of accent by blending spectral components from the native and non-native speakers. In [18,19], the authors used PSOLA to modify the duration and pitch patterns of accented speech. Aryal and Gutierrez-Osuna [1] adapted voice conversion (VC) techniques, replacing Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) with a technique that matched source and target frames based on their MFCC similarity after vocal tract length normalization.…”