Voice-Onset-Time in the Perception of Foreign Accent by Native Listeners of Spanish

This experiment seeks to determine the extent to which the variation of temporal characteristics of stops in a particular Spanish utterance spoken by an English speaker had a noticeable effect on the perception of foreigness of speech. The experiment was conducted by manipulating an utterance with special computer programs and using native subjects to rate the manipulated utterances as being more foreign or more native. The results were positive; the variation of the temporal characteristics of stops did have a noticeable effect on the perception of foreigness of speech by native listeners. Therefore, instruction directed to shorten such temporal characteristics of the English accented stops toward more Spanish-like values was recommended. It was suggested that this might be achieved through the use of interactive computer techniques.