Perceived Strength and Identity of Foreign Accent in Swedish

We report three listening experiments focussing on the phonetic correlates of perceived foreignness and perceived strength of foreign accent in Swedish. In the first experiment, it is shown that accentedness can be reliably measured on the basis of a relatively short speech sample and that a statistical count of deviating pronunciations correlates significantly with subjective judgements of accentedness by linguistically naive listeners. The second experiment shows a significant correlation between number of deviant features and perceived accent strength and a significant correlation between judgements of degree of deviation and foreignness. Some features are associated with impressions of stronger accents than others, and some with perception of 'Finnish' accent. The third experiment establishes which combinations of deviant phonetic characteristics most strongly tend to give the impression of Finnish accent.