Doctoral Dissertation Reasearch: Temporal Measures of Spanish-Accented English

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This dissertation project attempts to identify the acoustic features of Spanish-accented speech that give it the perception of being 'accented'. While considerable information is available on phonological aspects of Spanish-accented English, only a limited amount of research has been conducted on the objective acoustic features. In this study, Spanish speakers of English and native speakers of American English will be recorded, and speech samples will be compared in terms of temporal acoustic measurements, e.g. vowel duration, consonant duration, and stop voice onset time. These measurements will provide descriptive data for the timing of Spanish-accented English. The second part of the study is experimental. Having identified the temporal differences, the researchers will select those features which differ most consistently across the two groups of speakers. These features will be acoustically modified by waveform editing for the Spanish-accented speakers to bring them into accord with the measurements of the native (unaccented) speakers. The modified and unmodified speech of the accented speakers will then be subjected to listener ratings for relative accent judgments. The aim is to determine the extent to which temporal modification makes accented speech less accented and more native-like.