Suprasegmental Acoustic Cues of Foreignness in Czech English

摘要

English as the lingua franca of the modern world is spoken by increasing numbers of individuals from various nations and of different linguistic backgrounds. Detection of foreign accents can potentially lead to improvement in the development of ASR systems which have to cope with vast, but, at a certain level of generalization, finite variation of English accents. Samples of Czech English have been parameterized in terms of linguistically explicable suprasegmental variables and subjected to multiple regression analyses with foreignness scores as the dependent variable. The results are remarkably consistent and confirm that the chosen parameters contain cues of accentedness strength and might be used in detection and possibly explanation of the Czech accent in English.