Voice disguise and foreign accent: Prosodic aspects of English produced by Bra-zilian Portuguese speakers

This study aims to explore how much a speaker of English as a foreign language can mask one’s accent by performing voice disguise toward a native-like accent, and what implications it might bring forward. For the Methods, we conducted three experiments, (a) both the native and the foreign groups pr...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Leônidas Silva Jr., Plínio A. Barbosa
Format: Article
Language:Catalan
Published: Universitat de Barcelona 2023-11-01
Series:Estudios de Fonética Experimental
Subjects:
Online Access:http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/experimentalphonetics/article/view/45015
Description
Summary:This study aims to explore how much a speaker of English as a foreign language can mask one’s accent by performing voice disguise toward a native-like accent, and what implications it might bring forward. For the Methods, we conducted three experiments, (a) both the native and the foreign groups produced authentic voices, (b) the native group performed authentic voice and the foreign group performed disguised voice, and (c) a group of native listeners of English rated the degree of foreign accent from experiments a and b. The results showed evidence of correlation between the ratings and authentic voices. Nevertheless, they remained somewhat inconclusive for the disguised voice. It may be concluded that the more the Brazilian speaker approaches the L1-English target accent when voice disguising, the harder it is for the listener to recognize his/her L2-English accent.
ISSN:1575-5533
2385-3573