The Relative Contributions of Intonation and Duration to Degree of Foreign Accent in Norwegian as a Second Language

This study investigates the relative contributions of global intonation and global segment durations to degree of foreign accent in Norwegian. Speakers of Norwegian as a second language (N2) from different native languages (L1s) plus one native Norwegian (N1) speaker are recorded reading the same sentence. The N2 utterances’ global intonation and global segment durations are manipulated to match the N1 pronunciation. In this way every N2 speaker provides four utterance versions: the original, a duration corrected version, an intonation corrected version and a version with both features corrected. N1 listeners judge the degree of foreign accent between each speaker’s four utterance versions. The results show that a) the combined correction of both features reduces the degree of foreign accent for all speakers, b) each correction by itself reduces the degree of foreign accent for all but two of the investigated L1 groups and c) some L1 groups benefit more from intonation correction whereas others benefit more from duration correction.