Mild or strong? Foreign accent perception by postlingually deafened adults with cochlear implants

OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was to examine the perception of speaker accentedness by adult CI users and the relevance of segmental and suprasegmental features to CI users' accentedness rating. METHODS: Twenty native-English speaking, postlingually deafened adult CI users were recruited for an accent rating task. The speech materials were sentences segmented from the 'The Rainbow Passage' produced by 12 Mandarin-accented English speakers and 2 native English speakers. Each listener rated the speakers' accents on a 9-point scale. The 14 ' segmental and suprasegmental features, including vowel distance, occurrence of articulation and phonological errors, articulation rate, number of pauses, intensity change pattern, average F0 range, and F0 change pattern, were analyzed and used in a linear mixed-effects model (LMM) to examine their relationship with the listeners' rating scores. The CI listeners' rating data were compared with those of NH listeners reported in our previous study. RESULTS: Although the postlingually deafened adult CI users generally rated foreign-accented speakers with lower scores than the NH listeners did, they differentiated speakers' accent strength in a manner similar to that of the NH listeners. The LMM revealed that the CI listeners' accent rating was related to a wide range of acoustic-phonetic correlates, including both segmental and suprasegmental features of the speech samples, while the NH listeners' rating was mainly associated with speakers' segmental features and the articulation rate. CONCLUSION: Postlingually deafened adult CI users are able to differentiate the strength of non-native accents, and both segmental and suprasegmental features play a role in their accentedness judgments.