Perceptual identification and phonetic analysis of 6 foreign accents in French

A perceptual experiment was designed to determine to what extent naive French listeners are able to identify foreign accents in French: Arabic, English, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. They succeed in recognizing the speaker's mother tongue in more than 50% of cases (while rating their degree of accentedness as average). They perform best with Arabic speakers and worst with Portuguese speakers. The Spanish/Italian and English/German accents are the most mistaken ones. Phonetic analyses were conducted; clustering and scaling techniques were applied to the results, and were related to the listeners' reactions that were recorded during the test. They support the idea that differences in the vowel realization (especially concerning the phoneme /y/) seem to outweigh rhythmic cues.