The effect of correcting temporal patterns on the intelligibility of non-native Dutch speech

Abstract

This study examines the contribution of the temporal pattern of speech to the intelligibility of foreign accented utterances. Simple Dutch sentences, spoken by a Polish speaker of Dutch as a second language (D2), were artificially modified so as to match the temporal pattern of the same sentences of a native Dutch speaker (D1), and vice versa. Intelligibility was measured by a perceptual experiment according to the Speech Reception Threshold method (SRT, Plomp and Mimpen, 1979), in which native Dutch listeners repeated D1 and D2 sentences with an original and a modified temporal pattern. Results suggested that contrasts in intelligibility of native and non-native speech are partially explained by the temporal pattern. Additionally, the effect size of correcting temporal patterns of non-native speech presumably is related to other characteristics of speech, such as segmental errors.