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

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• voice disguise
• foreign accent
• prosodic-acoustic parameters