Voice quality, foreign accent and attitudes to speakers
Åsa Abelin, Sally Boyd
Department of linguistics, Göteborg University
Abstract
This paper reports some of the results from a project on attitudes to foreign accented
Swedish in Swedish schools 1 , namely a study focusing on voice quality in relation to
judgements of degree of foreign accent, suitability for teaching, comprehensibility and
pleasantness.
1. Introduction and background
Attitudes to foreign accents may depend on either the number of phonetic deviations of
speakers, the voices of speakers or it may depend on the listeners’ attitudes towards the
cultural background of the speakers. An earlier study (Boyd, Abelin, Dorriots, 1999) showed
that listeners’ evaluations of a group of foreign born teachers’ pedagogical skills correlates
with perceived degree of foreign accent and with number of deviation tokens. Segmental,
prosodic and phonotactic deviations from L1 Swedish matched perceived degree of foreign
accent equally well; neither phonotactic nor prosodic deviations showed a greater effect on
perceived degree of foreign accent than segmental ones. The study also showed that
perceived degree of lexical richness follows degree of foreign accent but not measured
degree of lexical richness. High proficiency in pronunciation thus led the judges to give
speakers high marks on other aspects of language proficiency. The study also reported
preliminary results on the effect of voice quality on listeners’ judgements, and this study is
followed up in this article.
In the present study we used another group eight foreign accented speakers who were judged
on different parametres by two groups of listeners. The first group were 30 linguists who
judged degree of foreign accent, suitability for teaching, comprehensiblity and pleasantness
(on a scale 1–5, where 1 was the best and 5 was the worst). The second was a group of 16
speech therapists who judged degree of foreign accent and 12 different voice parametres. The
aim is to see if different groups evaluate degree of foreign accent consistently, to see if voice
quality judgements correlate with degree of foreign accent and if degree of foreign accent
correlates with evaluative judgements such as pleasantness. Finally we did a test on a third
group, mainly linguists, who judged degree of foreign accent and emotional content of the
voices.
1
“Brytning i skolan – attityder och fonetisk realitet”, at Göteborg University.
Voice characteristics involve a number of factors, not only characteristics of larynx setting
but also of prosody and articulation (Lindblad, 1992). Research by e.g. Abelin & Allwood
(1999), Johnstone & Scherer (1999), Paeschke, Kienast, Sendlmeier (1999), Piot (1999),
Zetterholm (1999) indicate that F0 is an important carrier of emotional information and
could thus also give rise to emotional reactions and attitudes. For this reason we also focused
on judgements of global characteristics such as pitch level and pitch-varation.
The research questions in this second study were: 1) Do judges estimate degree of foreign
accent consistently? 2) Are speakers’ voice qualities related to perceived degree of foreign
accent? 3) Is degree of foreign accent related to estimated teacher suitability? 4) Is degree of
foreign accent related to comprehensibility? 5) Is comprehensibility related to pleasantness?
6) How are voice quality parametres related to interpreted emotional state?
2. Method
Nine women with different foreign accents were recorded in two different situations:
teaching a class and reading aloud. The nine subjects had different L1:s: Polish (2 speakers),
Spanish, Finnish, Somali, Dutch (2 speakers, one of them only reading), German (only
teaching) and Farsi. 30 second samples of these recordings were mixed onto a test tape.
The recordings were presented to 30 judges, who were linguists or teachers of Swedish as a
foreign language. These listeners were instructed to give judgements on a scale 1–5 for the
following parametres: “degree of foreign accent”, “teacher suitability”, “comprehensibility”
and “pleasantness”.
The same testtape was also judged by 16 students of speech pathology. They were told to
judge the voices in regard to 12 voice dimensions: pitch level, pitch variation and strength of
voice and also other voice characteristics normally used for describing pathological voices:
vocal fry/creaky, unstable voice quality, hyperfunctional, hypofunctional, breathy, aphonic,
hard glottal attacks, rough and voice breaks. The speech pathologists also judged degree of
foreign accent of the speakers.
Degree of accentedness is thus estimated by both listener groups. Boyd, Abelin, Dorriots
(1999) showed, for another group of speakers, that there is good agreement between
listeners’ estimation of degree of foreign accent and number of pronunciation errors, i.e.
error tokens. Therefore, in this experiment, we did not do an analysis of number of errors,
but we were content with letting subjects estimate degree of foreign accent.
We did a test on yet another group, mainly linguists, who judged degree of foreign accent
and emotional content of the voices. These results are not analyzed in detail yet.
3. Results
The judgements and estimations of degree of foreign accent gave the following results.
1. Both listeners groups ranked the speakers’ degree of foreign accent, when teaching, in
exactly the same way, except for one speaker "Nos".
Table 1. The speakers ranked after degree of foreign accent, as judged by the linguist group and the
speech pathologists group (1 = least accented; 5 = most accented).
linguist group
speech pathologists
Jas/Somali
Sil/German
Nos/Farsi
Hen/Dutch
Gil/Spanish
1,5
2,2
2,8
2,8
3,0
1,7
2,3
Mar/Finnish
Bog/Polish
Kry/Polish
3,0
3,9
4,1
2,6
3,0
3,3
2,0
2,4
2,5
2. Degree of foreign accent correlates significantly with the global parametres pitch level (r =
.323; p<.0001) and strength (r = .259; p<.0001). It also correlates significantly with the non
global parametres vocal fry/creaky (r = .232; p<.0006), unstable voice quality (r = .402;
p<.0001) hyperfunctional (r = .393; p<.0001) and hard glottal attacks (r = .340; p<.0001). It
does not correlate with F0-variation, hypofunction, aphonic, rough voice quality or voice
breaks. High values are correlated with higher degree of foreign accent. e.g. high pitch and
strong voice correlate with high degree of foreign accent.
3. The speakers are ranked in exactly the same order on the parametres degree of foreign
accent and teacher suitability.
Table 2. The speakers ranked after judged degree of teacher suitability, which correlates with
ranking of degree of foreign accent, as judged by the linguist group. The table also shows marks on
the parametres comprehesibility and pleasantness.
foreign
accent
teacher
suitability
compre-hen pleasant-ne
sibility2
ss3
Jas/Somali
Sil/German
Nos/Farsi
1,5
2,2
2,8
1,5
1,7
2,0
1,5
1,7
3,2
2,2
1,8
2,9
Hen/Dutch
Mar/Finnish
Gil/Spanish
Bog/Polish
Kry/Polish
2,8
3,0
3,0
3,9
4,1
1,9
2,1
2,3
2,6
2,6
2,0
2,0
2,2
3,4
3,4
2,6
2,8
3,1
4,2
3,7
4. All these parametres correlate with all. However, degree of foreign accent correlates less
well with the more esthetic parameters and best with comprehensibility (r = .770; p<.0001).
5. Every speaker (except Nos) has a higher evaluation on comprehensibility than on
pleasantness.This could indicate that comprehensibility is a prerequisite for good marks on
pleasantness; judges can not make esthetic judgements without understanding what they
hear. The speakers can, on all the parametres, be grouped into three groups. Two of the
speakers were considered best, two of them worst and the rest in between.
6. The third group that tried to interpret the emotional state of the nine speakers found the
task difficult. These data are not analysed in detail yet, but strong voice seems to be
asscoiated with dominance or anger while weak voice is associated with fear or shyness.
These results are in accordance with e.g. Abelin & Allwood (1999).
4. Summary and discussion
Research questions 1 was answered “yes”: Judges do estimate degree of foreign accent
consistently. This is even more interesting considering that the 8 speakers had 7 different
first languages.
2
3
For both reading and teaching.
For both reading and teaching.
Question 2 was answered “yes”: Degree of foreign accent correlates with a number of voice
qualities. Of the global ones it correlates with pitch level and strength of voice but not with
pitch variation.
Question 3 was answered “yes”. Speakers were ranked in almost the same way on the
parametres degree of foreign accent and teacher suitability.
Question 4 was answered “yes”. Degree of foreign accent correlates highly with
comprehensibility.
Question 5 was answered “yes”. Comprehensibility correlates with judgements on
pleasantness. It was suggested that comprehensibility could be a prerequisite for positive
judgements on pleasantness.
Since many of the parametres correlate it seems that judges make global judgements where
more evaluative judgements are based on degree of foreign accent. As shown i Boyd, Abelin,
Dorriots (1999) estimated degree of foreign accent correlates with number of deviation
tokens. That earlier study on five speakers showed that estimated degree of foreign accent is
wrongly generalized to both judgements on lexical richness and grammatical correctness.
Research question 6 does not yet have an answer, but partial analyses show that strong voice
seems to be associated with dominance or anger, while weak voice is associated with fear or
shyness (which is expected according to Abelin & Allwood, 1999). This is also interesting
comparing the voice judgements of the speech pathologists and the estimations of degree of
foreign accent; greater degree is associated with strong voice (typically related to anger,
dominance and disgust) and high pitch. Thus, there might be more to judgements on foreign
accent than perceived number of phonetic deviations.
References
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Johnstone, T., Scherer, K. R. (1999) ’The effects of emotions on voice quality’, in
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