Vene aktsent eesti keeles: akustilise analüüsi tulemusi
Russian accent in Estonian: some results of acoustic analysis

Summary/Abstract: The present study investigates Russian accent in Estonian. It is assumed that when native speakers can perceptually recognize non-native accent, it also should manifest itself in several acoustic features. The primary goal of the study is to find quantitative characteristics of different phenomena of Russian accent in Estonian. The basic premises of the study are the following: · most of foreign accent phenomena detected by perceptual analysis can be measured using different methods of acoustic analysis; · comparative analysis of acoustical data from both native and non-native speech in the context of phonological systems of speaker's native and target languages forms the basis for explanation of various accent phenomena. For the acoustic analysis a speech corpus including isolated words and short sentences representing different vowels, diphthongs, consonants, consonant clusters, syllable structures and quantity degrees has been recorded by two groups of speakers. L2-group involved 14 Russian speakers, mostly students of Estonian as L2 (12 female, 2 male) and in L1-group two native speakers of Estonian (1 female, 1 male) were involved. The acoustic features measured in the study were: · duration of different segments – stressed and unstressed vowels, diphthongs, consonants; · duration ratios of stressed and unstressed syllables; · formant frequencies of stressed and unstressed vowels; · formant trajectories of diphthongs; · correlates of word stress – F0 peaks and intensities of stressed and unstressed syllables; · duration and voicing of stop consonants. The values of acoustic features measured from accented speech were compared to those of native speech. The main results of the study are: · Russian accent in Estonian exhibits itself in a combination of different acoustic features the most relevant of which are the deviations in (1) temporal structure, (2) stress correlates, and (3) quality of sounds; · the roots of foreign accent lay in the differences of phonological systems of Estonian and Russian; · most of the accent phenomena investigated in the study can be explained by the transfer of L1 patterns to production of Estonian.

• Details
• Contents