Native Language Identification by English Stop VOT of Chinese, French and English Speakers

The present study examines the effect of the stop consonants’ Voice Onset Time (VOT) on the speaker identification of accented English with Chinese accent, French accent and American native English. The measurement of the degree of intelligibility unfolds by the production and perception experiments; in production experiment, three male adult speakers with different linguistic backgrounds (Chinese, French and American English) are singled out to record the experimental materials containing six stop consonants as targets, and phonetic analysis were conducted. In perception experiment, 30 listeners from three linguistic backgrounds (Chinese, French and American English) are asked to identify the speakers’ native linguistic backgrounds based on the sound features they hear. Results indicate that accented English does play a special role on speaker identification. Specifically, listeners score highest when listening to the speakers from same linguistic backgrounds; in addition, two stop consonants /p/ and /g/ are the most special cue for speaker identification.