Cues to linguistic origin: The contribution of speech temporal information to foreign accent recognition

•We examine listeners' ability to recognise foreign accents.•Listeners hear noise vocoded speech, 1-bit requantised speech and sasasa-speech.•Stimuli contain different types of temporal characteristics.•Listeners can recognise foreign accents based on primarily time domain information.•As frequency domain information is reduced, accent recognition scores decrease.

Foreign-accented speech typically contains information about speakers' linguistic origin, i.e., their native language. The present study explored the importance of different temporal and rhythmic prosodic characteristics for the recognition of French- and English-accented German. In perception experiments with Swiss German listeners, stimuli for accent recognition contained speech that was reduced artificially to convey temporal and rhythmic prosodic characteristics: (a) amplitude envelope durational information (by noise vocoding), (b) segment durations (by 1-bit requantisation) and (c) durations of voiced and voiceless intervals (by sasasa-delexicalisation). This preserved mainly time domain characteristics and different degrees of rudimentary information from the frequency domain. Results showed that listeners could recognise French- and English-accented German above chance even when their access to segmental and spectral cues was strongly reduced. Different types of temporal cues led to different recognition scores – segment durations were found to be the temporal cue most salient for accent recognition. Signal conditions that contained fewer segmental and spectral cues led to lower accent recognition scores.