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Abstract
This paper presents three experiments exploring the perception and production of accents in song. In a perception experiment, participants listened to passages sung and spoken by native and non-native speakers of English. The participants did better at identifying native speakers when listening to the spoken passages. Accents were also judged as more native-like in song than in speech. In addition, two production experiments compared the acoustic characteristics (pitch, duration, F1 and F2) of sung and spoken vowels, produced by native and non-native speakers of English. Both native and non-native speakers changed the pitch and duration of their vowels when singing; the vowel quality was not consistently shifted. Together, the results indicate that the melody imposed by the song impacts the suprasegmental properties of pronunciation whereas the segmental properties remain largely intact. Based on these results, we conclude that a main reason why accents are more difficult to detect in song than in speech is that the rhythm and melody imposed by the song mask intonational cues to accent.
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References
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- 1
We did not select these particular speakers for any specific reasons, we simply recorded the participants who volunteered.
- 2
The speakers/singers listened to the accompaniment in headphones as their song was recorded, so it was easy to include or exclude the channel with the accompaniment.
- 3
We aggregated data for all analyses except pitch range (see section 3.2.2).
- 4
The fact that the Wilcoxon statistics are identical here is explained by the fact that all values on one list (the values from the song condition) were higher than the paired values on the other list (from the speech condition).
- 5
All participants of the previous studies were guaranteed anonymity, and we did not have their contact details. We therefore could not approach the speakers/singers of studies 1 and 2 for this study.
- 6
Note that no half-notes were included in study 2. They were automatically excluded as a result of the two specific vowels that were investigated.
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