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Updated: Jul 15, 2026

Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody
Published on: September 27, 2024
The perception of phonemic contrasts in a non-native dialect
Sophie Dufour1, Noël Nguyen, Ulrich Hans Frauenfelder
1Laboratoire de Psycholinguistique Expérimentale, University of Geneva, Switzerland. Sophie.Dufour@pse.unige.ch
Abstract:
This study examined the impact on speech processing of regional phonetic/phonological variation in the listener's native language. The perception of the /e/-/epsilon/ and /o/-/upside down c/ contrasts, produced by standard but not southern French native speakers, was investigated in these two populations. A repetition priming experiment showed that the latter but not the former perceived words such as /epe/ and /epepsilon/ as homophones. In contrast, both groups perceived the two words of /o/-/upside down c/ minimal pairs (/pom/-/p(uspide down c)m/) as being distinct. Thus, standard-French words can be perceived differently depending on the listener's regional accent.
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