VOT as a Phonetic Cue of Foreign Accentedness – A Case Study Approach of Five Austrian Students of English

Foreign accentedness in L2 speech has been shown to be a remarkably salient feature. Numerous phonetic studies demonstrated that listeners are highly sensitive to foreign-accented speech in their interlocutors (Derwing/Munro, 2009). Yet it remains to be established which phonetic cues are dominant for perceived foreign accentedness. Studies have brought different outcomes in this regard, ranging from segmental features of consonants and vowels (e.g. Saito/Trofimovich/Isaacs, 2016; Gao/Weinberger, 2018; Labov/Ash/Boberg, 2006) over different prosodic features (e.g. Mareüil/Vieru-Dimulescu, 2006). The current study focuses on the voicing contrast in bilabial and alveolar plosives in the speech of five Austrian students of English, who are investigated in the form of a case study. It will be examined how far the measured VOT values in their L2 English speech deviate from British English VOT values. VOT was measured for the voiceless and voiced bilabial and alveolar plosives /p b t d/. The plosives chosen for analysis were assumed to be especially problematic for Austrian German speakers as voicing is realized differently in English and German. Correlations between VOT and foreign accentedness will be drawn based on the students’ final grades in an English pronunciation class they were all enrolled in at the time of the study. (received