The effects of acoustic-prosodic features of Hong Kong ESL learners on perceptual judgement by listeners from different language backgrounds

This study investigated the contributions of 17 aspects of English phonological features in Chinese speakers to listeners’ perceptions, and compared native and non-native English listeners’ assessments of the Chinese accented speech. Authentic speech data of 20 Hong Kong (HK) learners of English and 10 native speakers of English (NS) from the UK were acoustically analysed. 40 listeners with four first language background groups rated the speech samples. The results show that wrong pronunciation of vowels was found to have negative correlation with acceptability, and consonant deletion in final position has negative correlation with comprehensibility. Pro-portion of prominent words was negatively correlated with accentedness. Mean length of silent pauses was negatively correlated with comprehensibility, foreign accentedness, likability, familiarity, and overall rhythm. The rating scores given by the South Asian group was the lowest, and the NS group the second lowest; there was no statistically significant difference between HK and mainland groups.