Global measures of foreign accent in L2 European Portuguese

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We conducted three pilot studies that serve not only for the current experiment, but also for the upcoming:

• In the first pilot study, native European Portuguese speakers rated the uterances on the degree of target-likeness: target-like (TL) vs. NTL (non-target-like) on a slider scale from 0 to 100, where 0 was no foreign accent and 100 — very strong foreign accent , and the manner of production, where 0 was the person seems to read and 100 — the person seems to speak spontaneously (approx. 15 minutes)

• In the second pilot study, the same participants rated a list of profession according to their prestige (5 min)

• In the third and last pilot study, the participants rated a series of utterances on their similarity, in pairs (45 min), on a slider scale from 0 to 100, where 0 was not similar and 100 — very similar

At the end, they were asked to fill in a brief sociolinguistic questionnaire.

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In this study, two experienced linguists — native monolingual speakers of European Portuguese — rated the utterances on the goodness of prosody (in pairs), on a Likert scale from 1 to 9, where 1 was no foreign accent and 9 — very strong foreign accent. They also coded the utterances for grammatical and phonemic errors.

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Piloting the main study for accentedness, comprehensibility, and intelligibility.

The raters were asked to transcribe the utterance in a special field for intelligibility and rate on a 100-point slider scale for comprehensibility and accentedness, in this order.

For comprehensibility: 0 — very difficult to understand; 100 — very easy to understand

For accentedness: 0 — no foreign accent; 100 — very strong foreign accent

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Final rating study.

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