Discriminating between pathological and foreign-accented speech: an acoustic-perceptual study on Italian

This study investigates native Italian listeners’ability to discriminate pathological from foreign-accented speech, comparing the read performance in Italian of Italian and Ukrainian deaf talkers with those produced by hearing Japanese and Ukrainian L2 speakers. Seventeen native Italian listeners rated the speech samples for ‘accentedness’, ‘comprehensibility’ and ‘speech type’. The comparison between perceptive and acoustic data shows the difficulties of listeners to distinguish between native and non-native deaf speech. The mixed prosodic profile of the Japanese speaker and the great number of segmental misarticulations lead listeners to rate her speech similarly to those of deaf speakers, namely as ‘pathological’ and ‘scarcely comprehensible’. Conversely, the Vowel Space Area and the consonantal misarticulations type differentiate her from the deaf speakers, and are probably responsible for the judgement concerning her ‘non-nativity’ to the Italian language.