Vowel acoustics in imitation

Abstract

One’s accent is one of the hardest aspects to perfect in a second language. Some people seem to be better at imitating than other people. What is it that makes an imitation a good imitation? This research looked at the acoustic cues ‘vowel duration’ and ‘formant frequency’ (measured by Euclidean distance) to look at the differences between the baseline production of the words ‘disco’ and ‘dubbel’ of native Dutch speakers and the imitation of the same words spoken by a Greek-accented model speaker. The task of the participants was to imitate this production to the best of their abilities. The goal of this research was to get more insight into imitation and to answer the following research question: ‘’Did the native Dutch speakers imitate the accent of the Greek target speaker in the words ‘dubbel’ and ‘disco’ and were the two words equally imitated?