15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15) Barcelona, Spain August 3-9, 2003

The Influence of Different Linguistic Units and Unfamiliar Phonemes on Speaker Discrimination in a Foreign Language

Marion Libossek (1), Jacqueline Anthes (2)

(1) University of Munich, Germany
(2) University of Cologne, Germany

A distinct drop occurs in recognition accuracy when listeners no longer have to identify or discriminate speakers in their own tongue but when they are speaking a foreign language. Several possible aspects were already investigated by other researches. In this paper we try to explore whether a) the length of the units to be recognised, ranging from vowels to syllables influence the correct discrimination of four Russian speakers by Germans or if b) Russian sounds unknown in the German language are responsible for the decrease. Whereas the longer units were significantly better discriminated, the unknown sounds seem not to play an important role.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Libossek, Marion / Anthes, Jacqueline (2003): "The influence of different linguistic units and unfamiliar phonemes on speaker discrimination in a foreign language", In ICPhS-15, 699-702.