Identification of Russian accented Finnish by native and non-native listeners with and without Finnish proficiency

The study focuses on how different groups of listeners, that is native Finnish speakers (n = 18), non-native learners of Finnish (n = 12) and non-native non-learners of Finnish (n = 18), judge samples (n = 80) of Russian accented Finnish in an auditory experiment. The samples are read-aloud phrases of three Finnish speakers and three L1 Russian beginner learners of Finnish who were recorded three times at six-month intervals during their residence in Finland. The results show that the listener groups differ significantly from each other in the ability to identify the Russian accented samples. In addition, all the listener groups reported to have paid more attention to prosodic and segmental cues than speech rate. Finally, we conclude by considering implications of the study to further longitudinal studies on perception of foreign accented speech.