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Can a Prosodic Pattern Induce/Reduce the Perception of a Lower-class Suburban Accent in French?

Previous sociophonetic work suggested that an atypical prosodic pattern, namely a word-final sharp pitch fall, could characterise the French vernacular of youth living in working-class suburbs (the so-called “suburban accent”). A question we investigate in this study is whether the presence/absence of these prosodic patterns increases/decreases the perception of the suburban accent. Using prosody modification and re-synthesis, perceptual experiments were conducted. Results involving listeners from two French regions are rather robust. They show that utterances with (respectively without) high-low pitch falls are perceived as presenting a higher (resp. lower) degree of accentedness.