>>>Early on, after perhaps just a few months there, I asked a coworker do I have much of an accent. He said "no, no accent at all... it's that you make breaks at weird places in a sentence". That happens when I search for the best word to use, because very often the first word which comes to mind is ambiguous, so it takes some time to find the best substitute (first I wanted to write "replacement" but that could be taken as replacement part for something that was broken, so, next...).
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>>Many years ago I read a book about foreign accents. One thing I remember (which is more than I remember from many other books :)) is that the intonation (and another thing which I don't remember) makes us recognize a person not native to the language.
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>And detonation helps recognize explosives among other substances :).

The book, I mentioned above, had a very good example. You are standing some 20 or more feet away from a couple or some people who speak among themselves. You cannot hear a singe word distinctly but only the sound of the conversation. 99% of the time you can tell that people speak Polish, English, Spanish, German, Chinese, Russian etc. simple by the intonation of their language. Even though you may or may not speak or understand that language. I have experienced this situation many times.