Listening with an accent: speech perception in a second language by late bilinguals

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Second Language Acquisition
• Phonetics

Background:

• Late bilinguals often exhibit unique language processing patterns.
• Understanding second language (L2) perception of accented speech is crucial for L2 acquisition research.
• Native language phonology can influence L2 speech perception.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how native and non-native Hebrew speakers perceive accented Hebrew speech.
• To explore the role of phonological similarity in L2 word recognition for late bilinguals.
• To compare the perception of native-accented, own-accented, and foreign-accented L2 speech.

Main Methods:

• Utilized the gating paradigm to measure word recognition thresholds.
• Recruited healthy late fluent bilinguals (native Russian and Arabic speakers) and native Hebrew speakers.
• Presented auditory stimuli of Hebrew words spoken with native Hebrew, similar foreign (own L1 influence), and dissimilar foreign (American) accents.

Main Results:

• Native Hebrew speakers showed no significant effect of accent on word recognition.
• Bilingual groups (Russian and Arabic natives) required less phonological information for words with native Hebrew or similar foreign accents.
• Perception of accented L2 speech was influenced by the degree of phonological similarity to the listener's native language.

Conclusions:

• Phonological assimilation processes in L2 perception are consistent across different bilingual groups.
• Listeners' native phonology plays a significant role in processing accented L2 speech.
• The study supports the hypothesis of similar phonological assimilation mechanisms in diverse bilingual populations.