The role of unfamiliar accents in competing speech

A listeners' ability to comprehend one speaker against a background of other speech-a phenomenon dubbed the cocktail party problem-varies according to the properties of the speech streams and the listener. Although a number of factors that contribute to a listener's ability to successfully segregate two simultaneous speech signals have been identified, comparably little work has focused on the role accents may play in this process. To this end, familiar Canadian-accented voices and unfamiliar British-accented voices were used in a competing talker task. Native speakers of Canadian English heard two different talkers simultaneously read sentences in the form of "[command] [colour] [preposition] [letter] [number] [adverb]" (e.g., "Lay blue at C4 now") and reported the coordinate from a target talker. Results indicate that on all but the most challenging trials, listeners did best when attending to an unfamiliar-accented target against a familiarly-accented masker and performed worse when forced to ignore the unfamiliar accent. These results suggest listeners can easily tune out a familiar accent, but are unable to do the same with an unfamiliar accent, indicating that unfamiliar accents are more effective maskers.