Effect of Foreign Accent on Immediate Serial Recall

This study disentangled factors contributing to impaired memory for foreign-accented words - misperception and disruption of encoding. When native English and Cantonese-accented words were presented auditorily for serial recall (Experiment 1), intrusion errors for accented words were higher across all serial positions (SPs). Participants made more intrusion errors during auditory presentation than visual and auditory presentation, and more errors for accented words than native words. Lengthening the interstimulus intervals in Experiment 2 reduced intrusion, repetition, order, and omission errors in the middle and late SPs during accented word recall, suggesting that extra time is required for identification and encoding of accented words into memory. Analyses of the intrusions showed that a majority of them were misperceptions and sounded similar to the stimulus words. These findings suggest that effortful perceptual processing of accented speech can induce perceptual difficulty and interfere with downstream memory processes by exhausting the shared pool of working memory.