Expectations about the source of a speaker's accent affect accent adaptation

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Speech Perception
• Sociolinguistics

Background:

• Listeners experience initial processing costs with unfamiliar accents.
• Accent processing costs can decrease with short-term exposure.
• The similarity in processing foreign (L2) and within-language (L1) accents is not fully understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if listener expectations about a speaker's accent source (L1 vs. L2) influence speech intelligibility.
• To determine if priming listeners with accent information impacts comprehension.
• To explore the role of expectation in processing accented speech.

Main Methods:

• Native English listeners transcribed Spanish-accented English sentences in noise.
• Experiment 1: Compared intelligibility across three conditions: L1-accented, L2-accented, and no information.
• Experiment 2: Primed listeners to expect improvement in L2-accented speech intelligibility.

Main Results:

• Listeners with accent information outperformed those without.
• Listeners expecting L1-accented speech showed better intelligibility than those expecting L2-accented speech.
• Priming listeners to expect improvement in L2-accented speech enhanced intelligibility.

Conclusions:

• Listener expectations about accent source significantly affect speech intelligibility.
• Providing information about accent type can mitigate processing costs.
• Expectations about task difficulty play a role in processing accented speech, and these expectations can be manipulated to improve comprehension.