When A Nonnative Accent Lets You Spot All the Errors: Examining the Syntactic Interlanguage Benefit

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Neuroscience of Language
• Second Language Acquisition

Background:

• Cross-cultural and cross-linguistic communication is common globally.
• Processing nonnative-accented speech is often challenging for native listeners.
• Limited research explores accented speech recognition from the nonnative listener's perspective, despite evidence of easier processing (interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit).

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the phonological and syntactic processing of nonnative-accented speech in nonnative listeners using electroencephalography (EEG).
• To examine if nonnative listeners exhibit the interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit.
• To compare nonnative listeners' processing of native and nonnative-accented speech, including typical and atypical grammatical errors.

Main Methods:

• EEG study with 30 English learners of Spanish.
• Participants listened to syntactically correct and incorrect Spanish sentences (gender and number errors) in native and nonnative-accented Spanish.
• Analysis of event-related potentials (ERPs), specifically phonological mismatch negativity (PMN) and P600, compared to a precursor study with native listeners.

Main Results:

• Nonnative listeners showed a phonological mismatch negativity (PMN) for native Spanish speech.
• A P600 was observed for all grammatical violations in nonnative listeners, indicating error repair regardless of error type or accent.
• Native and nonnative listeners displayed opposite PMN effects: natives showed larger PMN for accented speech, while nonnatives showed larger PMN for native speech.
• Nonnative listeners exhibited a syntactic P600 for all accented syntactic errors, unlike native listeners who only repaired atypical errors in accented speech.

Conclusions:

• Accented speech is not inherently difficult to process; nonnative listeners may benefit from nonnative accents.
• Electrophysiological evidence supports the interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for both phonological and syntactic processing in nonnative listeners.
• Nonnative listeners demonstrate a broader sensitivity to syntactic errors when processing accented speech.