Individual differences in perception of prosody in Mandarin-accented speech are linked to pitch perception, melody memory, musical training, and neural encoding of sound

There are large differences across individuals in the ability to perceive foreign-accented speech, and the sources of this variability are poorly understood. Here we tested the hypothesis that individual differences in auditory processing help drive variability in accented speech perception. We asked L1 English speakers to perceive prosodic features in Mandarin-accented English. Individuals who could precisely discriminate pitch and accurately remember melodic sequences, and who placed more emphasis on pitch information during prosodic categorization, were better able to perceive Mandarin-accented speech. Individuals with more musical training also demonstrated enhanced Mandarin-accented speech perception. Finally, we found that better Mandarin-accented speech perception was linked to more robust neural encoding of speech harmonics. These findings suggest that the precision of sound perception and robustness of memory for sound sequences are major factors driving variability in accented speech perception, and so auditory training could potentially help remediate poor perception of accented speech.