Although unfamiliar accents can pose word identification challenges for children and adults, few studies have directly compared perception of multiple nonnative and regional accents or quantified how the extent of deviation from the ambient accent impacts word identification accuracy across development. To address these gaps, 5- to 7-year-old children's and adults' word identification accuracy with native (Midland American, British, Scottish), nonnative (German-, Mandarin-, Japanese-accented English) and bilingual (Hindi-English) varieties (one talker per accent) was tested in quiet and noise. Talkers' pronunciation distance from the ambient dialect was quantified at the phoneme level using a Levenshtein algorithm adaptation. Whereas performance was worse on all non-ambient dialects than the ambient one, there were only interactions between talker and age (child vs adult or across age for the children) for a subset of talkers, which did not fall along the native/nonnative divide. Levenshtein distances significantly predicted word recognition accuracy for adults and children in both listening environments with similar impacts in quiet. In noise, children had more difficulty overcoming pronunciations that substantially deviated from ambient dialect norms than adults. Future work should continue investigating how pronunciation distance impacts word recognition accuracy by incorporating distance metrics at other levels of analysis (e.g., phonetic, suprasegmental).
Hesitation phenomena in natural speech (e.g., pauses, word repetitions, or phrase repairs) vary as a function of speaker characteristics, with non-native speakers typically hesitating more than native speakers (Gilquin, 2008). Here, we examine whether hesitations can also reflect listeners’ mental effort required to comprehend native and non-native speech. We asked native English listeners to retell stories told by either a native or a non-native speaker and analyzed their hesitations using a 6-category taxonomy: filler vocalizations, filler words, filler nonspeech, self-monitoring, uptalk, and point of view switching. These story-retell behavioral data were obtained after recording their brain responses during listening to the stories using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and speaker-listener interbrain synchrony technique (hyperscanning). We found a higher hesitation rate for retelling of stories produced by a non-native (11.2%) than a native speaker (7.6%), with significant increase in hesitation frequency for the former. The hesitations corroborated brain responses: Listeners had greater difficulty processing discourse in non-native English and the recruitment of additional executive resources delayed comprehension and memory processes. The analysis of hesitations is a promising approach in measuring speaker-listener communicative effort because hesitations increase as uncertainty of interpretation increases, suggesting greater demands on working memory during lexical and semantic operations.
Evidence from the neuroscience of verbal communication shows that when two people share information (one speaks and the other listens) their brain activities work in synchrony (Silbert et al., 2014). This brain-to-brain synchrony (B-Bsync) is lost when the listener fails to understand the speaker's message. We test the hypothesis that B-Bsync predicts the level of effort involved in auditory processing: strong neural brain-to-brain coupling reflects relatively effortless processing; conversely, the weaker the coupling, the greater the effort, and the worse the processing and comprehension. We propose that B-Bsync affords a more sensitive assessment of listening effort than currently available on the basis of behavioral measures. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and fNIRS-based hyperscanning approach, we analyze patterns of neural activity separately in the speaker and in the listener, and assess statistically the correspondence in their brain activation (the degree of synchronized activation of cortical sites and temporal symmetry). We examine the effects of degraded source (i.e., accented American English in speakers telling several short stories) on B-Bsync, predicting the strongest coupling and the shortest time delay when the accent of the listener matches that of the speaker, followed by regional dialect mismatch and foreign-accent mismatch, respectively.
Previous research in sociophonetics examining consonantal variation in American English has uncovered systematic regional differences in the production of voiced stop closures in intersonorant positions, suggesting that social factors can be the source of variation in the phonetic realization of voiced stops. The current study focuses on school-age children to establish both the developmental stability of voiced stops in late childhood and the impact of regional variation on the amount of voicing in stop closures. Based on the literature showing that the mastery of lexical stress contrastivity continues into adolescence, we hypothesized that systematic variation in the amount of stop closure voicing is commensurate with the development of stress control; this relationship is further mediated by regional variation documented in the speech of adults. Sentence productions from 48 girls in the age range 8–13 years representing three regional varieties spoken in Central Ohio, Western North Carolina, and Southeastern Wisconsin were analyzed in a set of temporal variables. Preliminary analyses show moderate correlations between child's age and the variables of interest. Over the course of the development, the relationship between stress contrastivity and the corresponding extent of stop closure voicing is also influenced by regional variation.
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