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

Abstract

When encountering speakers whose accents differ from the listener's own, listeners initially show a processing cost, but that cost can be attenuated after short term exposure. The extent to which processing foreign accents (L2-accents) and within-language accents (L1-accents) is similar is still an open question. This study considers whether listeners' expectations about the source of a speaker's accent—whether the speaker is purported to be an L1 or an L2 speaker—affect intelligibility. Prior work has indirectly manipulated expectations about a speaker's accent through photographs, but the present study primes listeners with a description of the speaker's accent itself. In experiment 1, native English listeners transcribed Spanish-accented English sentences in noise under three different conditions (speaker's accent: monolingual L1 Latinx English, L1-Spanish/L2-English, no information given). Results indicate that, by the end of the experiment, listeners given some information about the accent outperformed listeners given no information, and listeners told the speaker was L1-accented outperformed listeners told to expect L2-accented speech. Findings are interpreted in terms of listeners' expectations about task difficulty, and a follow-up experiment (experiment 2) found that priming listeners to expect that their ability to understand L2-accented speech can improve does in fact improve intelligibility.

Stylistically coherent variants: Cognitive representation of social meaning / Variantes estilisticamente coerentes: representação cognitiva de significados sociais

“…A related study, Kim and Drager (2017), found that being primed with a variant that signals a sound change in progress in Korean (and thus points to the speaker being a certain age) facilitated listeners' lexical access to words congruent with the inferred age of the speaker. This is in line with work that more generally shows that expectations about talkers can affect speech perception (e.g., STRAND;JOHNSON, 1996;SZAKAY;BABEL;KING, 2016;VAUGHN, 2019;HAY, 2011). Many open questions regarding the cognitive representation of covarying features remain, however.…”

“…Further, recent work in perception has suggested that listeners may be aware of the cues that covary within styles (SUMNER et al, 2013;VAUGHN;, and that listeners can attach social meaning to such covariation (e.g., CAMPBELL-KIBLER, 2009, 2011LEVON, 2007LEVON, , 2014PHARAO et al, 2014). Sumner et al (2013) found that a variant's realization (i.e., word-medial /t/ as tapped or released) is processed by listeners with reference to the speaking style in which that variant usually occurs (i.e., casually or carefully).…”

“…The study of social meaning and style is a central focus in sociolinguistics, particularly in the third wave framework, which has seen increased interest in sociolinguistic perception. In this paper, we explore the cognitive representation of social meaning, in line with growing attention to the mental representation of socially meaningful variation (e.g., CAMPBELL-KIBLER, 2012;KIRTLEY, 2016;FOULKES;DOCHERTY, 2006;KLEINSCHMIDT;WEATHERHOLTZ;JAEGER, 2018;HAY et al, 2019;TAMMINGA;MACKENZIE;EMBICK, 2016;NIEDZIELSKI;PRESTON, 2000;SUMNER et al, 2014;VAUGHN;. Specifically, we use a production-based methodology to investigate potential associations in mental representation between variants of multiple sociolinguistic variables that may share congruent social meanings or styles.…”

Do faces speak volumes? Social expectations in speech comprehension and evaluation across three age groups

“…Finally, the study set up allowed an exploration of adaptation to speech. Although no a priori predictions were made regarding changes in sentence-repetition performance in light of perceived ethnicity during the course of the experiment, prior studies suggest improvements after brief exposure to accented speech [ 22 , 50 , 51 ]. Therefore, the statistical analyses for the repetition task included experimental part (first and second) as a fixed effect.…”

Adaptation to Social-Linguistic Associations in Audio-Visual Speech

“…Whether listeners specifically tailor their expectations to a particular accent—that is, adjusting the anticipated phonetic distributions to align with the pronunciation patterns of particular non-native accent (e.g., Mandarin-accented English)—or engage a more global relaxation mechanism is a matter of debate. Like the targeted adaptation to Mandarin-accented English when presented with an image of an Asian talker found in McGowan [ 18 ], Vaughn [ 26 ] found that giving listeners information about the identity of an upcoming L1-Spanish/L2-English talker improved transcription accuracy. These results suggest a targeted adaptation mechanism that improved American English listeners’ ability to parse Mandarin- and Spanish-accented English in those respective studies.…”