Faces with foreign accents: An event-related potential study of accented sentence comprehension

Grey, Sarah; Cosgrove, Abigail L.; Hell, Janet G. van

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2020.107575

Cited by 8 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…Recall that the speakers recorded both correct and incorrect versions of the sentences in real time. In line with similar past ERP research (Gosselin et al, 2021;Grey et al, 2019Grey et al, , 2020Xu et al, 2020;Caffarra & Martin, 2019;Grey & van Hell, 2017;Hanulíková et al, 2012), incorrect critical determiner phrases were not cross-spliced onto grammatically correct sentences to prioritize naturalistic, co-articulated speech. To ensure that the speakers had not unconsciously introduced prosodic "markers" of an upcoming error in the stimulus (e.g., differences in speech rate, pitch, pauses), each sentence was trimmed immediately before the target noun and presented to 30 additional native speakers of Spanish (M age = 23.8 years, SD = 4.7, 20 women, 10 men).…”

Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 79%

“…In other words, in the English accent, L1 listeners only repaired atypical grammatical errors. These findings point toward the idea that native listeners' expectations about accented speech modulate their underlying processing of this input (see also Grey, Cosgrove, & van Hell, 2020;Fairchild & Papafragou, 2018;Bosker, Quené, Sanders, & De Jong, 2014); L1 listeners may adapt their syntactic processing according to their expectations and overlook typical errors. Though it is not clear whether this capability is functionally advantageous or detrimental (see the Discussion section), such results demonstrate that error typicality is a dimension that must be considered in research focusing on the syntactic interlanguage speech benefit.…”

Section: Syntactic Processingmentioning

confidence: 67%

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

Gosselin

Martin

Martín³

et al. 2022

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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In our continuously globalizing world, cross-cultural and cross-linguistic communications are far from exceptional. A wealth of research has indicated that the processing of nonnative-accented speech can be challenging for native listeners, both at the level of phonology (e.g., Munro & Derwing, 1995) and syntax (Caffarra & Martin, 2019). However, few online studies have examined the underpinnings of accented speech recognition from the perspective of the “nonnative listener,” even though behavioral studies indicate that accented input may be easier to process for such individuals (i.e., the interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit; Bent & Bradlow, 2003). The current EEG study first examined the phonological and syntactic analysis of nonnative-accented speech among nonnative listeners. As such, 30 English learners of Spanish listened to syntactically correct and incorrect Spanish sentences produced in native and nonnative-accented Spanish. The violation in the incorrect sentences was caused by errors that are typical (i.e., gender errors; *la color) or atypical for English learners of Spanish (i.e., number errors; *los color). Results indicated that nonnative listeners elicit a phonological mismatch negativity (PMN) when attending to speech produced by a native Spanish speaker. Furthermore, the nonnative listeners showed a P600 for all grammatical violations, indicating that they repair all errors regardless of their typicality or the accent in which they are produced. Follow-up analyses compared our novel data to the data of native listeners from the methodologically identical precursor study (Caffarra & Martin, 2019). These analyses showed that native and nonnative listeners exhibit directionally opposite PMN effects; whereas natives exhibited a larger PMN for English-accented Spanish, nonnatives displayed a larger PMN in response to native Spanish utterances (a classic interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit). An additional difference was observed at the syntactic level: Whereas natives repaired only atypical number errors when they were English-accented, nonnative participants exhibited a P600 in response to all English-accented syntactic errors, regardless of their typicality (a syntactic interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit). Altogether, these results suggest that accented speech is not inherently difficult to process; in fact, nonnatives may benefit from the presence of a nonnative accent. Thus, our data provide some of the first electrophysiological evidence supporting the existence of the classic interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit and its novel syntactic counterpart.

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Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 79%

Section: Syntactic Processingmentioning

confidence: 67%

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

Gosselin

Martin

Martín³

et al. 2022

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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“…Prior EEG studies on spoken sentence processing have demonstrated that neural correlates of speech processing are modulated by stereotype‐dependent inferences about the speaker, individuated by voice (van Berkum et al, 2008) or by accent (Goslin et al., 2012; Grey & van Hell, 2017; Hanulíková et al., 2012; Romero‐Rivas et al., 2015; Xu et al., 2019). More recent studies using faces to pre‐cue speaker identity before each sentence found that seeing the speaker’s face seems to help shaping linguistic expectations associated with the speaker identity in a proactive way (Grey et al., 2020; Hernández‐Gutiérrez et al., 2021). In studies using sentences produced by speakers with differential individual‐specific communicative styles, newly learnt speaker‐specific characteristics in language use were found to shape listeners’ syntactic expectations about particular sentence structures (e.g., Kroczek & Gunter, 2017 using auditory sentence presentation) or to elicit differential neural responses (e.g., P600 effects in ERPs after ironic expressions in a reading paradigm in Regel et al., 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Face‐to‐face communication is natural in daily life, and listeners normally can tell who is going to speak next based on facial expression or body language. Recent studies have shown that associating and cueing speaker identity with a portrait may modulate P600 effects after syntactic violations (Grey et al., 2020) or N400 effects after semantic violations (Hernández‐Gutiérrez et al., 2021). Portraits before sentence presentation seem to help shaping linguistic expectations associated with the speaker identity in a proactive way.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who speaks next? Adaptations to speaker identity in processing spoken sentences

Rahman

Sommer

2021

Psychophysiology

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“…The neural correlates of integrated visual and linguistic processing have also been documented with event-related potentials (ERP). For instance, Grey et al ( 2020 ) found that the P600 component, which indexes grammatical processing, was modulated depending on the race of the face cue, whereas the N400, which indexes semantic processing, was not modulated (see also Hanulíková and colleagues work on L1 and L2 speech: Hanulíková et al, 2012 ; Grey & van Hell, 2017 ). All these findings suggest that faces as well as racial information affect listeners’ judgments of the presented speech (see also Yi et al, 2014 ; Banks et al, 2015 ; Kutlu, 2020 ; Kutlu et al, 2021 ).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Does race impact speech perception? An account of accented speech in two different multilingual locales

et al. 2022

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Upon hearing someone’s speech, a listener can access information such as the speaker’s age, gender identity, socioeconomic status, and their linguistic background. However, an open question is whether living in different locales modulates how listeners use these factors to assess speakers’ speech. Here, an audio-visual test was used to measure whether listeners’ accentedness judgments and intelligibility (i.e., speech perception) can be modulated depending on racial information in faces that they see. American, British, and Indian English were used as three different English varieties of speech. These speech samples were presented with either a white female face or a South Asian female face. Two experiments were completed in two locales: Gainesville, Florida (USA) and Montreal, Quebec (Canada). Overall, Montreal listeners were more accurate in their transcription of sentences (i.e., intelligibility) compared to Gainesville listeners. Moreover, Gainesville listeners’ ability to transcribe the same spoken sentences decreased for all varieties when listening to speech paired with South Asian faces. However, seeing a white or a South Asian face did not impact speech intelligibility for the same spoken sentences for Montreal listeners. Finally, listeners’ accentedness judgments increased for American English and Indian English when the visual information changed from a white face to a South Asian face in Gainesville, but not in Montreal. These findings suggest that visual cues for race impact speech perception to a greater degree in locales with greater ecological diversity.

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Faces with foreign accents: An event-related potential study of accented sentence comprehension

Cited by 8 publications

References 46 publications

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

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

Who speaks next? Adaptations to speaker identity in processing spoken sentences

Does race impact speech perception? An account of accented speech in two different multilingual locales

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