Foreign accent strength and listener familiarity with an accent codetermine speed of perceptual adaptation

Abstract

We investigated how the strength of a foreign accent and varying types of experience with foreignaccented speech influence the recognition of accented words. In Experiment 1, native Dutch listeners with limited or extensive prior experience with German-accented Dutch completed a cross-modal priming experiment with strongly, medium, and weakly accented words. Participants with limited experience were primed by the medium and weakly accented words, but not by the strongly accented words. Participants with extensive experience were primed by all accent types. In Experiments 2 and 3, Dutch listeners with limited experience listened to a short story before doing the cross-modal priming task. In Experiment 2, the story was spoken by the priming task speaker and either contained strongly accented words or did not. Strongly accented exposure led to immediate priming by novel strongly accented words, while exposure to the speaker without strongly accented tokens led to priming only in the experiment's second half. In Experiment 3, listeners listened to the story with strongly accented words spoken by a different Germanaccented speaker. Listeners were primed by the strongly accented words, but again only in the experiment's second half. Together, these results show that adaptation to foreignaccented speech is rapid but depends on accent strength and on listener familiarity with those strongly accented words.

Treack or trit: Adaptation to genuine and arbitrary foreign accents by monolingual and bilingual listeners

“…In addition, the nonnative Dutch listener data suggest that experience with foreign-accented speech in one language (i.e., Italian-accented Dutch) can lead to benefits in recognizing accented words in another language (Italian-accented English). Long-term prior experience with accented speech thus establishes a phonetic-to-lexical mapping that can be applied not only to new speakers of that accent (as previously shown by Witteman et al, 2013) but also to speakers of similar accents in other languages. Third, long-term experience with multiple languages (and probably also with multiple accents) plays another role in determining the flexibility of listeners' responses to foreign-accented speech.…”

“…If the arbitrariness of a mispronunciation matters to listeners, then they should fail to recognize forms in foreign-accented speech which are arbitrary in the accent they are listening to (e.g., an Italian shortening the stressed vowel in eatery to Itary) but may succeed if the forms are a genuine feature of that accent (e.g., an Italian lengthening the stressed vowel in Italy to Eataly). Indeed, for genuine variant forms, Witteman, Weber, and McQueen (2013) have recently shown that listeners can recognize genuine variants forms when listeners are familiar with the accent or when accent strength is moderate (see also Weber, Broersma, & Aoyagi, 2011). In order to investigate the role of genuineness further, we compared the recognition of foreign-accented words with genuine accent markers with that of foreign-accented words with arbitrary accent markers.…”

Listening to accented speech in a second language: First language and age of acquisition effects.

“…Given evidence for rapid adjustment to non-standard pronunciations in priming tasks (Witteman, Weber, & McQueen, 2013), we examined whether the patterns of priming changed over time. An analysis comparing the priming effects created by accented primes in the first half of the experiment was not different from the corresponding priming in the second half.…”

Perceived foreign accentedness: Acoustic distances and lexical properties

“…Here, we demonstrated the same with Chinese-accented English words, showing that the distances of both F1 and F2 values from typical native productions positively correlate with the strength of perceived accentedness. Also, as was suggested by Witteman et al (2013), deviations in vowel quality appear to be a driving force in the perception of foreign accentedness. On the basis of the ΔAIC results, it appears that the interaction between the log F1 and log F2 distances is quite important in the assessment of foreign accentedness.…”

“…A number of studies have shown that accentedness ratings (for various L1-L2 combinations) can be predicted by many of the acoustic variables discussed above (Munro, 1993;Porretta & Tucker, 2012;Wayland, 1997). Witteman, Weber, and McQueen (2013) stated that vowels drive differences in perceived accentedness because they can vary significantly from standard forms, and Munro (1993) showed this for L1 Arabic productions of English vowels. In that study, five native English-speaking listeners (all linguists) rated the accentedness of vowel productions from native Arabic speakers.…”