Limitations on adaptation to foreign accents

Abstract

Although foreign accents can be highly dissimilar to native speech, existing research suggests that listeners readily adapt to foreign accents after minimal exposure. However, listeners often report difficulty understanding non-native accents, and the time-course and specificity of adaptation remain unclear. Across five experiments, we examined whether listeners could use a newly learned feature of a foreign accent to eliminate lexical competitors during online speech perception. Participants heard the speech of a native English speaker and a native speaker of Québec French who, in English, pronounces /i/ as [i] (e.g., weak as wick) before all consonants except voiced fricatives. We examined whether listeners could learn to eliminate a shifted /i/-competitor (e.g., weak) when interpreting the accented talker produce an unshifted word (e.g., wheeze). In four experiments, adaptation was strikingly limited, though improvement across the course of the experiment and with stimulus variations indicates learning was possible. In a fifth experiment, adaptation was not improved when a native English talker produced the critical vowel shift, demonstrating that the limitation is not simply due to the fact the accented talker was non-native. These findings suggest that although listeners can arrive at the correct interpretation of a foreign accent, this process can pose significant difficulty.

Accent Intelligibility Differences in Noise Across Native and Nonnative Accents: Effects of Talker–Listener Pairing at Acoustic–Phonetic and Lexical Levels

“…Socio-linguistic factors may also influence processing; listeners are more tolerant of variation and errors in non-native than native speech (Hanulíková et al, 2012;Schmid & Yeni-Komshian, 1999) and process it in less detail (Lev-Ari & Keysar, 2012). Word recognition can also be delayed if listeners are less confident of correctly identifying the input (McQueen & Huettig, 2012;Trude, Tremblay & Brown-Schmidt, 2013), possibly to avoid incorrectly recognising words and then needing to apply costly repair processes. Factors such as these may then modulate listeners' expectations about accented speech in addition to accent intelligibility and so influence the N400.…”

The influence of neighborhood density on the recognition of Spanish-accented words.

“…The visual world eye-tracking paradigm used by Trade et al (2013) is an online measure that tracks the listener's eye fixations to both the target and the competitors. It examines the time course of the lexical retrieval process during foreign-accented word recognition.…”

Relative Difficulty of Understanding Foreign Accents as a Marker of Proficiency

“…Such deviations make foreign-accented speech (henceforth, accented speech) more difficult to cope with than native speech. That is, despite listeners' abilities to adapt to accented speakers (e.g., Clarke & Garrett, 2004; although see Floccia, Butler, Goslin, & Ellis, 2009;Trude, Tremblay, & Brown-Schmidt, 2013 for counterexamples), accented speech is typically less intelligible and harder to understand than native speech (Munro & Derwing, 1995;van Wijngaarden, 2001). For non-native speakers, language processing is harder to begin with, at all linguistic levels.…”