Sentence Context Facilitation for Children's and Adults' Recognition of Native- and Nonnative-Accented Speech

Abstract

Supportive semantic and syntactic information can increase children's and adults' word recognition accuracy in adverse listening conditions. However, there are inconsistent findings regarding how a talker's accent or dialect modulates these context effects. Here, we compare children's and adults' abilities to capitalize on sentence context to overcome misleading acousticphonetic cues in nonnative-accented speech. Method: Monolingual American English speaking 5-to 7-year-old children (n = 90) and 18-to 35-year-old adults (n = 30) were presented with full sentences or the excised final word from each of the sentences and repeated what they heard. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: native-accented (Midland American English) or nonnative-accented (Spanishand Japanese-accented English) speech. Participants also completed the NIH Toolbox Picture Vocabulary Test. Results: Children and adults benefited from sentence context for both native-and nonnativeaccent talkers, but the benefit was greater for nonnative than native talkers. Furthermore, adults showed greater context benefit than children for nonnative talkers, but the two age groups showed similar benefit for native talkers. Children's age and vocabulary scores both correlated with context benefit. Conclusions: The cognitive-linguistic development that occurs between the early school age years and adulthood may increase listeners' abilities to capitalize on top-down cues for lexical identification with nonnative-accented speech. These results have implications for the perception of speech with source degradation, including speech-sound disorders, hearing loss, or signal processing that does not faithfully represent the original signal.

Co-text, context, and listening proficiency as crucial variables in intelligibility among nonnative users of English

“…The importance of co-textual and contextual information for linguistic comprehension is generally acknowledged by researchers: It is well established that both L1 and L2 listening are cognitively interactive processes in which listeners combine information from the acoustic signal with information from linguistic co-text and extralinguistic context (e.g., Field 2004Field , 2008Goh & Vandergrift, 2021; see also Kennedy, 2021). This has repeatedly been demonstrated regarding intelligibility to L1 listeners in publications on speech science, psycholinguistics, or speech pathology (e.g., Bent et al, 2019;Garcia & Cannito, 1996;Kamide et al, 2003) and regarding L2 listening comprehension more generally (e.g., Macaro et al, 2005). However, research on co-textual and contextual effects has been comparatively scarce concerning intelligibility to L2 listeners, notably L2 listeners in lingua franca (LF) listening situations-that is, when listening to another nonnative accent.…”

“…Studies have shown that listeners draw on lexical knowledge—for example word frequency knowledge or knowledge of the phonological “neighborhood” of a word (Bradlow & Pisoni, 1999; Luce & Pisoni, 1998)—and on aspects of the visual context, such as gestures (Garcia & Cannito, 1996) or referent availability (Tanenhaus et al, 1995), to identify spoken words. Additionally, numerous studies have provided evidence for the use of sentence co-text in SWR, with syntactic, semantic, and collocational constraints aiding listeners in recognizing words (Baese-Berk et al, 2021; Behrman & Akhund, 2013; Bent et al, 2019; Hilpert, 2008; Kennedy & Trofimovich, 2008). Sentence co-text has also been found to facilitate SWR by triggering certain schematic expectations that make listeners anticipate the intended word (Kamide et al, 2003).…”

“…The research discussed above was concerned with co(n)textual effects on SWR in L1 listeners, often under adverse listening conditions such as when listening to dysarthric speech (e.g., Garcia & Cannito, 1996) or L2-accented speech (Baese-Berk et al, 2021; Behrman & Akhund, 2013; Bent et al 2019; Kennedy & Trofimovich, 2008). Such research concerning L2 listeners is much harder to find, although other factors associated with intelligibility to nonnative listeners are well studied, such as the effect of various talker–listener pairings.…”

Social priming: Exploring the effects of speaker race and ethnicity on perception of second language accents

“…Listeners often have more difficulty understanding L2-accented speech than L1-accented speech (though this depends on speaker fluency; Munro & Derwing, 1995), and individual listener differences in cognitive ability, such as working memory capacity (McLaughlin, Baese-Berk, Bent, Borrie, & Van Engen, 2018) and vocabulary knowledge (Banks, Gowen, Munro, & Adank, 2015;Bent, Holt, Miller, & Libersky, 2019;McLaughlin et al, 2018), account for some variation among listeners. Additionally, while it may be cognitively demanding to process an L2 accent initially , listeners can rapidly adapt to unfamiliar L2accented speech (Clarke & Garrett, 2004;Bradlow & Bent, 2008), thereby reducing the cognitive demands of speech processing (Brown, McLaughlin, Strand, & Van Engen, 2020).…”