Exposure to nonnative-accented speech reduces listening effort and improves social judgments of the speaker.

Prior research has revealed a native-accent advantage, whereby nonnative-accented speech is more difficult to process than native-accented speech. Nonnative-accented speakers also experience more negative social judgments. In the current study, we asked three questions. First, does exposure to nonnative-accented speech increase speech intelligibility or decrease listening effort, thereby narrowing the native-accent advantage? Second, does lower intelligibility or higher listening effort contribute to listeners' negative social judgments of speakers? Third and finally, does increased intelligibility or decreased listening effort with exposure to speech bring about more positive social judgments of speakers? To address these questions, normal-hearing adults listened to a block of English sentences with a native accent and a block with nonnative accent. We found that once participants were accustomed to the task, intelligibility was greater for nonnative-accented speech and increased similarly with exposure for both accents. However, listening effort decreased only for nonnative-accented speech, soon reaching the level of native-accented speech. In addition, lower intelligibility and higher listening effort was associated with lower ratings of speaker warmth, speaker competence, and willingness to interact with the speaker. Finally, competence ratings increased over time to a similar extent for both accents, with this relationship fully mediated by intelligibility and listening effort. These results offer insight into how listeners process and judge unfamiliar speakers.

Rovetti J ，Sumantry D ，Russo FA 《Scientific Reports》

Listening Effort by Native and Nonnative Listeners Due to Noise, Reverberation, and Talker Foreign Accent During English Speech Perception.

Peng ZE ，Wang LM 《-》

Rapid adaptation to fully intelligible nonnative-accented speech reduces listening effort.

Brown VA ，McLaughlin DJ ，Strand JF ，Van Engen KJ ... -  《-》

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

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. 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. 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 (i.e., number errors; *los color) for English learners of Spanish. 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. 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.

Gosselin L ，Martin CD ，González Martín A ，Caffarra S ... -  《-》

Effects of noise and talker intelligibility on judgments of accentedness.

Gittleman S ，Van Engen KJ 《-》