Accent familiarity and adverse listening conditions

Abstract

Our ability to understand spoken language depends on both the speaker and listening environment. Speech intelligibility is higher in more favorable listening environments. Accent familiarity also plays a major role, with familiar accents being more intelligible than unfamiliar accents. Previous research [S. Gittleman and K. J. Van Engen, “Effects of noise and talker intelligibility on judgments of accentedness,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 143(5), 3138–3145 (2018)] found a significant relationship between the level of noise and perceived “foreignness” of an accent for Mandarin-accented English and locally accented English speakers. Their results show that when participants listened to Mandarin-accented speakers they rated them as less accented in lower signal-to-noise ratios (SNR). However, when participants listened to local English speakers, they rated the speakers as more accented in lower SNRs. The current study replicates these procedures using locally accented English (n = 5) and Hawaiian Pidgin English (n = 5). In a within-listener design, listeners complete an intelligibility task and an accentedness rating task. In the accent rating task, listeners are presented with sentences in four conditions: clear, + 4 db SNR, 0 db SNR, and −4 db SNR. These results will contribute to our understanding of familiarity in speech processing.