Classification of foreign accents

Abstract

Regional dialects and foreign accents account for a significant source of between-talker variability. The auditory free classification task—in which listeners freely group talkers based on audio samples—has been a useful tool for examining listeners' cognitive representations of regional dialects (e.g., Clopper and Pisoni, 2007) and was employed here to examine perceptual representation of foreign accents. This task assesses listeners' perception of variation without imposing category structure. In the present study, native listeners completed four free classification tasks in which they grouped 24 talkers from six native language backgrounds by perceived native language. The four tasks varied in overall sentence intelligibility and whether four native talkers were also included, to explore how accent level and presence of native language exemplars influence classification. Categorization performance was less accurate with lower intelligibility sentences, even when sentence content was known, but more accurate when native talkers were included. Thus, listeners attend to phonological features that characterize differences across foreign accents, and are more attentive to these features when accented and native speech can be directly compared. Moreover, perception of lower intelligibility sentences may impose a higher cognitive load, thus restricting the cognitive resources available for classification. [Work supported by NIDCD R21DC010027.]