Context effects on accentedness ratings

Abstract

Intelligibility and accentedness are largely independent judgments (Derwing & Munro, 1995); a speaker rated as highly accented can be quite intelligible. The context of listeners’ exposure to accented speakers has been shown to affect adaptation to speakers in terms of intelligibility (e.g., Tzeng et al., 2016), suggesting that implicit comparison between examples facilitates learning of systematic properties of accented speech. However, it is unknown whether context affects accentedness ratings, which are often assumed to be stable properties of speakers. To better understand the susceptibility of accent ratings to context effects, the present study examines listeners’ accentedness judgments of native and non-native speech taken from the ALLSSTAR Corpus (Bradlow et al., 2010). A target set of the same accented speech samples was embedded in a variety of task contexts, varying whether the stimuli were randomized among speakers or blocked by speaker, or presented at the beginning or end of the experiment. ...