Familiarity with a foreign accent aids perceptual accent adaptation

Abstract

A change in speaker accent is reported to temporarily slow speech processing (Bradlow and Bent, 2003; Clarke and Garrett. 2004). Recent work suggests that this delay may be an artifact of task expectations and reflects a surprise effect, not the time needed for accent adaptation (Floccia et al., 2009). The present study tested listeners with high and low exposure to Spanish- and Korean-accented English to determine if frequent exposure to these accents decreases the surprise effect in an experimental setting. Participants listened to four blocks of meaningful sentences and responded to probe words; they heard a native-accented speaker in the first block and either native-, Spanish- or Korean-accented speakers in blocks 2 and 3. Results thus far show that the change from native-accented to foreign-accented speaker (block 1 to block 2) elicited a processing delay for participants in the Korean-accented condition, but not in the Spanish-accented condition. This pattern remained, but was somewhat attenuated, in the change from block 2 to block 3, when voice but not accent changed. These results show that extensive experience with a particular foreign accent (Spanish) outside the lab results in a smaller processing cost when listening to accented speech in the lab.