Individual differences in the perception of nonnative speech

Abstract

As a mentor, Diane Kewley-Port was attentive to each student’s needs and took a highly hands-on, individualized approach. In many of her collaborative research endeavors, she has also taken a fine-grained approach toward both discovering individual differences in speech perception and production as well as explaining the causes and consequences of this range of variation. I will present research investigating several cognitive-linguistic factors that may contribute to individual differences in the perception of nonnative speech. Recognizing words from nonnative talkers can be particularly difficult when combined with environmental degradation (e.g., background noise) or listener limitations (e.g., child listener). Under these conditions, the range of performance across listeners is substantially wider than observed under more optimal conditions. My work has investigated these issues in monolingual and bilingual adults and children. Results have indicated that age, receptive vocabulary, and phonological awareness are predictive of nonnative word recognition. Factors supporting native word recognition, such as phonological memory, were less strongly associated with nonnative word recognition. Together, these results suggest that the ability to accurately perceive nonnative speech may rely, at least partially, on different underlying cognitive-linguistic abilities than those recruited for native word recognition. [Work supported by NIH-R21DC010027.]