Investigating whether ease of lexical processing affects listeners’ ratings of the strength of talkers’ foreign accent.

Abstract

Many research studies in spoken word recognition have examined the role that different types of surface variability have on listeners’ perception of spoken words (e.g., influence of same versus different talker manipulations). In our ongoing research program, we are investigating the other direction of this relationship. Our initial two experiments investigated whether linguistic complexity affects listeners’ overt subjective impressions of the strength of talkers’ foreign accents. Ease of lexical processing was manipulated in two ways, namely, sentence context and long-term repetition priming. In the sentence context experiment, participants made accent ratings on the last word of each sentence presented to them; this word was either related or unrelated to the sentence context. In the long-term repetition priming experiment, participants made their accent ratings to isolated spoken words, which they either had (primed) or had not (unprimed) heard earlier in the experiment. Stronger accent ratings in the unrelated sentence context and unprimed conditions were predicted. Response time to provide their accent rating responses to sentence context and priming manipulations was also studied. Our results should lead to a greater understanding of the role that lexical processing plays in listeners’ perception of foreign accents and perhaps other types of surface variability.