Orthographic information facilitates discrimination of native and foreign-accented speech

Abstract

Previous research on the perception of foreign-accented speech has demonstrated that providing orthographic transcriptions of auditory stimulus words influences accentedness ratings of the talker. Specifically, foreign-accented talkers are rated as having less accented speech in favorable listening conditions when orthographic information is present. Cochlear implant users show poor identification and discrimination of foreign-accented speech relative to listeners with normal hearing. In the current study, we examined whether orthographic information facilitates the discrimination of native and foreign-accented (non-native) speech under cochlear-implant simulation. Participants were presented with native or foreign-accented sentences through an eight-channel noise vocoder with or without matching text. They were asked to determine whether the sentence was spoken by a native or non-native talker. We hypothesized that the presence of matching text would increase identification accuracy and decrease reaction time. Consistent with our predictions, participants more accurately and more quickly identified whether sentences were spoken by a non-native talker in the presence of matching text compared to performance in conditions with no text. These results suggest that the presence of orthographic information may facilitate indexical, non-linguistic perception under cochlear-implant simulation. Future work will determine whether these results may extend to cochlear implant users.