Perception advantages of foreign directed speech

Abstract

Foreign directed speech (FDS) is a listener directed speech style used when native speakers interact with non-native listeners of a language. This study considers if native and non-native listeners benefit from the phonetic features of FDS in English. 43 native English speakers and non-native speakers were recruited on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Participants were presented with an audio clip and two pictures. They were asked to click on the correct image based on the audio given with reaction times recorded. Each participant was given a randomized order of speech tokens: 12 tokens from the two speech conditions, native speech (NS) and FDS. The data showed that speech condition had a significant effect on reaction time, where FDS yielded faster reaction times than native speech (est = −0.024, t = 2.035, p = 0.04). Listener language background did not have a significant effect, with both groups performing similarly in reaction times across both speech conditions. The results of this study show that the phonetic features of FDS are beneficial for comprehension when compared to native speech regardless of listener language background. This may be because the phonetic features of FDS are similar to the characteristics of other listener directed speech styles.