Sins of omission are more likely to be forgiven in non-native speakers

Abstract

Utterances produced by foreign-accented speakers are often judged as less credible, more vague, and more difficult to understand compared to those produced by native speakers. Some theoretical accounts argue that listeners have different expectations about the speech of non-native speakers. Other accounts argue that non-native speech is processed differently to the extent that a foreign accent taxes intelligibility and introduces additional processing load. Here we test the role of expectations for the processing of native vs. non-native speech in written texts where accents cannot be directly perceived (and thus affect processing load). In Experiment 1, native comprehenders gave higher ratings to the meaning of under-informative sentences (“Some people have noses with two nostrils”) when they believed that the sentences were produced by non-native compared to native speakers. This difference was larger the more likely individual participants were to interpret under-informative sentences pragmatically (as opposed to logically). In Experiment 2, the tendency to forgive sins of information omission was shown to depend on the presumed L2 proficiency of non-native speakers. Experiment 3 replicated and extended the major finding. Since intelligibility of the sentences was identical across types of speakers, these findings provide support for the role of expectations for non-native speech comprehension, as well as for broader models of language processing that argue for a role of speaker identity.