Unfamiliar Accent Research Articles

Exploring effects of brief daily exposure to unfamiliar accent on listening performance and cognitive load

IntroductionListeners rapidly “tune” to unfamiliar accented speech, and some evidence also suggests that they may improve over multiple days of exposure. The present study aimed to measure accommodation of unfamiliar second language- (L2-) accented speech over a consecutive 5-day period using both a measure of listening performance (speech recognition accuracy) and a measure of cognitive load (a dual-task paradigm).MethodsAll subjects completed a dual-task paradigm with L1 and L2 accent on Days 1 and 5, and were given brief exposure to either L1 (control group) or unfamiliar L2 (training groups) accent on Days 2–4. One training group was exposed to the L2 accent via a standard speech transcription task while the other was exposed to the L2 accent via a transcription task that included implicit feedback (i.e., showing the correct answer after each trial).ResultsAlthough overall improvement in listening performance and reduction in cognitive load were observed from Days 1 to 5, our results indicated neither a larger benefit for the L2 accent training groups compared to the control group nor a difference based on the implicit feedback manipulation.DiscussionWe conclude that the L2 accent trainings implemented in the present study did not successfully promote long-term learning benefits of a statistically meaningful magnitude, presenting our findings as a methodologically informative starting point for future research on this topic.

Variable effects of speakers’ visual cues and accent on L2 listening comprehension: A mixed-methods approach

Few studies have explored the influence of a speaker’s accent and visual (facial and gestural) cues on second-language (L2) listening comprehension. The current mixed-methods between-groups design investigated: (1) the effects of accent and visual cues on Arab students’ comprehension of recorded lectures delivered by two speakers: first language (L1) American English and second language (L2) English (strong Vietnamese accent), (2) students’ assessments of the comprehensibility and English nativelikeness of the accents, and (3) students’ perceptions of and preferences for visual cues in communication. A total of 120 Arab university students were distributed across three stimulus conditions: auditory-visual (AV)-gesture-face, AV-face, and A-only within two accent conditions (L1, L2 English). Materials included: a listening comprehension task, 9-point rating scales for comprehensibility and nativelikeness of accent, and a speaker’s accent and visual cues (SAVC) questionnaire. ANCOVAs were conducted on listening comprehension scores and the ratings, with students’ listening proficiency as the covariate. Students with higher listening proficiency received higher comprehension scores and tended to recognize the L1 English accent as nativelike; however, proficiency was not significantly related to their comprehensibility ratings of either accent. The L1 English speaker’s gestures were associated with higher comprehensibility ratings; the L2 English speaker’s gestures were associated with a stronger nonnativelike accent, which students found frustrating to comprehend. Although SAVC responses revealed a general preference for facial cues and gestures in daily communication, the L2 English speaker’s gestures in the study were not considered helpful. Thematic analysis of interviews emphasized: (1) the variable effectiveness of visual cues, (2) the important role of topic and accent familiarity, (3) the relationship between listening proficiency and interlocutor/instructor preference, and (4) strategies to deal with unfamiliar accents. Pedagogical implications include increased awareness of variability in visual cues across speakers and the need to build familiarity with various accents and gesture patterns.

Preschoolers benefit from sentential context in familiar- and unfamiliar-accented speech.

To learn the meaning of a new word, or to recognize the meaning of a known one, both children and adults benefit from surrounding words, or the sentential context. Most of the evidence from children is based on their accuracy and efficiency when listening to speech in their familiar native accent: they successfully use the words they know to identify other words' referents. Here, we assess how accurately and efficiently 4-year-old children use sentential context to identify referents of known and novel nouns in unfamiliar-accented speech, as compared to familiar-accented speech. In a looking-while-listening task, children showed considerable success in processing unfamiliar-accented speech. Children robustly mapped known nouns produced in an unfamiliar accent to their target referents rather than novel competitors, and they used informative surrounding verbs (e.g., "You can eat the dax") to identify the referents of both known and novel nouns-although there was a processing cost for unfamiliar-accented speech in some cases. This demonstrates that 4-year-olds successfully and rapidly process unfamiliar-accented speech by recruiting the same strategies available to them in familiar-accented speech, revealing impressive flexibility in word recognition and word learning across diverse linguistic environments. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: We examined 4-year-old children's accuracy and processing efficiency in comprehending known and novel nouns embedded in sentences produced in familiar-accented or unfamiliar-accented speech. Children showed limited processing costs for unfamiliar-accented speech and mapped known words to their referents even when these were produced in unfamiliar-accented speech. Children used known verbs to predict the referents of upcoming nouns in both familiar- and unfamiliar-accented speech, but processing costs were evident for unfamiliar-accented speech. Thus, the strategies that support children's word comprehension and word learning in familiar-accented speech are available to them in unfamiliar accents as well.

Influence of Talker and Accent Variability on Rapid Adaptation and Generalization to Non-Native Accented Speech in Younger and Older Adults

ABSTRACT Listeners can rapidly adapt to English speech produced by non-native speakers of English with unfamiliar accents. Prior work has shown that the type and number of talkers contained within a stimulus set may impact rate and magnitude of learning, as well as any generalization of learning. However, findings across the literature have been inconsistent, with relatively little study of these effects in populations of older listeners. In this study, adaptation and generalization to unfamiliar talkers with familiar and unfamiliar accents are studied in younger normal-hearing adults and older adults with and without hearing loss. Rate and magnitude of adaptation are modeled using both generalized linear mixed-effects regression and generalized additive mixed-effects modeling. Rate and magnitude of adaptation were not impacted by increasing the number of talkers and/or varying the consistency of non-native English accents across talkers. Increasing the number of talkers did strengthen generalization of learning for a talker with a familiar non-native accent, but not for an unfamiliar accent. Aging alone did not diminish adaptation or generalization. These findings support prior evidence of a limited benefit for talker variability in facilitating generalization of learning for non-native accented speech, and extend the findings to older adults.

The role of gradient speech categorization in accent perception

A key question in speech perception research is how listeners categorize highly varied signals into discrete units. The long-held assumption was that listeners discard variation and focus on the category itself (categorical perception, Liberman et al., 1957). However, listeners often encounter highly varied speech signals (e.g., processing unfamiliar accents). In such cases, discarding variation can be detrimental for listeners and can lead to more processing difficulty. Here, in an ongoing online study (n = 80), we measure English-speaking adult listeners’ speech categorization patterns with a continuous measure (the Visual Analogue Scaling Task: Kutlu et al., 2022; Apfelbaum et al., 2022) to see whether they are more susceptible to phonetic variation in their language environments. We index adults’ language exposure with an extensive social network survey which quantifies the extent to which they are exposed to varied accents on a regular basis and what those accents are. We then asked participants to recognize spoken sentences from a diverse set of unfamiliar accents. We predict that adults who are more gradient in their speech categorization are more accurate in transcribing sentences with a diverse set of accents.

Intelligibility of British and American English in different listening conditions

Communication specialists frequently hear complaints from patients that unfamiliar accents are more difficult to understand, particularly in background noise. Previous work (Schilaty et al., 2021) has indeed shown that when presenting American listeners with both American and British accents, intelligibility in noise is poorer for the unfamiliar accent across age and hearing status. However, Schilaty et al. (2021) examined relatively easy sentence materials (Basic English Lexicon [BEL] sentences; Calandruccio & Smiljanic, 2012) in only one type of noise. The current study expands on previous work by comparing the intelligibility of American and British accents for a more difficult sentence set (Harvard sentences; Rothauser et al., 1969) in young adult American listeners across two noise types (speech-shaped noise and 12-talker babble). Stimuli consisted of 180 Harvard sentences produced by two male talkers: one with an American (Northwestern) dialect and one with a Southern British dialect. Young adult listeners with normal hearing transcribed the sentences in quiet, in speech-shaped noise at −3 dB SNR, and in 12-talker babble at −3 dB SNR. Listeners also completed a dialect familiarity questionnaire. The results will shed additional light on the interactions between talker and listener dialect, dialect familiarity, and background noise type.

Perceptual adaptation to unfamiliar dialects in an eye-tracking task

Variation in pronunciation of vowels across American English dialects often creates the strongest distinctions between dialects and leads to lexical ambiguity between minimal pairs within dialects. This lexical ambiguity is stronger for listeners with lifetime exposure to multiple dialects than to a single dialect. In the current study, we investigated the influence of brief, in- lab dialect exposure on lexical competition and perceptual adaptation. Midwestern American English participants were first presented with a familiarization short story told in one of two unfamiliar dialects (Southern American English or a novel accent) and then completed a visual-world eye-tracking task containing both acoustically ambiguous and non-ambiguous words from each dialect in a forced-choice task. The results showed evidence of greater lexical competition for target dialect minimal pairs following familiarization. This pattern of results is consistent with previous work suggesting greater lexical competition following lifetime exposure to dialect variation among geographically mobile listeners, suggesting similarities in the effects of brief in-lab and lifetime exposure to dialect variation on lexical competition and processing.

The effect of talker intelligibility on adaptation to an unfamiliar accent

Listening effort, as indexed by task-evoked pupil response, increases as the intelligibility of second language (L2) speech decreases, and this processing cost is mitigated by experience with talkers of the same accent (Porretta and Tucker, 2019). Prior research has shown that listeners can adapt to unfamiliar L2-accented speech and generalize the adaptation to different L2-accented talkers with the same L1 (Bradlow and Bent, 2008). The current study investigates what type of L2-accented speech exposure (high or low intelligibility) best reduces later listening effort to a novel talker of the same accent. We hypothesize that exposure to highly intelligible L2 speech supports adaptation to the features of an accent because it allows listeners to map accented tokens to the talker’s intended lexical representations. Alternatively, adaptation to a less intelligible talker may require exposure to other low-intelligibility speech, which is characterized by features that deviate more significantly from L1 norms. To test this, participants were exposed to simple sentences spoken in English by either L1 talkers, highly intelligible L2 talkers, or less intelligible L2 talkers. At test, all participants listened to different sentences spoken by a previously unheard L2 talker while listening effort was measured via pupillometry. Data collection is ongoing.

The Accent Atlas: Effects of long-term exposure to nonnative accents on adaptive speech perception

As mobility increases and virtual interactions grow, quickly adapting to diverse accents is essential for effective communication. While lab-based accent training promotes rapid adaptation to unfamiliar accents, whether prolonged environmental exposure to linguistic diversity yields similar benefits is unknown. We conducted a large-scale perceptual experiment involving 600 + participants across 15 U.S. states, utilizing a cross-modal word matching task to measure speech recognition in both non-native accented English and native English with background noise. Participants were recruited from linguistically diverse (LD) or linguistically homogeneous (LH) states. Linguistic diversity was defined based on the prevalence of non-English speaking residents (U.S. census data). Our findings were twofold: firstly, consistent with prior studies, only exposure to non-native accented speech—but not exposure to speech in noise—improved recognition of novel talkers with the same accent; secondly, individuals from the LD states outperformed those from LH areas in initial accented speech perception. However, by the end of the experiment, benefits from in-lab accent exposure did not differ significantly between the two groups, suggesting that short-term training could mitigate long-term environmental influences. These results illuminate the interplay between daily linguistic environments and accent adaptation, enhancing our understanding of speech perception's adaptivity in a multilingual context.

Perceptual adaptation to unfamiliar dialect variation

Regional varieties of a language often differ in the phonetic realization of shared phonological categories, resulting in perceptual ambiguity. In perceptual tasks, listeners with more exposure to regional dialect variation perform differently than listeners with less exposure, reflecting underlying differences in lexical competition. In this study, we examined perceptual adaptation to one authentic dialect of American English and one novel dialect to test for adaptation to unfamiliar variation. Our materials contained contrasts that are perceptually ambiguous in Southern American English and in the novel dialect we created, in which linguistically trained bilinguals substituted English /ow/ with Spanish /o/. Participants heard a familiarization passage spoken in a Southern or Novel dialect and then completed an auditory lexical decision task. Adaptation was assessed by differences in accuracy and response times for each vowel contrast, talker dialect, and familiarization dialect. Results revealed lower accuracy and slower response times for both target contrasts when pronounced in their respective dialects. These effects reflect the difficulty in processing perceptually ambiguous stimuli. Familiarization dialect had no effect on accuracy or response times; future analyses will include quantification of listener regional dialect exposure to better assess its influence on processing novel variation.

The Effectiveness of Hybrid Learning in English Pronunciation Pedagogy in the Nigerian ESL Context

This paper is a study on the effectiveness of hybrid learning; a blend of traditional and technology-based training, vis-à-vis the second language (L2) learner of English pronunciation. Specifically, our motivation is centred on the functionality of combining the habitual classroom teaching style with the Telegram app (a mobile-based technological tool) for studies relating to speech production and perception. The methodical procedure and design for this study is both quantitative and descriptive; employing the use of a multiple-choice questionnaire in data collection from 401 Nigerian undergraduate and postgraduate students in the University of Benin, Nigeria, to ascertain the effectiveness of digital designs and stratagems. Pie charts are employed to display multiple divisions of the study's data comparison. This study emphasizes the Online-Driver Blended Learning Model; such a pedagogical approach exposes the L2 learner to a more involved and effective way of understanding how to avoid imposing an unfamiliar accent upon the target language. Consequently, we see a merger of online practical exercises and exposure to uploaded multimodal texts and native speakers' spoken data (audio-visual recordings/voice notes) with scheduled direct classroom interludes. Findings confirm that exploiting such a hybrid model enhances students' cognitive abilities and retentive capacity regarding English pronunciation. Such digital audio-visual tools are paramount phonetic strategies for learning how to avoid unacceptable phonetic alterations. Thus, we see the effectiveness of integrating the Telegram app into the traditional brick-and-mortar educational method in handling problems associated with speech sound production and second-language phonological interference.

From first encounters to longitudinal exposure: a repeated exposure-test paradigm for monitoring speech adaptation.

Perceptual difficulty with an unfamiliar accent can dissipate within short time scales (e.g., within minutes), reflecting rapid adaptation effects. At the same time, long-term familiarity with an accent is also known to yield stable perceptual benefits. However, whether the long-term effects reflect sustained, cumulative progression from shorter-term adaptation remains unknown. To fill this gap, we developed a web-based, repeated exposure-test paradigm. In this paradigm, short test blocks alternate with exposure blocks, and this exposure-test sequence is repeated multiple times. This design allows for the testing of adaptive speech perception both (a) within the first moments of encountering an unfamiliar accent and (b) over longer time scales such as days and weeks. In addition, we used a Bayesian ideal observer approach to select natural speech stimuli that increase the statistical power to detect adaptation. The current report presents results from a first application of this paradigm, investigating changes in the recognition accuracy of Mandarin-accented speech by native English listeners over five sessions spanning 3 weeks. We found that the recognition of an accent feature (a syllable-final /d/, as in feed, sounding/t/-like) improved steadily over the three-week period. Unexpectedly, however, the improvement was seen with or without exposure to the accent. We discuss possible reasons for this result and implications for conducting future longitudinal studies with repeated exposure and testing.

Individual Differences in Accent Imitation.

All talkers show some flexibility in their speech, and the ability to imitate an unfamiliar accent is a skill that shows vast individual differences. Yet the source of these individual differences, in particular whether they originate from perceptual, motor, or social/personality factors, is not yet clear. In the current study, we ask how individual differences in these factors predict individual differences in deliberate accent imitation. Participants imitated three accents, and attempts were rated for accuracy. A set of measures tracking individual differences in perceptual, motor, cognitive, personality, and demographic factors were also acquired. Imitation ability was related to differences in musical perception, vocal articulation, and the personality characteristic of "openness to experience," and was affected by attitudes towards the imitated talkers. Taken together, results suggest that deliberate accent imitation skill is modulated not only by core perceptual and motor skills, but also by personality and affinity to the talker, suggesting that some aspects of deliberate imitation are a function of domain-general constraints on perceptual-motor systems, while others may be modulated by social context.

Children's listening effort for L2-accented speech

Speech perception is a complex task that can become challenging in certain conditions, such as listening to speech in unfamiliar accents. Using task-evoked pupillary response (TEPR) and dual-task procedures, prior research has shown that adults recruit additional cognitive resources when processing fully intelligible L2-accented speech compared to speech in their own L1 accent (McLaughlin and Van Engen, 2020; Brown et al., 2020). In the current study, we used pupillometry to investigate this effect in children (n = 35, ages 5;0 – 8;11) and ask whether prosodic variation can explain any differences in listening effort. Using Growth Curve Analysis, we found that unlike adults, children do not appear to recruit extra cognitive resources to process intelligible L2-accented speech. Like adults, however, pupillary response declined more rapidly for L2-accented speech across the experiment than for L1-accented speech, indicating either rapid adaptation or fatigue. Additionally, we identified three prosodic measures (relative word duration, pitch stability, and pitch range) that were related to speech adaptation/fatigue for both accent conditions, but in opposite directions. Although children do not appear to upregulate listening effort for L2-accented speech like adults, they appear to use prosodic cues differently for L1- versus L2- accented speech as they adapt to speech.

Identifying linguistic contributions to variable speech perception in Spanish/English bilingual children and adults using the ascending target-to-masker ratio method

When people encounter variable speech, like an unfamiliar accent, they map new productions to existing word forms. This skill appears to develop through adolescence for monolingual children, with school-age children perceiving unfamiliar accented speech less accurately than adults. For monolingual children, vocabulary size and phonemic awareness predict performance. Less is known about which factors account for individual differences in variable speech perception in multilingual school-age children. The goals of this study were to (a) assess group differences in variable speech perception in Spanish/English bilingual and English monolingual children and adults, (b) validate the ascending target-to-masker (TMR) method for assessing speech reception thresholds (SRTs) for foreign accented speech, and (c) identify linguistic skills that account for individual differences in performance. Participants completed speech perception and language testing. SRTs in speech-shaped noise were measured for Midland-, Spanish-, and Korean-accented English; these accents ranged from familiar to unfamiliar across participants. In each accent condition, one list of Bamford-Kowal-Bench test sentences was presented, with each sentence presented at multiple TMRs. Preliminary data suggest differences in how bilingual and monolingual groups perceive variable speech in noise. While linguistic skills accounted for individual differences in performance, different patterns emerged in children and adults.

ENGLISH ORAL PROFICIENCY AND TOURISM ENTREPRENEURSHIP: IDENTIFYING AND OVERCOMING CHALLENGES

In this millennium era, the English language proficiency of tourism entrepreneurs must be looked into and improved. This is due to the tourism industry’s tremendous growth that requires mastery of the English language, as English is now widely acknowledged as the worldwide language of communication. In addition, due to the scope of their work that needs to interact with international tourists, it is essential for them to be able to communicate in the English Language. This study aims to discover the challenges faced by them and their way of having to learn, master the English language and overcome these challenges. This study will follow a qualitative approach where the researchers engaged in semi-structured interviews as preliminary data, interviewing two tourism entrepreneurs located in various parts of the tourist island of Langkawi. Thematic analysis was employed to interpret the collected data and generate appropriate themes and sub-themes for the study. The findings illustrated that tourism entrepreneurs operating on Langkawi Island encountered various obstacles with their English-speaking skills. These challenges included difficulties in understanding unfamiliar accents and the necessity for additional resources to effectively communicate with international tourists. The entrepreneurs expressed their desire for support in enhancing their English language proficiency. The data also revealed that these individuals overcame their difficulties by actively engaging in regular interactions with international tourists and making use of mobile applications to improve their ability to speak English.

Revealing perceptual structure through input variation: cross-accent categorization of vowels in five accents of English

This paper characterizes the perceptual structure of vowel systems in five regional accents of English, from Australia (A), New Zealand (Z), London (L), Yorkshire (Y), and Newcastle upon Tyne (N), on the basis of “whole system” vowel categorization experiments. We established patterns of within-accent vowel confusions, and then explored cross-accent perception, assessing how listeners from one accent background categorize vowels from another. Our experimental task required mapping continuous phonetic dimensions to perceptual categories in the absence of phonotactic and lexical cues to vowel identity and socio-indexical information about the talker. Our results show that, without these sources of information, there is uncertainty in vowel categorization, even for native accent vowels, and that this degree of uncertainty increases for unfamiliar accents. The patterns of cross-accent perception largely reflect the accent-specific perceptual structure of the listener, as opposed to adaptations to the stimulus accents. This finding contrasts with the type of active talker adaptation found with tasks offering lexical information about vowel identity and indexical information about the talker.

Short-term retention of learning after rapid adaptation to native and non-native speecha).

Non-native, accented speech spoken by unfamiliar talkers can be challenging to recognize, but rapid improvements in perception are often observed after a short period of exposure. However, it is not clear whether these improvements are retained over multiple sessions. Stimulus variability facilitates learning for non-native speech, so it is possible it may also induce increased retention of learning for speech produced with an unfamiliar accent. In this paper, we conduct a retrospective analysis of a dataset well suited to examine learning of non-native English speech on both a within-session and across-session basis. During data collection, participants completed a protocol involving recognition of matrix sentences recorded by native and non-native talkers with different first languages. Listeners completed the protocol in a self-paced approach, including 15 blocks of 50 trials over 4-7 days, separated by an average of 1-2 days. Learning was strongest within the first day, and improvements were retained at subsequent test sessions. The pace of learning was faster for stimuli produced by native speakers of English as compared to non-native English speakers.

Examining linguistic and experimenter biases through “non-native” versus “native” speech

AbstractThere is a consensus in psycholinguistic research that listening to unfamiliar speech constitutes a challenging listening situation. In this commentary, we explore the problems with the construct ofnon-nativeand ask whether using this construct in research is useful, specifically to shift the communicative burden from the language learner to the perceiver, who often occupies a position of power. We examine what factors affect perception of non-native talkers. We frame this question by addressing the observation that not all “difficult” listening conditions provide equal challenges. Given this, we ask how cognitive and social factors impact perception of unfamiliar accents and ask what our psycholinguistic measurements are capturing. We close by making recommendations for future work. We propose that the issue is less with the terminology ofnativeversusnon-native, but rather how our unexamined biases affect the methodological assumptions that we make. We propose that we can use the existing dichotomy to create research programs that focus on teaching perceivers to better understand talkers more generally. Finally, we call on perceivers and researchers alike to question the idea of speech being “native,” “non-native,” “unfamiliar,” and “accented” to better align with reality as opposed to our inherently biased views.

Speech intelligibility and listening effort: A dual-task paradigm for accented speech perception

Unfamiliar accents can make speech communication difficult, both by reducing speech intelligibility and by increasing the effort listeners must put forth to understand speech. In general, intelligibility refers to the proportion of words that a listener can correctly identify (100%, 50%, etc.), while listening effort refers to the cognitive resources that must be devoted to a difficult listening task. Generally, lower intelligibility is related to higher effort. However, it is now apparent that these two constructs, while related, are independent: for example, two 100% intelligible speakers may elicit different amounts of effort. To better characterize the relationship between intelligibility and effort, this study presents speakers of four intelligibility levels (one L1 English speaker, and three Mandarin-accented English speakers) within a dual-task paradigm (featuring a vibrotactile secondary task) to measure listening effort. We hypothesize an inverse relationship between intelligibility and effort, but the shape and slope of this relationship are of primary interest. These results will begin to illuminate the relationship between intelligibility and effort across a more continuous range of accent intelligibility. Data collection is ongoing. Results for the Mandarin Chinese accent will be presented. Preliminary results for the study’s second iteration (using a Korean accent) will also be presented.