Recognition of foreign-accented words in isolation

Abstract

Foreign-accented speech presents a challenge for native speakers of a given language. When presented with foreign-accented speech, native speakers tend to rely heavily on context and other lexical cues. When processing isolated spoken words, participants do not have access to contextual cues and have to rely solely on acoustic cues. Thus, processing accented spoken words in isolation might be a bigger challenge. We tested the hypothesis that identification accuracies by native speakers of American English of two foreign-accented speakers with different accent strengths will not differ in isolated spoken word recognition task. Ten native speakers of American English rated the accent of a Chinese-accented (heavy accent) and a Korean-accented (moderate accent) speakers after hearing a small passage read by both speakers. Different set of native speakers of American English heard a list of isolated words spoken by both speakers and had to type what they had heard. Overall, participants did not differ in their accuracy in the identification task even though the speakers differed in the strength of their accent, while there was no significant difference in participants rating of the strength of the speakers’ accents. Implication of the results on the processing of foreign-accented speech will be discussed.