Speech intelligibility across native and non-native accents: Accent similarity and electrophysiological measures of word recognition

Abstract

The intelligibility of accented speech in noise greatly depends on the pairing of speaker and listener, where two important factors are a listener’s familiarity with a speaker’s accent and the acoustic similarity between their accents. In this study, we present patterns of the intelligibility of standard British English, Glaswegian English and Spanish English accents for British and high and low proficiency Spanish listeners. We predict intelligibility will correlate with acoustic-phonetic similarity across accent pairings, in line with previous findings. As such, findings are expected to provide further support that accent similarity can predict patterns of accent intelligibility, even if listeners have little experience of a speaker’s accent. Electrophysiological measures relating to phonological and semantic integration stages of word recognition will also allow the investigation of the influence of accent on the time course of word recognition, which has not previously been directly compared to accent intelligibility or applied in studies of accent processing by non-native listeners. Findings will be discussed in the context of previous exploratory findings in this field, and in reference to other factors influencing accent intelligibility.

Processing of unfamiliar accents in monolingual and bilingual children: effects of type and amount of accent experience

“…A likely reason why foreign accent experience did not improve performance in our study is that the foreign accents children were familiar with and the unfamiliar accent in the experiment were more dissimilar than the regional accents (Pinet et al, 2011;Stringer 2015). Stringer argues that similarity between the accent of a talker and the accent of a listener could be a better predictor of accent intelligibility than familiarity or experience with accented speech.…”