Skip to main content

Web Content Display Web Content Display

News

Join us next Thursday

We're happy to host prof. Janet Van Hell whose talk is scheduled for June 27th.

Understanding accented speech: the role of speaker identity and listener experience

a talk by
Janet G. van Hell
Department of Psychology and Center for Language Science
Pennsylvania State University

Thursday, June 27th, 2 PM, room 2.15

Current everyday communication is a cultural and linguistic melting pot. There are hundreds of millions of speakers of English as a second language in the world, so we are likely to encounter speakers who have a foreign accent when speaking English. We are also likely to interact with people from different ethnic backgrounds, who may or may not have a foreign accent. Research has shown that foreign-accented speech can challenge language comprehension. Although behavioral studies suggest that listeners adapt quickly to foreign-accented speech, neurocognitive studies have shown distinct neural mechanisms in processing foreign-accented relative to native-accented sentences. I will present a series of recent behavioral and EEG/ERP experiments in which we examined how speaker identity and listener experience affect the comprehension of foreign-accented and native-accented sentences. More specifically, we studied how faces cuing the speaker’s ethnicity (e.g., Asian face) create language expectations (here, Chinese-accented English), and how these biases impact the neural and cognitive mechanisms associated with the comprehension of American- and Chinese-accented English sentences. We also examined how listeners’ experience with foreign-accented speech modulates accented-speech comprehension by testing different groups of listeners (young and older adult monolinguals with little experience with foreign-accented speech, listeners immersed in foreign-accented speech, and bilingual (foreign-accented) listeners). Implications of the findings will be discussed by integrating neuropsychological theories of language comprehension with linguistic theories on the role of socio-indexical cues and linguistic stereotyping.