Processing Time, Accent, and Comprehensibility in the Perception of Native and Foreign-Accented Speech

TLDR

The study used a sentence verification task to examine how a foreign accent affects sentence processing time. Twenty native English listeners evaluated true/false statements spoken by ten native English and ten native Mandarin speakers, rating truth and providing accent and comprehensibility judgments. Mandarin‑accented utterances took longer to evaluate, especially when rated as less comprehensible, but accent intensity itself did not predict processing time.

Abstract

In this study, a sentence verification task was used to determine the effect of a foreign accent on sentence processing time. Twenty native English listeners heard a set of English true/false statements uttered by ten native speakers of English and ten native speakers of Mandarin. The listeners assessed the truth value of the statements, and assigned accent and comprehensibility ratings. Response latency data indicated that the Mandarin-accented utterances required more time to evaluate than the utterances of the native English speakers. Furthermore, utterances that were assigned low comprehensibility ratings tended to take longer to process than moderately or highly comprehensible utterances. However, there was no evidence that degree of accent was related to processing time. The results are discussed in terms of the “costs” of speaking with a foreign accent, and the relevance of such factors as accent and comprehensibility to second language teaching.