Brain networks involved in accented speech processing

Age Effects in Processing Bilinguals’ Accented Speech

Older adults often complain about difficulty understanding distorted speech, such as synthetic voices on telephones, answering-machine messages that are “too-fast”, and movies with actors speaking dialects of English different from their own. Younger adults (college-students) have been reported to complain about difficulties understanding teaching assistants with “foreign” accented speech (e.g....

1 THE PROCESSING OF ACCENTED SPEECH by HESTER DUFFY

Processing changes when listening to foreign-accented speech

This study investigates the mechanisms responsible for fast changes in processing foreign-accented speech. Event Related brain Potentials (ERPs) were obtained while native speakers of Spanish listened to native and foreign-accented speakers of Spanish. We observed a less positive P200 component for foreign-accented speech relative to native speech comprehension. This suggests that the extractio...

Linguistic Processing of Accented Speech Across the Lifespan

In most of the world, people have regular exposure to multiple accents. Therefore, learning to quickly process accented speech is a prerequisite to successful communication. In this paper, we examine work on the perception of accented speech across the lifespan, from early infancy to late adulthood. Unfamiliar accents initially impair linguistic processing by infants, children, younger adults, ...

Listening effort and accented speech

Understanding spoken language requires mapping acoustic input onto stored phonological and lexical representations. Speech tokens, however, are notoriously variable: they fluctuate within speakers, across speakers, and in different acoustic environments. As listeners, we must therefore perceive speech in a manner flexible enough to accommodate acoustic signals that imperfectly match our expecta...