The perception of foreign-accented speech by cochlear implant users

The current study investigated the perception of foreign-accented speech by prelingually deaf, longterm cochlear implant (CI) users. CI and normalhearing (NH) listeners made judgements about the intelligibility of short sentences produced by native and non-native speakers of American English. While both CI and NH listeners rated foreign-accented sentences as less intelligible than native sentences, the CI listeners perceived smaller differences in intelligibility between foreign-accented and native sentences. However, the CI listeners demonstrated substantial individual variability in their ratings. Additional analyses of these individual differences showed that CI listeners who were more sensitive to foreign accent differences also had better speech perception abilities. Taken together, these results suggest that CI listeners are sensitive to foreign accents, but less so than NH listeners. Further, their sensitivity to this source of variability in the speech signal may reflect the development and use of basic speech and language processing skills.