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Investigating the Effect of Foreign Accents on Sensitivity to Word Predictability in Speech Comprehension

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Shang-En Huang1 (sehuang@ucsd.edu), Ian Martindale1,2, Seana Coulson1,2; 1University of California, San Diego, 2San Diego State University

Previous research on foreign accents has revealed inconsistent findings regarding their effect on predictive processing. Across studies, comparisons of familiar local versus less familiar foreign accents have revealed larger, smaller, and similar sized N400 predictability effects. Here we recorded EEG as 18 participants listened to local or foreign-accented sentences with more versus less predictable endings. For example, “Ben’s so stubborn he can never admit he’s wrong (more predictable) / drunk (less predictable)”. ERPs time-locked to the first word in each sentence revealed the P2 was larger for local than foreign accented speech, consistent with previous literature suggesting better acoustic feature extraction. In ERPs time-locked to sentence-final words, mean amplitude measurements (250-600ms) were more negative for unpredictable than predictable words in both local (ClozeHi-Low = -2.01microvolts, p<.001) and foreign (ClozeHi-Low = -1.29microvolts, p = 0.019) accents. Interestingly, the N400 to unpredictable words peaked earlier for local (357ms) than foreign (418ms) accents (t(17) = 2.47, p<.05). Predictability effects 500-1000ms were larger for local than foreign accents (AccentLocal-Foreign = -1.71microvolts, p = .002). Further, accent effects were significant for predictable (AccentLocal-Foreign = -1.05microvolts, p = .010) but not unpredictable words. This suggests that participants were better able to anticipate words in sentences spoken with more familiar accents. In sum we find that predictability effects were slightly delayed for foreign accented speech, and were less pronounced in ERPs following the N400. Overall, results suggest that while local and foreign accents are acoustically different, listeners utilize similar predictive mechanisms to perceive incoming speech.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Semantic

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