(Not so) Great Expectations: Listening to Foreign-Accented Speech Reduces the Brain’s Anticipatory Processes

This study examines the effect of foreign-accented speech on the predictive ability of our brain. Listeners actively anticipate upcoming linguistic information in the speech signal so as to facilitate and reduce processing load. However, it is unclear whether or not listeners also do this when they are exposed to speech from non-native speakers. In the present study, we exposed native Dutch listeners to sentences produced by native and non-native speakers while measuring their brain activity using electroencephalography. We found that listeners’ brain activity differed depending on whether the... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Niels O. Schiller
Bastien P.-A. Boutonnet
Marianne L. S. De Heer Kloots
Marieke Meelen
Bobby Ruijgrok
Lisa L.-S. Cheng
Dokumenttyp: Artikel
Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
Reihe/Periodikum: Frontiers in Psychology, Vol 11 (2020)
Verlag/Hrsg.: Frontiers Media S.A.
Schlagwörter: prediction / speech perception / sentence comprehension / foreign-accented speech / Dutch / native vs. non-native speech processing / Psychology / BF1-990
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-28580740
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02143

This study examines the effect of foreign-accented speech on the predictive ability of our brain. Listeners actively anticipate upcoming linguistic information in the speech signal so as to facilitate and reduce processing load. However, it is unclear whether or not listeners also do this when they are exposed to speech from non-native speakers. In the present study, we exposed native Dutch listeners to sentences produced by native and non-native speakers while measuring their brain activity using electroencephalography. We found that listeners’ brain activity differed depending on whether they listened to native or non-native speech. However, participants’ overall performance as measured by word recall rate was unaffected. We discussed the results in relation to previous findings as well as the automaticity of anticipation.