Limitations on adaptation to foreign accents.

ABSTRACT: Although foreign accents can be highly dissimilar to native speech, existing research suggests that listeners readily adapt to foreign accents after minimal exposure. However, listeners often report difficulty understanding non-native accents, and the time-course and specificity of adaptation remain unclear. Across five experiments, we examined whether listeners could use a newly learned feature of a foreign accent to eliminate lexical competitors during online speech perception. Participants heard the speech of a native English speaker and a native speaker of Québec French who, in English, pronounces /i/ as [i] (e.g., weak as wick) before all consonants except voiced fricatives. We examined whether listeners could learn to eliminate a shifted /i/-competitor (e.g., weak

SUBMITTER: Trude AM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3763963 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature