The effects of speaker accent and target predictability on perception of mispronunciations

This study makes use of a listening for mispronunciation task to examine ho w native English listeners perceive sentences produced by non-native speake rs. The effects of target predictability and degree of foreign accent were investigated. Native and non-native speakers produced English sentences con taining mispronunciation. Mispronunciations (MPs) were constructed by chang ing the initial phoneme of target words by a single distinctive feature alo ng the dimensions of voicing, place, or manner. Results showed that listene rs (a) were more accurate and faster in detecting MPs produced by native th an non-native speakers, (b) were more accurate and faster in detecting MPs in predictable than unpredictable sentences, and (3) were more accurate in detecting MPs produced by non-native speakers with milder accents, as compa red to heavier accents. These findings suggest that listening to fairly int elligible but accented speech requires increased processing effort-possibly because of subtle differences in intelligibiliy and increased variability characteristic of non-native speech.