Experiencing different cultures and languages is one of the most exciting elements of living in a globally connected world. If you enjoy cross-cultural adventures or have lived in multiple cities or countries, you are probably familiar with processing English spoken in a variety of accents. In fact, next time you watch a movie, pay careful attention to the variety of accents used to bring characters to life.
As I become a self-proclaimed Disney movie expert during the COVID-19 pandemic, I have noticed the deliberate accented language that is incorporated into making each movie more realistic. Take Lumiere in Beauty and the Beast in the video clip below as an example.
It seems easy enough to process language in a movie due to the context surrounding the speech, and when comprehension does become difficult, subtitles are available to help. However, have you ever wondered how accented language might impact the cognitive processing of speech in real life?
A new study by Vincent Poretta, Lori Buchanan, and Juhani Järvikivi (pictured below) published in Psychonomic Society journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics showed that although foreign-accented speech increases processing cost, it is possible to process the speech accurately. They also found that the more experience one has with that particular foreign language, the better they will process the speech.
The authors used a visual world paradigm with an eye tracker to conduct their study, where anticipatory eye movements were used as an indicator of predictive processing, i.e., predictions about forthcoming information.
Sixty English speakers aged 18 to 40 participated in the study. They saw visual scenes with several objects (e.g., ball, cake, car, train) and spoken sentences (e.g., the boy will move/eat the cake). The verb in the sentence either supported all four objects (move condition) or just one (eat condition). In past studies, participants were more likely to look at the cake if they heard eat rather than move. This finding suggests that eye movements can tell us what the person may be anticipating the rest of the sentence to be, i.e., predictive processing. In the present study, participants heard sentences read by a native English speaker and a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese.
The results were fascinating! As expected, foreign-accented speech did interfere with predictive processing, with fewer anticipatory eye movements and slower rates of prediction. However, what’s important to note is that participants could always predict and did not give up on processing when listening to accented speech.
What’s exciting about this study is the finding that experience with the language increases prediction. People who were highly experienced with Chinese as a foreign language showed predictive patterns that were almost identical to those exhibited by native Chinese speakers! These findings suggest that having extensive exposure to diverse languages might help free up cognitive resources and improve predictive processing of accented language.
These findings are good news for foreign language learners. This skill will not only allow them to communicate with people from another culture, but will also increase their understanding of the English spoken by natives who speak that foreign language.
Featured Psychonomic Society article
Porretta, V., Buchanan, L., & Järvikivi, J. (2020). When processing costs impact predictive processing: The case of foreign-accented speech and accent experience. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 82, 1558-1565. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-019-01946-7