title: When one person's mistake is another's standard usage: the effect of foreign accent on syntactic processing.
abstract: How do native listeners process grammatical errors that are frequent in non-native speech? We investigated whether the neural correlates of syntactic processing are modulated by speaker identity. ERPs to gender agreement errors in sentences spoken by a native speaker were compared with the same errors spoken by a non-native speaker. In line with previous research, gender violations in native speech resulted in a P600 effect (larger P600 for violations in comparison with correct sentences), but when the same violations were produced by the non-native speaker with a foreign accent, no P600 effect was observed. Control sentences with semantic violations elicited comparable N400 effects for both the native and the non-native speaker, confirming no general integration problem in foreign-accented speech. The results demonstrate that the P600 is modulated by speaker identity, extending our knowledge about the role of speaker's characteristics on neural correlates of speech processing.
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Adriana.Hanulikova@mpi.nl
authors.forename: Adriana
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hanulíková
authors.forename: Petra M
authors.initials: PM
authors.lastname: van Alphen
authors.forename: Merel M
authors.initials: MM
authors.lastname: van Goch
authors.forename: Andrea
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Weber
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014175:Translating; D055815:Young Adult