title: The influence of neighborhood density on the recognition of Spanish-accented words.
abstract: Foreign-accented speech is more difficult to recognize than the same words produced by a native speaker because the accented speech may activate many additional competitors, or it may strongly activate a single, but incorrect, word during lexical retrieval. Experiments 1 and 2 examined the recognition of native-produced and foreign-accented words varying in neighborhood density with auditory lexical decision and perceptual identification tasks, respectively. Experiment 1 found increased reaction times (RTs), especially for accented dense words. Analysis of misperceptions from Experiment 2 found that the mean number of phonologically distinct misperception tokens was higher for native than accented stimuli, suggesting that accented speech does not tend to activate more lexical candidates. Furthermore, a higher proportion of misperceptions in the accented condition (71%) compared with the native condition (58%) was accounted for by the most frequently reported misperception token, suggesting that accented speech instead tends to strongly activate 1 particular neighbor of the target word during lexical competition. Moreover, systematic phonemic substitutions in the misperceptions suggest that lawful acoustic-phonetic variations introduced by the accented speaker's L1 (native language) play a crucial role in determining which neighbor is activated as a strong competitor.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology.
authors.forename: Kit Ying
authors.initials: KY
authors.lastname: Chan
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Kansas.
authors.forename: Michael S
authors.initials: MS
authors.lastname: Vitevitch
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D006801:Humans; D019303:Multilingualism; D010700:Phonetics; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult