title: Processing changes when listening to foreign-accented speech.
abstract: This study investigates the mechanisms responsible for fast changes in processing foreign-accented speech. Event Related brain Potentials (ERPs) were obtained while native speakers of Spanish listened to native and foreign-accented speakers of Spanish. We observed a less positive P200 component for foreign-accented speech relative to native speech comprehension. This suggests that the extraction of spectral information and other important acoustic features was hampered during foreign-accented speech comprehension. However, the amplitude of the N400 component for foreign-accented speech comprehension decreased across the experiment, suggesting the use of a higher level, lexical mechanism. Furthermore, during native speech comprehension, semantic violations in the critical words elicited an N400 effect followed by a late positivity. During foreign-accented speech comprehension, semantic violations only elicited an N400 effect. Overall, our results suggest that, despite a lack of improvement in phonetic discrimination, native listeners experience changes at lexical-semantic levels of processing after brief exposure to foreign-accented speech. Moreover, these results suggest that lexical access, semantic integration and linguistic re-analysis processes are permeable to external factors, such as the accent of the speaker.
authors: Speech Production and Bilingualism, Center for Brain and Cognition, Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona, Spain.
authors: Carlos
authors: C
authors: Romero-Rivas
authors: BCBL - Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language San Sebastian, Spain ; IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science Bilbao, Spain.
authors: Clara D
authors: CD
authors: Martin
authors: Speech Production and Bilingualism, Center for Brain and Cognition, Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona, Spain ; Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats Barcelona, Spain.
authors: Albert
authors: A
authors: Costa
keywords: ERPs; N400; P200; P600; adaptation; foreign-accented speech; lexical-semantic processing; perceptual learning