title: Relative Difficulty of Understanding Foreign Accents as a Marker of Proficiency.
abstract: Foreign-accented speech is generally harder to understand than native-accented speech. This difficulty is reduced for non-native listeners who share their first language with the non-native speaker. It is currently unclear, however, how non-native listeners deal with foreign-accented speech produced by speakers of a different language. We show that the process of (second) language acquisition is associated with an increase in the relative difficulty of processing foreign-accented speech. Therefore, experiencing greater relative difficulty with foreign-accented speech compared with native speech is a marker of language proficiency. These results contribute to our understanding of how phonological categories are acquired during second language learning.
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.|Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (ENS, EHESS, CNRS), Département d'Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University.
authors.forename: Shiri
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Lev-Ari
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (ENS, EHESS, CNRS), Département d'Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University.|Department of Psychology, University at Buffalo, State University of New York.
authors.forename: Marieke
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: van Heugten
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (ENS, EHESS, CNRS), Département d'Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University.
authors.forename: Sharon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Peperkamp
mesh_terms: D001076:Aptitude; D032882:Comprehension; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D013060:Speech; D013067:Speech Perception
keywords: Foreign accent; L2 learners