title: Don't Underestimate the Benefits of Being Misunderstood.
abstract: Being a nonnative speaker of a language poses challenges. Individuals often feel embarrassed by the errors they make when talking in their second language. However, here we report an advantage of being a nonnative speaker: Native speakers give foreign-accented speakers the benefit of the doubt when interpreting their utterances; as a result, apparently implausible utterances are more likely to be interpreted in a plausible way when delivered in a foreign than in a native accent. Across three replicated experiments, we demonstrated that native English speakers are more likely to interpret implausible utterances, such as "the mother gave the candle the daughter," as similar plausible utterances ("the mother gave the candle to the daughter") when the speaker has a foreign accent. This result follows from the general model of language interpretation in a noisy channel, under the hypothesis that listeners assume a higher error rate in foreign-accented than in nonaccented speech.
authors.affiliation: 1 Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
authors.forename: Edward
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Gibson
authors.affiliation: 1 Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
authors.forename: Caitlin
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Tan
authors.affiliation: 1 Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
authors.forename: Richard
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Futrell
authors.affiliation: 1 Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
authors.forename: Kyle
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Mahowald
authors.affiliation: 2 Center for Cognitive Science, University of Freiburg.
authors.forename: Lars
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Konieczny
authors.affiliation: 3 Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Université Paris Diderot.
authors.forename: Barbara
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Hemforth
authors.affiliation: 1 Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.|4 Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts.|5 Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts.
authors.forename: Evelina
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Fedorenko
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D019303:Multilingualism; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology
keywords: comprehension; language; open data; open materials; psycholinguistics