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How listening to nonnative-accented speech in a noisy environment impacts online lexical-semantic access and offline sentence comprehension: A combined ERP and behavioral study
Poster C37 in Poster Session C, Friday, October 7, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm EDT, Millennium Hall
Yushuang Liu1, Janet van Hell1; 1The Pennsylvania State University
In today’s globalized world, people increasingly encounter speakers with a foreign accent. Moreover, natural speech communication rarely takes place in ideal listening conditions, as we often listen to others when surrounded by background noise. Processing and comprehending foreign-accented speech in noisy backgrounds has thus become a common characteristic of everyday communication in our multicultural and multilingual society. However, few if any neurolinguistic studies have examined how listeners process foreign-accented sentences in background noise. In this project, we examined the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying the semantic processing of native-accented and foreign-accented sentences embedded in background noise, and we focus on the N400 effect as an index for semantic access, because of its high sensitivity to preceding semantic context. Using a semantic violation paradigm, 35 American English monolingual young adults (27 female; MAge = 19.38, SD = 0.95) without any substantial exposure to foreign-accented speech listened to a total of 288 unique sentences, while EEG were recorded. These sentences were counterbalanced across conditions of Accent (native accent: American, foreign accent: Chinese) and of Background (quiet, multi-talker babble noise) and Sentence semantic types (well-formed: e.g., “Kevin reached into his pocket to get the keys”, anomalous: e.g., “Kevin reached into his funeral to get the keys”). After hearing each sentence, participants verbally repeated the sentence, which was coded and scored as offline comprehension accuracy measure. Analysis of the verbal repetition accuracy data showed that background noise negatively impacted repetition accuracy of foreign-accented sentences more than native-accented sentences. This finding aligns with previous behavioral literature (e.g., Bent, 2018). ERP analyses of the N400 component showed that the semantic N400 effect (larger N400 for semantic anomalies than for control words) was larger for native-accented than for foreign-accented sentences, and for sentence presented in quiet than for in noise, indicating an impaired lexical-semantic access when listening to foreign-accented sentence or sentences embedded in background noise. In fact, when facing both a foreign accent and background noise, the semantic N400 effect was completely absent (mean amplitude: -0.05 mV across regions of interests). Taken together, this indicates that our brains fail to generate predictions based on semantic context when being confronted with an unfamiliar foreign accent in background noise.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Lexical Semantics, Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics