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Listening effort during speech perception enhances auditory and lexical processing for non-native listeners and accents

Song, J; Iverson, P; (2018) Listening effort during speech perception enhances auditory and lexical processing for non-native listeners and accents. Cognition , 179 pp. 163-170. 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.06.001. Green open access

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Abstract

Speech communication in a non-native language (L2) can feel effortful, and the present study suggests that this effort affects both auditory and lexical processing. EEG recordings (electroencephalography) were made from native English (L1) and Korean listeners while they listened to English sentences spoken with two accents (English and Korean) in the presence of a distracting talker. Neural entrainment (i.e., phase locking between the EEG recording and the speech amplitude envelope) was measured for target and distractor talkers. L2 listeners had relatively greater entrainment for target talkers than did L1 listeners, likely because their difficulty with L2 speech recognition caused them to focus more attention on the speech signal. N400 was measured for the final word in each sentence, and L2 listeners had greater lexical processing in high-predictability sentences than did L1 listeners. L1 listeners had greater target-talker entrainment when listening to the more difficult L2 accent than their own L1 accent, and similarly had larger N400 responses for the L2 accent. It thus appears that the increased effort of L2 listeners, as well as L1 listeners understanding L2 speech, modulates their auditory and lexical processing during speech recognition. This may provide a mechanism to compensate for their perceptual challenges under adverse conditions.

Type: Article
Title: Listening effort during speech perception enhances auditory and lexical processing for non-native listeners and accents
Location: Netherlands
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.06.001
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.06.001
Language: English
Additional information: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Keywords: Accent processing, Cognitive load, Entrainment to the speech envelope, Listening effort, N400, Non-native language (L2) speech recognition
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10052666
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