ISCA Archive Interspeech 2015
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2015

Production inconsistencies delay adaptation to foreign accents

Ann-Kathrin Grohe, Gregory J. Poarch, Adriana Hanulíková, Andrea Weber

The effects of production inconsistencies and speaker's accented production preferences on speech comprehension were investigated in an eyetracking experiment. Using the visual world paradigm, native speakers of German with L2 English listened to single English words produced by a German speaker that had their th either pronounced canonically or substituted with an /s/ or a /t/. Looks to the target word were most likely for the canonical pronunciation and did not differ between the substitutes. However, target looks increased for items with th substitutions in the course of the experiment, indicating slow adaptation to inconsistently foreign accented speech.