Speech perception in a second language: Hearing is believing-seeing is not. 2020

Fengyang Ma, and Haiyang Ai, and Ting Xiao, and Taomei Guo, and Hye K Pae
School of Education, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA.

This study examined the effects of the speaker's face and accent on second language (L2) speech perception. Forty-two Chinese speakers of English immersed in the L2 environment were instructed to perform a cross-modal semantic judgement task. They saw an Asian or Caucasian face on the screen and heard word pairs in L2 in a native English accent or a Chinese accent, and were asked to judge whether the word pairs were related to each other in meaning or not. Results showed that for words presented in the native accent, there was a semantic effect in both reaction time and accuracy, irrespective of the face shown. For words presented in the non-native accent, the RT data showed a semantic effect, whereas the accuracy revealed a reversed semantic effect. The speed-accuracy trade-off suggests a relatively weak semantic effect. These patterns were not modulated by the faces accompanying the word pairs. These results suggest that the cue of accent plays an important role during bilinguals' speech perception in L2, such that non-native accent hampers speech perception, even when it matches bilinguals' first language. In contrast, bilinguals do not seem to depend on the social indexical cue of the face when it is not reliable. The present findings hold implications for the Bilingual Model of Lexical Access (BIMOLA) of bilingual speech perception and the monolingual models of social speech perception.

UI MeSH Term Description Entries
D008297 Male Males
D011578 Psycholinguistics A discipline concerned with relations between messages and the characteristics of individuals who select and interpret them; it deals directly with the processes of encoding (phonetics) and decoding (psychoacoustics) as they relate states of messages to states of communicators. Psycholinguistic
D011930 Reaction Time The time from the onset of a stimulus until a response is observed. Response Latency,Response Speed,Response Time,Latency, Response,Reaction Times,Response Latencies,Response Times,Speed, Response,Speeds, Response
D003463 Cues Signals for an action; that specific portion of a perceptual field or pattern of stimuli to which a subject has learned to respond. Cue
D005260 Female Females
D006801 Humans Members of the species Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens,Man (Taxonomy),Human,Man, Modern,Modern Man
D000066499 Facial Recognition Ability to identify an individual from their facial features. Face Emotion Perception,Face Emotion Processing,Face Emotion Recognition,Face Processing,Face Recognition,Facial Emotion Recognition,Facial Expression Recognition,Facial Identity Recognition,Face Perception,Emotion Perception, Face,Emotion Processing, Face,Emotion Recognition, Face,Emotion Recognition, Facial,Expression Recognition, Facial,Identity Recognition, Facial,Perception, Face,Perception, Face Emotion,Processing, Face,Processing, Face Emotion,Recognition, Face,Recognition, Face Emotion,Recognition, Facial,Recognition, Facial Emotion,Recognition, Facial Expression,Recognition, Facial Identity
D000328 Adult A person having attained full growth or maturity. Adults are of 19 through 44 years of age. For a person between 19 and 24 years of age, YOUNG ADULT is available. Adults
D012660 Semantics The relationships between symbols and their meanings. Semantic
D012938 Social Perception The perceiving of attributes, characteristics, and behaviors of one's associates or social groups. Perception, Social,Perceptions, Social,Social Perceptions

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