Recognizing foreign accents helps brains process accented speech

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. Our brains process foreign-accented speech with better real-time accuracy if we can identify the accent we hear, according to a team of neurolinguists. "Increased familiarity with an accent leads to better sentence processing," said Janet van Hell , professor of psychology and linguistics and co-director of the Center for Language Science , Penn State. "As you build up experience with foreign-accented speech, you train your acoustic system to better process the accented speech." A native of the Netherlands, where the majority of people are bilingual in Dutch and English, van Hell noticed that her spoken interactions with people changed somewhat when she moved to central Pennsylvania. "My speaker identity changed," said van Hell. "I suddenly had a foreign accent, and I noticed that people were hearing me differently, that my interactions with people had changed because of my foreign accent. And I wanted to know why that is, scientifically." Van Hell and her colleague Sarah Grey, former Penn State postdoctoral researcher and now assistant professor of modern languages and literature at Fordham University, compared how people process foreign-accented and native-accented speech in a neurocognitive research study that measured neural signals associated with comprehension while listening to spoken sentences.