The effect of talker identity and language experience in perceiving foreign-accented speech

Abstract The current study examines the effect of talker identity and linguistic experience on the perception of novel speech patterns by English speakers, focusing on vowel insertion in Korean-accented English. Experiment 1 shows that English speakers with no experience of living in Korea identify English words with vowel insertion as valid words more frequently throughout the experiment only when the talker is described as Korean, but not when the talker is American or Mexican. In Experiment 2, we find similar results with English speakers living in Korea, who provide more word responses to vowel-inserted English words in the Korean talker condition but not the American talker condition. Comparing Experiment 1 and Experiment 2, participants living in Korea show a greater preference for the inserted vowel that is similar to the one found in Korean-accented English (ʊ) over the control vowel (ɪ), as well as faster adaptation to this type. These results suggest that both talker identity and previous exposure to an accent influence how listeners perceive and adapt to foreign-accented speech, consistent with exemplar models of speech perception.