Listeners sometimes struggle to identify talkers with accents different from their own. What drives this Other Accent Effect (OAE)? Here, we explore two possible explanations: the Processing Load Hypothesis and the Sociolinguistic Attitudes Hypothesis. According to the former, the OAE results when the effort required to adapt to and comprehend other-accented talkers reduces the resources available to process talker details. According to the latter, the OAE results when talkers with socially marked accents are classified as out-group members, thus negatively affecting listeners' processing. To test these hypotheses, we examined Canadian English listeners' identification of same- and other-accented talkers from voice lineups. In Experiment 1 (N = 144), we manipulated the predictability of talkers' speech and presented accents of variable social prestige and intelligibility from the listener's own accent (i.e., Canadian, Australian, Southern U.S., Mandarin-accented English). In Experiment 2 (N = 72), we varied accent strength, expecting that heavier accents would be harder to understand and more socially marked. Surprisingly, although the accents we used varied in intelligibility and in social prestige, these factors did not influence identification performance. We close by summarizing what our study reveals about talker recognition, and by discussing how future work could probe the mechanisms underlying the OAE. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Yu et al. (2026) studied this question.