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Poster Session 6, 4:15 PM - 5:00 PM: Concourse [B2]

Presenter: Jessica Murray

Faculty Sponsor: Alexandra Jesse

School: UMass Amherst

Research Area: Psychology and Behavioral Sciences

ABSTRACT

Most English speakers worldwide are non-native and are likely to speak with an accent to some degree. Non-native accents can increase perceptual difficulty and cognitive effort for native listeners. Prior research shows that with exposure, native listeners rapidly adapt to non-native accents, improving processing speed and accuracy. These benefits can generalize to new speakers who share the same accent. However, it remains unclear whether listening effort similarly decreases with exposure, and whether any reduction reflects adaptation to a specific speaker or to the accent more broadly. We address this question by measuring pupil dilation, a well-established physiological index of listening effort. On each trial, participants listen to an English sentence while their pupil size is continuously recorded; afterward, they see a printed probe word and indicate as quickly and accurately as possible whether that word appeared in the sentence they just heard. During exposure, participants hear the sentences spoken by one of two Mandarin-accented speakers or a native English speaker. In a subsequent test phase, all participants hear the same Mandarin-accented speaker. If exposure reduces listening effort, participants exposed to the same Mandarin speaker across phases should show smaller pupil dilations, higher accuracy, and faster responses at test than those exposed to native speech. Critically, if adaptation occurs at the accent level, similar reductions in pupil dilation should also emerge for participants exposed to the other Mandarin speaker. Demonstrating reduced listening effort would have important social implications, as greater effort is associated with more negative evaluations of accented speakers.