How does sentence difficulty impact understanding?

Multilingual Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Eastern Kentucky University Foreign accents can make the processing of difficult information particularly challenging. When presented with a difficult sentence spoken by a native speaker (as opposed to a foreign speaker) listeners might be more likely to understand the content. In Pilot 3, participants will be presented with written sentences on a computer screen, and will be asked to rate them on a response bar ranging from -100 (Easy) to 100 (Difficult). For each speaker, participants will rate twenty sentences in order to select five easy and five difficult for the final corpus. The purpose of this pilot study is to select sentences across the continuum of difficulty. Controlling for sentence difficulty is crucial because of the influence of cognitive load. The final corpus will incorporate the difficulty rating for each sentence