Pilot 3: How does sentence difficulty impact understanding?

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 were presented with written sentences on a computer screen and were asked to rate them on a response bar ranging from -100 (Easy) to 100 (Difficult). For each speaker, participants rated twelve sentences in order to select four easy and four difficult sentences for the final corpus. The purpose of this pilot study was to select sentences across the continuum of difficulty. Controlling for sentence difficulty is a crucial step to control for the influence of cognitive load. The final corpus will incorporate several pieces of information for each sentence, so researchers can control for the accents of the speakers, the looks of the speakers, and the difficulty of the sentences.https://encompass.eku.edu/swps_undergraduategallery/1237/thumbnail.jp