Evaluating the Impacts of Accent and Semantic Context on Listening Effort

Nonnative accented speech is associated with increased listening effort for English-monolingual listeners, even if the speech signal is intelligible. Semantic context is a global characteristic of English phrases that quantifies the degree to which words communicate a cohesive idea. Previous research suggests that semantic context may be used as a helping factor during speech perception in adverse conditions. The current work examines the relationship between speaker accent and semantic context using global semantic anomalies. Participants performed a randomly prompted recall task during lists of varying semantic context levels recorded by native and nonnative-accented speakers. Results are discussed in terms of two frameworks for understanding listening effort and speech processing: the Ease of Language Understanding Model and the Effortfulness Hypothesis, which differ in their prediction of an interaction between speaker accent and semantic context. A significant interaction was found between Speaker Accent and Context Group, lending support for the Effortfulness Hypothesis