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The Processing of Foreign-Accented Speech: Effects of Accent Closeness, Language Status, and Listener Status

Vortragende(r) Hanna Kędzierska
Institution(en) Uniwersytet Wrocławski
Datum 29.03.2022, 2:00 pm
Uhrzeit 14:00 Uhr
Ort Virtual: Please send an e-mail to zas.xtalks@leibniz-zas.de to get the Zoom invitation link. To be let in, use your proper name.

Abstract 

The mounting neurolinguistic ERP research on foreign-accentedness has so far delivered ambiguous results, especially regarding the semantic processing of foreign-accented speech. Given different experimental designs adopted by researchers, questions arise concerning the sociolinguistic factors which potentially affect the neural processing of non-native speech. I will present the results of a series of ERP experiments investigating three such factors: (i) accent closeness, (ii) the language status as L1 or L2, and (iii) the listener’s status as balanced or unbalanced bilinguals. The experimental material included semantically correct and anomalous sentences recorded by native and foreign-accented speakers of Polish. I will discuss the implications of the results for the current models of speech comprehension and production which start to take into consideration the non-linguistic information concerning the individual characteristics of the speaker and the addressee. 

About Hanna Kędzierska 

Hanna Kędzierska received her master's degree from the University of Wrocław, before she joined a DAAD research project called “Linguistic predictions in context: Collocations and selection from a psycholinguistic and corpus linguistic perspective” from 2017 to 2018 and “The perception and processing of foreign accent from a German-Polish perspective” (DAAD) from 2018 to 2019.  She recently submitted her PhD-thesis on mechanisms of anticipation during the processing of foreign-accented speech at the University of Wrocław.  Her research interests mainly include foreign language speech processing and production as well as figurative language (idioms in particular).