Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Leibniz-Gemeinschaft

The perception and processing of the foreign-language accent from the German-Polish perspective

The goal of this project is to investigate the perception and neural processing of foreign accented speech by making use of a novel combination of experimental methods (EEG and perception experiments). In particular, we would like to investigate how native speakers of Polish perceive and process German accent in Polish (i.e., Polish spoken with a German accent) and conversely, how native speakers of German perceive and process Polish accent in German (i.e., German spoken with a Polish accent).

The aim of this study is to gain more insight into the role of speakers’ attitudes towards other speakers’ groups speaking a different accent. We are primarily interested to what extent the perception and processing of foreign accent depends on the speaker’s background information (including prejudices).

            Our study is accompanied by two research questions:

  1. Does the hearer’s attitude towards the foreign accent depend on the speaker’s ancestry?
  2. Is the hearer’s neural processing of the foreign accent influenced by the speaker’s ancestry?