Research Article
Effect of Foreign Accent on Immediate Serial Recall Kit Ying Chan1 , Ming Ming Chiu2, Brady A. Dailey3, and Daroon M. Jalil4 1
Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
2
Department of Special Education and Counselling, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
3
Department of Linguistics, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA
4
Department of Psychology, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA Abstract: This study disentangled factors contributing to impaired memory for foreign-accented words – misperception and disruption of encoding. When native English and Cantonese-accented words were presented auditorily for serial recall (Experiment 1), intrusion errors for accented words were higher across all serial positions (SPs). Participants made more intrusion errors during auditory presentation than visual and auditory presentation, and more errors for accented words than native words. Lengthening the interstimulus intervals in Experiment 2 reduced intrusion, repetition, order, and omission errors in the middle and late SPs during accented word recall, suggesting that extra time is required for identification and encoding of accented words into memory. Analyses of the intrusions showed that a majority of them were misperceptions and sounded similar to the stimulus words. These findings suggest that effortful perceptual processing of accented speech can induce perceptual difficulty and interfere with downstream memory processes by exhausting the shared pool of working memory. Keywords: serial recall, foreign accent, speech perception, short-term memory, listening effort
Foreign accent refers to the extent to which the pronunciation of second language (L2) learners deviates from native speaker norms (Munro & Derwing, 1995a). The acousticphonological deviations include different subsegmental (Caramazza, Yeni-Komshian, Zurif, & Carbone, 1973), segmental (Flege & Hillenbrand, 1984; Munro & Derwing, 1995a), suprasegmental (Reed, 2000; Riazantseva, 2001), and temporal characteristics (Munro & Derwing, 1998; Temple, 2000). These deviations induce a mismatch between the speech inputs and the native listener’s representations, resulting in increased misperceptions, processing time, and vulnerability to noise compared to native speech (Van Wijngaarden, 2001). Most research has focused on the accent-induced perception costs and the perceptual learning of accented speech (Clarke & Garrett, 2004; Reinisch & Holt, 2014; Witteman, Weber, & McQueen, 2013). Few studies have examined the influence of foreign accent on memory. Gill (1994) studied how regional and foreign accents affected comprehension, and subsequent recall. Lectures by native North American English speakers were rated as most comprehensible, followed by those of British English speakers and then by Experimental Psychology (2019), 66(1), 40–57 https://doi.org/10.1027/1618-3169/a000430
those of Malaysian English speakers. Native listeners recalled significantly more information from native North American English speakers than from British or Malaysian English speakers. Gill (1994) suggested that comprehending messages from unfamiliar regional or foreign-accented speakers requires more cognitive resources, resulting in fewer available resources to encode information for subsequent recall. Furthermore, Pickel and Staller (2012) showed that a perpetrator’s accent influenced witnesses’ memories of the perpetrator’s message and physical appearance. Witnesses listening to a message spoken by a native-speaking perpetrator rather than by a foreign-accented perpetrator performed significantly better on a secondary visual search task, suggesting that processing foreign-accented speech is more effortful. Witnesses subsequently recalled more correct details and fewer incorrect details from messages by native-speaking perpetrators. Pickel and Staller (2012) also proposed that processing accented speech demands more cognitive resources, leaving fewer cognitive resources for remembering the speech. However, these studies did not examine the intelligibility of the foreign-accented stimuli. For less intelligible foreign-accented words, initial lexical access failure rather than subsequent memory processes might account for the poor recall. A study by Cho and Feldman (2013) accounted for word intelligibility, and their participants were given 2 s Ó 2019 Hogrefe Publishing
