When One Person's Mistake Is Another's Standard Usage: The Effect of Foreign Accent on Syntactic Processing

摘要

How do native listeners process grammatical errors that arenfrequent in non-native speech? We investigated whether the neuralncorrelates of syntactic processing are modulated by speakernidentity. ERPs to gender agreement errors in sentences spokennby a native speaker were compared with the same errors spokennby a non-native speaker. In line with previous research, gendernviolations in native speech resulted in a P600 effect (larger P600nfor violations in comparison with correct sentences), but whennthe same violations were produced by the non-native speakernwith a foreign accent, no P600 effect was observed. Control sentencesnwith semantic violations elicited comparable N400 effectsnfor both the native and the non-native speaker, confirming nongeneral integration problem in foreign-accented speech. Thenresults demonstrate that the P600 is modulated by speaker identity,nextending our knowledge about the role of speakerʼs characteristicsnon neural correlates of speech processing.