When A Nonnative Accent Lets You Spot All the Errors: Examining the Syntactic Interlanguage Benefit

摘要

In our continuously globalizing world, cross-cultural andcross-linguistic communications are far from exceptional. Awealth of research has indicated that the processing ofnonnative-accented speech can be challenging for native listeners,both at the level of phonology. However, few onlinestudies have examined the underpinnings of accented speechrecognition from the perspective of the nonnative listener, eventhough behavioral studies indicate that accented input may beeasier to process for such individuals (i.e., the interlanguagespeech intelligibility benefit. The current EEG study first examinedthe phonological and syntactic analysis of nonnativeaccentedspeech among nonnative listeners. As such, 30 Englishlearners of Spanish listened to syntactically correct and incorrectSpanish sentences produced in native and nonnativeaccentedSpanish. The violation in the incorrect sentenceswas caused by errors that are typical (i.e., gender errors; *lacolor) or atypical (i.e., number errors; *los color) for Englishlearners of Spanish. Results indicated that nonnative listenerselicit a phonological mismatch negativity (PMN) when attendingto speech produced by a native Spanish speaker. Furthermore,the nonnative listeners showed a P600 for all grammaticalviolations, indicating that they repair all errors regardless oftheir typicality or the accent in which they are produced.Follow-up analyses compared our novel data to the data ofnative listeners from the methodologically identical precursorstudy. These analyses showed that native and nonnative listenersexhibit directionally opposite PMN effects; whereasnatives exhibited a larger PMN for English-accented Spanish,nonnatives displayed a larger PMN in response to nativeSpanish utterances (a classic interlanguage speech intelligibilitybenefit). An additional difference was observed at the syntacticlevel: Whereas natives repaired only atypical number errorswhen they were English-accented, nonnative participants exhibiteda P600 in response to all English-accented syntactic errors,regardless of their typicality (a syntactic interlanguage speechintelligibility benefit). Altogether, these results suggest thataccented speech is not inherently difficult to process; in fact,nonnatives may benefit from the presence of a nonnativeaccent. Thus, our data provide some of the first electrophysiologicalevidence supporting the existence of the classic interlanguagespeech intelligibility benefit and its novel syntacticcounterpart.