Studying mispronunciations in accented speech

This project will investigate the impact of foreign accent on native listener’s semantic processing in Spanish. As such, participants will listen to Spanish words that are produced by native Spanish speakers or native Chinese speakers. Stimuli will include commonly mispronounced words in Spanish (e.g. pelo, ‘hair’) and words that are non-commonly mispronounced in Spanish (e.g. pena, ‘pity’). The commonly mispronounced words will involve mispronunciations on the alveolar sounds /r/ and /l/, phonemes that are restricted in Mandarin Chinese. While participants listen to the stimuli, their neural reactions will be measured via the EventRelated Potentials technique, a temporally reliable brain imaging technique. We anticipate that all mispronunciations will lead to an increased difficulty with semantic integration (indexed by an increased negativity in the neural activity, 400ms post-stimulus) when they are produced by a native Spanish speaker. In contrast, for stimuli produced by a native Chinese speaker, we anticipate that only non-commonly mispronounced words will lead to this same effect.

Faculty Supervisor:

Laura Sabourin

Student:

Partner:

Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Life Sciences (not health); Information and Communications Technology; Other

University:

University of Ottawa

Program: