Adults' Perceptions and Comprehension of Foreign-Accented Speakers

Abstract

Purpose: This study had three purposes. The first purpose was to investigate what perceptions adults form about mildly and moderately foreign-accented speakers. Next, how intelligible Young Adults (YA), Middle Aged Adults (MA), and Elderly Adults= (EA) found the mildly and moderately foreign-accented speakers. Finally, the effects that hearing loss (mild, moderate, and moderately-severe) had on the elderly adults’ intelligibility ratings of the foreign-accented speakers.

Method: Six speakers who spoke English with a foreign accent were audio-recorded as they read fifteen sentences taken from the listening section of The Official Guide to the TOEFL Test, Third Edition. The six audio recordings were played to forty-three adult listeners in a classroom setting at a university. The listeners used a Likert-type scale to rate their perception of degree of accent from “mild” to “heavy”. The most frequently rated mildly and moderately-accented speech samples were selected from the six recordings. The two speech samples selected were provided by speakers who were originally from India. Next, sixty listeners, twenty from each age category of YA, MA, and EA listened to one of the two speech samples. Those sixty listeners were required to repeat what they heard to assess the level of intelligibility of the speech sample. The participants also rated their perceptions across a qualitative continuum of adjective pairs (e.g. pleasant and unpleasant).

Results: There were no significant differences in how the listeners rated the intelligibility of the mildly and moderately-accented speakers. There was a significant difference between how intelligible the YA and MA participants found the two speakers in comparison to the EA participants. All three age groups expressed a positive perception of both speech samples. There was a moderate correlation between hearing loss and intelligibility ratings within the EA participants.

Conclusions: The YA and MA found the foreign-accented speech to be intelligible and showed little difficulty understanding them. However, the EA had difficulty understanding the speakers. There was a moderate correlation between the EA’s hearing loss and their intelligibility ratings. The implications of the EA’s difficulty understanding foreign-accented speech will be discussed. Further research is needed to investigate why the EA’s intelligibility ratings were significantly lower than the YA and MA participants.