Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We routinely encounter speakers with different accents andspeaking styles. The speech perception literature offersexamples of disruption of comprehension for unfamiliarspeech and also of listeners’ rapid accommodation tounfamiliar accents. Much of this research uses a singlemeasure and/or focuses on isolated word perception. Weinvestigated listeners’ abilities to comprehend and shadowconnected speech spoken in a familiar or unfamiliar accent.We found increases in shadowing latencies andcomprehension errors in the Dissimilar Speech relative toSimilar Speech conditions—especially for relatively informalrather than more academic style speech. Additionally, therewas less accommodation over time to Dissimilar than SimilarSpeech. These results suggest that there are costs both in theimmediate timescale of processing speech (necessary forshadowing) and in the longer time scale of listeningcomprehension when accent and other speech quality is verydifferent from one’s own speech.