Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cb9f654ff-rkzlw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-08-11T12:19:33.334Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 16 - Self-Reported Effort of Listening to Nonnative Accented English Depends on Talker Pausing and Listener Working Memory Capacity

from Part V - Cognitive and Psychological Variables

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 January 2021

By
Mengxi Lin  and
Alexander L. Francis
Edited by
Ratree Wayland
Ratree Wayland
Affiliation:
University of Florida
Get access

Summary

This study was designed to investigate the contribution of non-native (L2) patterns of pausing to the perceived effort of listening to speech. English-language speech samples from ten native speakers of Korean and Mandarin Chinese (five of each) previously assessed as having intermediate proficiency in English were manipulated by removing all non-juncture silent pauses as well as all filled pauses. The original and manipulated speech samples, as well as samples of comparable but un-manipulated English speech produced by ten native speakers of Korean and Mandarin Chinese with higher English proficiency were evaluated in a between-groups design by 60 native speakers of American English. Although the removal of non-juncture pauses did not significantly alter listeners’ ratings of the intermediate speech, results did suggest a subtle interaction between ratings of effort and measures of listeners’ working memory capacity, suggesting that the detrimental effects of pausing in non-native accented speech may be related to increased demand on limited-capacity cognitive processing resources such as working memory.

Keywords

Non-nativeListeningEffortEnglishKoreanPausingWorkingMemoryCapacityAccentedSpeech

Information

Type
Chapter
Information
Second Language Speech Learning
Theoretical and Empirical Progress
 , pp. 399 - 417
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Amichetti, N. M., Stanley, R. S., White, A. G., & Wingfield, A. (2013). Monitoring the capacity of working memory: Executive control and effects of listening effort. Memory and Cognition, 41(6), 839–849.Google Scholar
Baddeley, A. D. (1999). Essentials of human memory. New York, NY: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Bates, D., Mächler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bent, T., Baese-Berk, M., Borrie, S. A., & McKee, M. (2016). Individual differences in the perception of regional, nonnative, and disordered speech varieties. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 140(5), 3775–3786.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2013). Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer software]. Retrieved from www.praat.org/Google Scholar
Bosker, H. R., Quené, H., Sanders, T., & Jong, N. H. (2014). The perception of fluency in native and nonnative speech. Language Learning, 64(3), 579–614.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davidson, L. (2011). Phonetic, phonemic, and phonological factors in cross-language discrimination of phonotactic contrasts. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 37(1), 270–282.Google Scholar
Deese, J. (1980). Pauses, prosody, and the demands of production in language. In Dechert, H. W. & Raupach, M (Eds.), Temporal variables in speech: Studies in honour of Frieda Goldman-Eisler (pp. 69–84). The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Derwing, T., & Munro, M. (1997). Accent, intelligibility, and comprehensibility: Evidence from four L1s. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19, 1–16.Google Scholar
Derwing, T., & Munro, M. (2005). Second language accent and pronunciation teaching: A research-based approach. TESOL Quarterly, 39, 379–397.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deschamps, A. (1980). The syntactical distribution of pauses in English spoken as a second language by French students. In Dechert, H & Raupach, M (Eds.), Temporal variables in speech: Studies in honour of Frieda Goldman-Eisler (pp. 255–262). The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edwards, B. (2016). A model of auditory-cognitive processing and relevance to clinical applicability. Ear and Hearing, 37, 85S–91S.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Floccia, C., Butler, J., Goslin, J., & Ellis, L. (2009). Regional and foreign accent processing in English: Can listeners adapt? Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 38, 379–412.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Freed, B. (1995). What makes us think that students who study abroad become fluent? In Freed, B (Ed.), Second language acquisition in a study abroad context (pp. 123–148). Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Garcia Lecumberri, M. L., Cooke, M., & Cutler, A. (2010). Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review. Speech Communication, 52(11), 864–886.Google Scholar
Gevins, A., & Cutillo, B. (1993). Neuroelectric evidence for distributed processing in human working memory. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 87, 128–143.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ginther, A., Dimova, S., & Yang, R. (2010). Conceptual and empirical relationships between temporal measurements of fluency. Language Testing, 27, 379–399.Google Scholar
Goldman-Eisler, F. (1968). Psycholinguistics: Experiments in spontaneous speech. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Haatveit, B. C., Sundet, K., Hugdahl, K., Ueland, T., Melle, I., & Andreassen, O. A. (2010). The validity of d prime as a working memory index: results from the “Bergen n-back task.” Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 32(8), 871–880.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hart, S., & Staveland, L. (1988). Development of NASA-TLX (Task Load Index): Results of empirical and theoretical research. In Hancock, P & Meshkati, N (Eds.), Human mental workload (pp. 139–183). Amsterdam, Netherlands: North-Holland Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heald, S., & Nusbaum, H. C. (2014). Speech perception as an active cognitive process. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 8, 35.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Johnson, J., Xu, J., Cox, R., & Pendergraft, P. (2015). A comparison of two methods for measuring listening effort as part of an audiologic test battery. American Journal of Audiology, 24(3), 419–431.Google Scholar
Just, M., & Carpenter, P. (1992). A capacity theory of comprehension: Individual differences in working memory. Psychological Review, 99, 122–149.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kuznetsova, A., Brockhoff, P. B., & Christensen, R. H. B. (2017). lmerTest package: Tests in linear mixed effects models. Journal of Statistical Software, 82(13), 1–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Le, S., Josse, J., & Husson, F. (2008). FactoMineR: An R package for multivariate analysis. Journal of Statistical Software, 25(1), 1–18.Google Scholar
Lennon, P. (1984). Retelling a story in English. In Dechert, H, Möhle, D, & Raupach, M (Eds.), Second language productions (pp. 50–68). Tübingen, Germany: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar
Lennon, P. (1990). The advanced learner at large in the L2 community: Developments in the spoken performance. Interaction Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 28, 309–321.Google Scholar
Lenth, R., Singmann, H., Love, J., Buerkner, P., & Herve, M. (2018). emmeans: Estimated Marginal Means, aka Least-Squares Means (R package Version 1.2.3). Retrieved from https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=emmeansGoogle Scholar
Lunner, T. (2010). Designing HA signal processing to reduce demand on working memory. The Hearing Journal, 63, 29–31.Google Scholar
Mackersie, C., MacPhee, I. X., & Heldt, E. W. (2015). Effects of hearing loss on heart rate variability and skin conductance measured during sentence recognition in noise. Ear and Hearing, 36(1), 145–154.Google Scholar
Macmillan, N., & Creelman, C. (1990). Response bias: Characteristics of detection theory, threshold theory, and nonparametric indexes. Psychological Bulletin, 107, 401–413.Google Scholar
McLaughlin, D. J., Baese-Berk, M. M., Bent, T., Borrie, S. A., & Van Engen, K. J. (2018). Coping with adversity: Individual differences in the perception of noisy and accented speech. Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, 80(6), 1559–1570.Google Scholar
Munro, M., & Derwing, T. (1995). Processing time, accent, and comprehensibility in the perception of foreign-accented speech. Language and Speech, 38, 289–306.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Munro, M., & Derwing, T. (1998). The effects of speaking rate on listener evaluation of native and foreign-accented speech. Language Learning, 48, 159–182.Google Scholar
Owen, A., McMillan, K., Laird, A., & Bullmore, E. (2005). N-back working memory paradigm: A meta-analysis of normative functional neuroimaging studies. Human Brain Mapping, 25, 46–59.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Peelle, J. E. (2017). Listening effort: How the cognitive consequences of acoustic challenge are reflected in brain and behavior. Ear and Hearing, 39(2), 204–214.Google Scholar
Pichora-Fuller, M. K. (2006). Perceptual effort and apparent cognitive decline: Implications for audiologic rehabilitation. Seminars in Hearing, 27(4), 284–293.Google Scholar
Pichora-Fuller, M. K., Kramer, S. E., Eckert, M. A., Edwards, B., Hornsby, W. Y., Humes, L. E., … Wingfield, A. (2016). Hearing impairment and cognitive energy: The Framework for Understanding Effortful Listening (FUEL). Ear and Hearing, 37, 5S–27S.Google Scholar
Raupach, M. (1980). Temporal variables in first and second language speech production. In Dechert, H & Raupach, M (Eds.), Temporal variables in speech Studies in honour of Frieda Goldman-Eisler (pp. 263–271). The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Raupach, M. (1984). Formulae in second language speech production. In Dechert, H & Möhle, D & Raupach, M (Eds.), Second language productions (pp. 114–137). Tübingen, Germany: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar
R Core Team. (2018). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.Google Scholar
Riazantseva, A. (2001). Second language proficiency and pausing: A study of Russian speakers of English. SSLA, 23, 497–526.Google Scholar
Riggenbach, H. (1991). Towards an understanding of fluency: A microanalysis of nonnative speaker conversations. Discourse Analysis, 14, 423–443.Google Scholar
Rönnberg, J., Lunner, T., Zekveld, A., Sörqvist, P., Danielsson, H., Lyxell, B., … Rudner, M. (2013). The Ease of Language Understanding (ELU) model: Theoretical, empirical, and clinical advances. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 7, 31.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rudner, M., Lunner, T., Behren, T., Thoren, E. S., & Ronnberg, J. (2012). Working memory capacity may influence perceived effort during aided speech recognition in noise. Journal of the American Academy of Audiology, 23, 577–589.Google ScholarPubMed
Sajavaara, K. (1987). Second language speech production factors affecting fluency. In Dechert, H. W. & Raupach, M (Eds.), Psycholinguistic models of production (pp. 45–65). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Schmid, P., & Yeni-Komshian, G. (1999). The effects of speaker accent and target predictability on perception of mispronunciations. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 42, 56–64.Google Scholar
Schneider, W., Eschman, A., & Zuccolotto, A. (2002). E-Prime reference guide. Pittsburgh, PA: Psychology Software Tools.Google Scholar
Van Engen, K., & Peelle, J. (2014). Listening effort and accented speech. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 1–4.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wingfield, A. (2016). Evolution of models of working memory and cognitive resources. Ear and Hearing, 37, 35S–43S.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wood, D. (2001). In search of fluency: What is it and how can we teaching it? Canadian Modern Language Review, 57, 571–589.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zekveld, A., Kramer, S., & Festen, J. (2011). Cognitive load during speech perception in noise: The influence of age, hearing loss, and cognition on the pupil response. Ear and Hearing, 32, 498–510.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

Accessibility standard: Unknown

Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×