Our meetings this quarter will be held on Zoom. Please sign up for the listserv to receive the Zoom link (instructions in sidebar).

—

Perception of and adaptation to non-native and unfamiliar speech

Listening to unfamiliar speech, including non-native speech, often results in substantial challenges for listeners. The consequences of these challenges are far-reaching (i.e., costs for comprehension, memory and other down-stream processing), and increased costs for listening to unfamiliar speech exist even when the speech is fully intelligible (e.g., McLaughlin & Van Engen, 2020). I will present a series of studies aimed at investigating what makes perception of non-native speech especially challenging and what factors impact adaptation to this speech. I will show some new data that suggests that social factors, in addition to linguistic properties, can impact adaptation to unfamiliar speech.