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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

Ratree Wayland
Affiliation:
University of Florida
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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.

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

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