ABSTRACT

Previous research suggests that native listeners may be more tolerant to syntactic errors when they are produced in a foreign accent. However, studies investigating this topic within the semantic domain remain conflicting. The current study examined the effects of mispronunciations leading to semantic abnormality in foreign-accented speech. While their EEG was recorded, native speakers of Spanish listened to semantically correct and incorrect sentences produced by another native speaker and a native speaker of Chinese. The anomaly in the incorrect sentences was caused by a subtle mispronunciation (typical or atypical in Chinese-accented Spanish) during a critical word production. While initial-stage semantic processing yielded no accent-specific differences, late processing revealed a persistent N400-effect in the foreign-accent but not in the native-accent. These findings suggest that foreign-accented mispronunciations are more difficult to integrate than native-accented errors, regardless of their relative typicality. The distinction between syntactic and semantic processing of foreign-accented speech is discussed.

摘要

先前的研究表明，当用外国口音产生句法错误时，母语听众可能更能容忍句法错误。然而，在语义领域内调查这个主题的研究仍然存在冲突。目前的研究调查了错误发音对外国口音语音语义异常的影响。在记录他们的脑电图时，以西班牙语为母语的人会听另一位母语人士和一位母语为中文的人在语义上正确和不正确的句子。错误句子中的异常是由关键单词产生过程中的微妙发音错误（汉语口音的西班牙语中的典型或非典型）引起的。虽然初始阶段的语义处理没有产生特定于口音的差异，后期处理在外国口音中显示出持续的 N400 效应，但在本地口音中没有。这些发现表明，无论它们的相对典型性如何，外国口音的错误发音比母语口音的错误更难整合。讨论了外国口音语音的句法和语义处理之间的区别。