Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Listeners often have trouble identifying other-accented talkers. Some suggest this Other Accent Effect (OAE) occurs only for non-native accents (e.g., Canadian English listeners experience it for Mandarin-accented English, but not Australian English). But the line between native and non-native accents can be difficult to distinguish, and past studies have confounded accent strength with accent type. Thus, we hypothesize that accent strength modulates the OAE. We predict a heavy non-native accent will elicit an OAE, whereas a light one will not. To test this, we presented native Canadian English listeners with voice line-ups of native Canadian English accented, non-native heavy Mandarin-accented, and non-native light Mandarin-accented talkers. Unsurprisingly, listeners performed better with Canadian English talkers than Mandarin-accented talkers. Crucially, listeners performed equally poorly with both heavy and light Mandarin-accented talkers. Thus, we found no evidence for our hypothesis; instead, we observe that even a weak non-native accent can elicit a strong OAE.