Porretta, V. 1 , Järvikivi, J. 2 & Buchanan, L. 1
1 University of Windsor
2 University of Alberta
We investigate the effect of foreign-accented speech on predictive processing of objects in transitive clauses. Listeners can use linguistic information and real-world event knowledge to anticipate upcoming words (Altmann & Kamide, 1999); however, research on foreign-accented speech has shown that an accent reduces lexical activation and certainty of the intended message (Porretta, Tucker, & Järvikivi, 2016). In a Visual World Paradigm experiment, we examine the effect of foreign-accented speech on the time-course of anticipatory eye movements to objects based on semantic information associated with the verb.
Following Altmann and Kamide (1999), this study consisted of simple transitive sentence pairs in which the verb either restricted the subsequent direct object or not; for example, ?The fireman will climb/use the ladder?, where ?climb? restricts to ?ladder?. Two speakers (native English and native Mandarin) produced the English stimuli. Gaze data were recorded while native English-speaking participants listened to the sentences and looked at an array of four objects, including the target object (e.g., ?ladder?). To examine the effect of accent and verb type on predictive processing, we modeled looks to the target object as a time series prior to the acoustic onset of the object word.
While data collection is ongoing (n = 14), preliminary analysis indicated greater and earlier anticipatory looks approximately 200 ms before the target object was heard for the native talker, with possible differences as early as during the verb. We will present the complete data set and discuss the effects of verb type and accent on the time-course of anticipatory looks to the target object. These preliminary results suggest that the processing costs associated with foreign-accented speech also impact listeners? ability to employ predictive processing in both magnitude and timing, and speak to a possible trade-off in processing resource allocation.