Exposure-independent comprehension of Greek-accented speech: evidence from New Zealand listeners

Accents provide extensive variation in speech, which can cause difficulties for comprehension. However, after a period of exposure to a foreign accent, listeners are usually able to understand it better. This study examined whether New Zealanders could adapt to consider Greek-accented raised /ɪ/ in English as part of their native centralised /ɪ/ phonetic category. Participants listened to a story in either Greek-accented or New Zealand-accented speech, and then underwent a cross-modal priming and lexical decision task as well as a rating task to examine perception at different levels of speech processing. Participants correctly identified words in Greek-accented English whether they had previous exposure to the accent or not. This effect extended throughout the speech processing system, from
automatic lexical activation to deliberate categorisation. We discuss reasons for these results, including perceptual flexibility for variant forms of vowels and a high level of familiarity New Zealanders have with the Australian accent