Ongoing Projects
The PsychLing Lab focuses on many different aspects of speech communication research. Interested in what were working on now? Read below to find out more.
Foreign-accented (L2) speech requires more effort to understand. However, it is hard to find an objective rating of how difficult listeners find L2-accented speech to be. In this task, we use an effort discounting paradigm (adapted from Westbrook et. al., 2013) to objectively and uniformly measure how subjectively difficult participants find listening to accented speech. For more information, email [email protected].
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Bilinguals typically underperform relative to monolinguals in speech-perception-in-noise tasks. However, there is little data comparing bilinguals and monolinguals in other types of difficult listening conditions, and such differences are typically investigated using off-line intelligibility accuracy scores, which do not necessarily reflect differences in on-line speech processing. In the current study, pupillometry was used during sentence recognition tasks to index cognitive processing load. Monolingual English listeners and English-dominant simultaneous bilingual listeners heard English sentences in four conditions: American-Accented in Quiet, Turkish-Accented in Quiet, American-Accented in Noise, and Face Mask-Attenuated American-Accented in Quiet. Differences in pupil dilation between groups are expected in the latter three conditions. Data collection is on-going, but preliminary results (N = 40) show bilinguals exert more cognitive effort than monolinguals across all conditions.
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Processing speech in an accent different from your own, even if you understand every word that was said, takes extra effort for adults. A prior study from our lab (McLaughlin & Van Engen, 2020) found this by measuring monolingual adults' pupil size while listening to native and non-native accented speech. They found that pupils dilated to a larger degree (indicating extra cognitive effort) when listening to the non-native accented speech. This study uses a similar procedure to ask whether children ages 5-8 are changing the amount of listening effort they use for non-native accented speech in the same way as adults. For more information, email [email protected].
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