Tao Lily, Taft Marcus
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, East China Normal UniversityShanghai, China; School of Psychology, University of New South WalesSydney, NSW, Australia.
School of Psychology, University of New South Wales Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Front Psychol. 2017 Feb 24;8:266. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00266. eCollection 2017.
Foreign accent in speech often presents listeners with challenging listening conditions. Consequently, listeners may need to draw on additional cognitive resources in order to perceive and comprehend such speech. Previous research has shown that, for older adults, executive functions predicted perception of speech material spoken in a novel, artificially created (and therefore unfamiliar) accent. The present study investigates the influences of executive functions, information processing speed, and working memory on perception of unfamiliar foreign accented speech, in healthy young adults. The results showed that the executive processes of inhibition and switching, as well as information processing speed predict response times to both accented and standard sentence stimuli, while inhibition and information processing speed predict speed of responding to accented word stimuli. Inhibition and switching further predict accuracy in responding to accented word and standard sentence stimuli that has increased processing demand (i.e., nonwords and sentences with unexpected semantic content). These findings suggest that stronger abilities in aspects of cognitive functioning may be helpful for matching variable pronunciations of speech sounds to stored representations, for example by being able to manage the activation of incorrect competing representations and shifting to other possible matches.
带有外国口音的言语常常给听众带来具有挑战性的听力条件。因此，听众可能需要利用额外的认知资源来感知和理解这类言语。先前的研究表明，对于老年人来说，执行功能可预测对以新颖的、人工创造的（因而不熟悉的）口音说出的言语材料的感知。本研究调查了执行功能、信息处理速度和工作记忆对健康年轻成年人感知不熟悉的外国口音言语的影响。结果表明，抑制和转换的执行过程以及信息处理速度可预测对带口音和标准句子刺激的反应时间，而抑制和信息处理速度可预测对带口音单词刺激的反应速度。抑制和转换进一步预测了对处理需求增加的带口音单词和标准句子刺激（即非单词和具有意外语义内容的句子）的反应准确性。这些发现表明，认知功能方面更强的能力可能有助于将语音的可变发音与存储的表征相匹配，例如通过能够管理不正确的竞争表征的激活并转向其他可能的匹配。
