School of Education, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA.
State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning & IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, P.R. China.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2020 Jun;73(6):881-890. doi: 10.1177/1747021820911362. Epub 2020 Mar 23.
This study examined the effects of the speaker's face and accent on second language (L2) speech perception. Forty-two Chinese speakers of English immersed in the L2 environment were instructed to perform a cross-modal semantic judgement task. They saw an Asian or Caucasian face on the screen and heard word pairs in L2 in a native English accent or a Chinese accent, and were asked to judge whether the word pairs were related to each other in meaning or not. Results showed that for words presented in the native accent, there was a semantic effect in both reaction time and accuracy, irrespective of the face shown. For words presented in the non-native accent, the RT data showed a semantic effect, whereas the accuracy revealed a reversed semantic effect. The speed-accuracy trade-off suggests a relatively weak semantic effect. These patterns were not modulated by the faces accompanying the word pairs. These results suggest that the cue of accent plays an important role during bilinguals' speech perception in L2, such that non-native accent hampers speech perception, even when it matches bilinguals' first language. In contrast, bilinguals do not seem to depend on the social indexical cue of the face when it is not reliable. The present findings hold implications for the Bilingual Model of Lexical Access (BIMOLA) of bilingual speech perception and the monolingual models of social speech perception.
本研究考察了说话者的面部特征和口音对第二语言（L2）语音感知的影响。42 名沉浸在 L2 环境中的中国英语使用者被要求执行一项跨模态语义判断任务。他们在屏幕上看到一个亚洲或白种人的面孔，并听到以母语英语口音或中国口音呈现的 L2 单词对，并被要求判断这些单词对在语义上是否相关。结果表明，对于以母语口音呈现的单词，无论呈现的面孔如何，在反应时间和准确性上都存在语义效应。对于以非母语口音呈现的单词，反应时间数据显示出语义效应，而准确性则显示出相反的语义效应。这种速度-准确性权衡表明语义效应较弱。这些模式不受伴随单词对出现的面孔的调节。这些结果表明，口音提示在双语者的 L2 语音感知中起着重要作用，以至于非母语口音会干扰语音感知，即使它与双语者的母语相匹配。相比之下，当面部特征不可靠时，双语者似乎并不依赖于其社会索引线索。本研究结果对双语词汇通达的双语模型（BIMOLA）和单语社会语音感知模型都具有启示意义。
