Frances Candice, Navarra-Barindelli Eugenia, Martin Clara D
Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL), Donostia, Spain.
Department of Social Sciences and Law, The University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Donostia, Spain.
Front Psychol. 2022 May 19;13:892822. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.892822. eCollection 2022.
The cognate effect refers to translation equivalents with similar form between languages-i.e., cognates, such as "band" (English) and "banda" (Spanish)-being processed faster than words with dissimilar forms-such as, "cloud" and "nube." Substantive literature supports this claim, but is mostly based on orthographic similarity and tested in the visual modality. In a previous study, we found an inhibitory orthographic similarity effect in the auditory modality-i.e., greater orthographic similarity led to slower response times and reduced accuracy. The aim of the present study is to explain this effect. In doing so, we explore the role of the speaker's accent in auditory word recognition and whether native accents lead to a mismatch between the participants' phonological representation and the stimulus. Participants carried out a lexical decision task and a typing task in which they spelled out the word they heard. Words were produced by two speakers: one with a native English accent (Standard American) and the other with a non-native accent matching that of the participants (native Spanish speaker from Spain). We manipulated orthographic and phonological similarity orthogonally and found that accent did have some effect on both response time and accuracy as well as modulating the effects of similarity. Overall, the non-native accent improved performance, but it did not fully explain why high orthographic similarity items show an inhibitory effect in the auditory modality. Theoretical implications and future directions are discussed.
同源效应是指不同语言之间具有相似形式的翻译对等词，即同源词，如英语中的“band”和西班牙语中的“banda”，在处理时比形式不同的词，如“cloud”和“nube”，速度更快。大量文献支持这一观点，但大多基于拼写相似性，并在视觉模态中进行测试。在之前的一项研究中，我们在听觉模态中发现了一种抑制性的拼写相似性效应，即拼写相似性越高，反应时间越慢，准确性越低。本研究的目的是解释这一效应。在此过程中，我们探讨了说话者口音在听觉单词识别中的作用，以及母语口音是否会导致参与者的语音表征与刺激之间的不匹配。参与者进行了一项词汇判断任务和一项打字任务，在打字任务中他们拼写出听到的单词。单词由两名说话者读出：一名带有标准美国英语母语口音，另一名带有与参与者匹配的非母语口音（来自西班牙的西班牙语母语者）。我们正交操纵了拼写和语音相似性，发现口音确实对反应时间和准确性都有一定影响，并且调节了相似性的影响。总体而言，非母语口音提高了表现，但它并没有完全解释为什么高拼写相似性的项目在听觉模态中会表现出抑制效应。我们还讨论了理论意义和未来的研究方向。
