Effects of noise and talker intelligibility on judgments of accentedness

The goal of this study was to determine how noise affects listeners' subjective judgments of foreign-accented speech and how those judgments relate to the intelligibility of foreign-accented talkers. Fifty native English listeners heard native Mandarin speakers and native English speakers producing English sentences in quiet and in three levels of noise. Participants judged the accent of each speaker on a scale from 1 (native-like) to 9 (foreign). The results show that foreign-accented talkers were rated as less accented in the presence of noise, and that, while lower talker intelligibility was generally associated with higher (more foreign) accent ratings, the presence of noise significantly attenuated this relationship. In contrast, noise increased accent ratings and strengthened the relationship between intelligibility and accent ratings for native talkers. These findings indicate that, by obscuring the acoustic-phonetic cues that listeners use to judge accents, noise makes listeners less confident about the foreign (or native) status of a given talker.