Accents and Adverse Conditions: Investigating the Effects of Semantic and Phonemic Information on Accented Speech Comprehension

• Author / Creator

  Woerle, Timothy A.

• Under normal conversational conditions, listeners are typically able to adapt to a speaker’s
  accent or idiosyncrasies with relative ease. While this is a well-established phenomenon, the
  exact mechanisms which allow fast adaptation are not yet entirely understood, and there are a
  variety of models which offer competing accounts of the underlying process. In this study, I
  examined a few of these models by subjecting listeners to artificially accented speech under
  different adverse circumstances which specifically degraded phonemic information or semantic
  information to examine how adaptation to a given speaker relies on these respective sources of
  information. The analysis revealed likely interactions between accent condition and semantic
  information, and between accent condition and phonemic information, with little support for an
  interaction between semantic information and phonemic information. The implications of these
  findings as they relate to existing models are discussed.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Psychology
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Accent
  • Speech

• Graduation date

  Fall 2024

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Science

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-c4yp-w898

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Library with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.