The roles of familiarity, intelligibility and attitude in the processing of native and non-native accents

本研究旨在探讨我们如何处理我们所听的说话者的口音，特别是，我们对这些口音的显性或隐性态度如何影响我们在互动中如何感知、表达和检索信息。该研究领域是认知社会语言学的一个有前途的新领域，它探索了语言变异的各个方面（例如说话者的来源，母语/非母语状态）曾经被认为是语言的感知和认知加工之外，但实际上对我们的语言操作和表征至关重要。通过一系列借鉴知觉方言学和心理语言学技术的原始方法的实验，我将研究三个因素在处理母语和非母语口音中的作用：熟悉度、可理解性和听者在特定互动中对说话者口音的态度。实验还测试了与不同口音的说话者互动如何影响一个人对自己语言的认知表征，这是一个在以前的研究中几乎没有涉及的领域。这项研究将包括一项跨语言设计，以便在评估非标准口音和非母语口音时对不同语言进行比较。研究结果将通过评估社会索引信息在语言处理中的重要性来改进语言表征的理论模型。如果对口音的负面态度被证明会阻碍理解和回忆，那么这些发现也将告诉社会口音歧视的潜在有害影响，最终促进跨地区和跨国工作场所合作中更有效的互动。

This study aims to investigate how we process the accents of speakers we listen to, in particular, how our explicit or implicit attitudes towards those accents influence how we perceive, represent and retrieve information during interactions. The domain of the research is a promising new area of cognitive sociolinguistics which explores how aspects of language variation (e.g. speaker origin, native/non-native status) once considered external to the perceptual and cognitive processing of language may actually be critical to our linguistic operations and representations. Through a series of experiments with original methodologies which borrow techniques from perceptual dialectology and psycholinguistics, I will examine the role of three factors in processing native and non-native accents: familiarity, intelligibility and attitude of the listener towards the accent of a speaker during a given interaction. The experiments also test how interacting with speakers of different accents affects the cognitive representation of one's own speech, an area that has hardly been addressed in previous research. The study will include a cross-linguistic design which allows for the comparison between languages in how non-standard and non-native accents are evaluated. The outcomes of the research will improve theoretical models of linguistic representation by assessing the importance in language processing of social-indexical information. The findings will also inform society about the potentially deleterious effects of accent discrimination if negative attitudes towards accents are shown to impede understanding and recall, ultimately promoting more effective interactions during cross-regional and crossnational collaborations in the workplace.