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

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.