The National Science Foundation awarded a $433,242 Project Grant to The Washington University under the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences federal grant program (CFDA 47.075). The three-year award will support research modeling the cognitive challenges of accented speech.
The research team will conduct experiments measuring cognitive processing during listening to accented speech using methods from listening effort literature and behavioral economics. Eye-tracking will test if listeners relax linguistic categories when processing unfamiliar accents. Acoustic-phonetic analyses of speech will relate to experimental outcomes to identify accent features contributing most to listening effort. Outreach to the St. Louis Science Center and local university will promote tolerance and better communication among speakers through education on linguistic diversity and accents. Results have implications for automatic speech recognition, language teaching, and language proficiency assessment.
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