Replication Data for: 'Perceptie van een anderstalig accent: Een experimentele studie naar de perceptieve aanpassing aan een exogeen geaccentueerd Nederlands klinkercontrast'

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Dataset abstract

This dataset contains the results from 100 native (L1) Dutch speakers from Flanders (Belgium). These participants completed a (i) lexical decision task and a (ii) phoneme categorisation task. In the lexical decision task, participants were exposed to the accented speech of one Italian L1 speaker of Dutch who pronounced 40 target words with either canonical productions of the /ɪ/-vowel but ambiguous realisations of the /i/-vowel (e.g., vlinder 'butterfly' as [ˈvlɪn.dər], but diefstal 'theft' as [ˈdⁱ/_ɪf.stɑl]), or vice versa. Participants’ comprehension of the target words was measured in terms of word endorsement (i.e. accepting or rejecting target words as real Dutch words) and response time (i.e. the time interval between the end of stimulus presentation and participant response). The phoneme categorisation task, then, was used to verify if the Dutch L1 listeners are able to identify the two phonemes correctly and if they perceive the ambiguous sounds as pronunciation variants of one of the front vowels. If so, the participants are expected to identify the ambiguous vowels in minimal /ɪ/-/i/ words (e.g., bid-bied 'pray'-'bid') predominantly as either /ɪ/ or /i/, depending on whether the /ɪ/- or /i/-words contained ambiguous vowels in the lexical decision task.

Article Abstract

Listeners can usually effortlessly cope with the extreme acoustic variability of spoken language. Although accented speech might initially pose a challenge, listeners have been shown to rapidly adjust their perceptual system in response to atypical sound productions in the auditory input by exploiting prior lexical knowledge (i.e., lexically-guided perceptual learning). Here, we aimed to gain further insight into how Dutch L1 listeners adapt to Italian accented Dutch front vowels, and how short-term experience with one L2 speaker’s accent might help these listeners to interpret novel words and another L2 speaker’s accent. Therefore, 100 Dutch-speaking Belgian participants were exposed to 40 Dutch target words with either /ɪ/ or /i/ as syllable nucleus. All stimuli were produced by a female native speaker of Italian who is highly proficient in Dutch, but has a noticeable Italian accent. There were two exposure conditions: participants either heard target words in which the /ɪ/-sound was replaced by an ambiguous sound in between [ɪ]-[i] and canonically produced /i/-words (/ɪ/-ambiguous condition), or the exact opposite pattern (/i/-ambiguous condition). To assess perceptual learning, participants needed to identify the front vowel in five Dutch /ɪ/-/i/ minimal pairs across two speaker conditions: listeners either heard stimuli produced by the same female speaker or stimuli produced by a male-sounding speaker, whose voice was created from the female speaker’s voice using the ‘change gender’ function in Praat. Neither for the female speaker nor for the male-sounding speaker did we observe auditory perceptual learning effects. That is, participants did not identify the ambiguous vowel in the minimal pairs significantly differently depending on the exposure condition to which they had been assigned. Suggestions for future research are proposed on how to obtain a better understanding of how native speakers process L2 accented speech.