Exploring the impact of individual differences and SLP experience on accent perception

Spoken language exhibits considerable variability, with factors such as age and linguistic experience contributing to changes in speech patterns. Despite advancements in speech perception theories, there is a gap in understanding this variability from an applied perspective, particularly in Speech-Language Pathology (SLP). The current approach in SLP tends to treat voices as uniform acoustic signals, overlooking ecological variation in favor of identifying pathological markers. This study aims to explore how SLP training influences speech-language pathologists' sensitivity to ecological speech variability and whether this variability is mistakenly perceived as pathological. We tested 30 SLP trainees, measuring their ability to understand unfamiliar accents and individual differences in speech categorization (through a Visual Analogue Scaling Task). We find that listeners who are less consistent in their ability to categorize the same speech sound are worse at understanding unfamiliar accents. We argue that SLP trainees benefit from more diverse training. Future work aims to test SLP clinicians to examine whether further training also impacts accent perception.