Social expectations in speech perception: English-accented Korean in South Korea

What factors beyond acoustic features influence native speakers’ perception of foreign-accented speech? This study investigated how social information impacts the perception of English-accented Korean using intelligibility and accent rating tasks. Native Korean listeners heard English-accented Korean stimuli paired with one of three guises and corresponding descriptions: a Caucasian guise described as an American learner of Korean, an Asian guise described as a Korean American, or a silhouette as a foreign learner of Korean. Preliminary results (n = 25 in each condition) indicated that intelligibility was highest for the Caucasian, followed by the Korean, and lowest for the silhouette condition, suggesting a more positive bias toward the Caucasian guise compared to the Korean-American guise. In terms of accentedness, the silhouette was judged as least accented, followed by the Caucasian guise, and then the Korean guise, again suggesting a positive bias toward the Caucasian guise compared to the Korean guise. These findings suggest that the exemplar model, which predicts compatible results for the Caucasian and Korean guises, does not fully explain the observed results. Factors such as listeners’ language attitudes and notions of in- and out-group membership are considered as potential additional influences in the processing of accented speech.