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When Foreign accent modulates perceptual and pragmatic processing of indirect replies: An ERP investigation
Poster Session B, Wednesday, September 30, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, Wangari Maathai
Angélica Gutiérrez Cisneros1, Angèle Brunellière1, Alice Foucart2; 1Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR 9193 - SCALab - Sciences Cognitives et Sciences Affectives, F-59000 Lille, France, 2CINC - Nebrija Research Centre on Cognition, Nebrija Universidad, 28015 Madrid,
While electrophysiological studies on multilingualism attribute processing differences to the heightened cost of interpreting foreign-accented speech (Song & Iverson, 2018; Thomas et al., 2022), other proposals posit that language processing in a multilingual context is “shallower” and less detailed, influenced by social judgement and native speakers’ prediction on foreign-accented speakers’ linguistic abilities (Foucart & Hartsuiker, 2021). Moreover, electrophysiological research on foreign accent has yet to investigate ecological pragmatic phenomena during natural spoken conversations, where the timing of spoken conversations can constrain the online temporal dynamics when inferring an interlocutor’s intended message. To address this gap, this study aimed to characterize the neural signature of indirect reply processing in foreign-accented dialogues. For example, if someone replies to “How hard is it to give a presentation?” with “Giving a good presentation is complicated” the reply is direct. However, with a different question, “Did you like my presentation?”, the same reply becomes indirect, implying the presentation was not well received. By using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we explored the brain processes that enable indirect reply interpretation in spoken dialogues. Since foreign accents can influence language comprehension at acoustic-perceptual and pragmatic levels (Caffarra et al., 2018; Domínguez-Arriola et al., 2025), we hypothesize that foreign-accented speech may affect the early processing of indirect replies and their indirectness interpretation. Forty native French speakers listened to dialogues with two Accent conditions: native (French) and foreign (7 different accents). First, a written context introduced the communicative situation, the spoken dialogues were then presented in either of the two Indirectness conditions. The question and the reply between the two speakers that were either directly or indirectly related to the question. ERPs were time-locked to the onset and final word of the reply. In line with a rapid perceptual discrimination of accents through acoustic processing, a cluster-based permutation test revealed an accent effect from 100ms of the reply onset. The N100 amplitude was reduced for the foreign-accented dialogues compared to the native accent, reinforcing the notion of a less detailed linguistic processing. A significant interaction between the Accent and Indirectness factors emerged over the N400 at reply onset, reflecting a pragmatic processing of Indirectness. Pairwise comparisons showed indirect replies elicited larger N400 amplitude than direct ones in native accent. This effect was not significant in foreign-accented dialogues, suggesting that foreign accents could hinder pragmatic processing of indirect replies. In the final word of the reply, a sustained accent effect significantly emerged from 550ms until the end of the reply, with native-accented replies triggering a larger Late-Positive Component (LPC) amplitude than foreign-accented ones. The accent effect characterized by reduced ERP responses for foreign-accented speech and persisting throughout the entire reply supports the idea that non-native accent processing is shallower than native-accent processing across all linguistic levels. Furthermore, the absence of indirectness effect in foreign-accented speech suggests the heightened processing cost hampered pragmatic processing. Overall, this study provided new insights on how multilingual contexts impact neural processes during natural language comprehension at different levels including acoustic and pragmatic levels.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism, Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics