Exploring effects of social information on talker-independent accent adaptation.

The present study examined whether race information about speakers can promote rapid and generalizable perceptual adaptation to second-language accent. First-language English listeners were presented with Cantonese-accented English sentences in speech-shaped noise during a training session with three intermixed talkers, followed by a test session with a novel (i.e., fourth) talker. Participants were assigned to view either three East Asian or three White faces during training, corresponding to each speaker. Results indicated no effect of the social priming manipulation on the training or test sessions, although both groups performed better at test than a control group.