Processing changes when listening to foreign-accented speech

This study investigates the mechanisms responsible for fast changes in processing foreign-accented speech. event related brain potentials (erps) were obtained while native speakers of spanish listened to native and foreign-accented speakers of spanish. we observed a less positive p200 component for foreign-accented speech relative to native speech comprehension. this suggests that the extraction of spectral information and other important acoustic features was hampered during foreign-accented speech comprehension. however,the amplitude of the n400 component for foreign-accented speech comprehension decreased across the experiment,suggesting the use of a higher level,lexical mechanism. furthermore,during native speech comprehension,semantic violations in the critical words elicited an n400 effect followed by a late positivity. during foreign-accented speech comprehension,semantic violations only elicited an n400 effect. overall,our results suggest that,despite a lack of improvement in phonetic discrimination,native listeners experience changes at lexical-semantic levels of processing after brief exposure to foreign-accented speech. moreover,these results suggest that lexical access,semantic integration and linguistic re-analysis processes are permeable to external factors,such as the accent of the speaker. © 2015 romero-rivas,martin and costa.