Replication Data for: Phonetic reduction in native and non-native English speech: Assessing the intelligibility for L2 listeners

Dataset abstract This dataset contains the results from 40 L1 British English, 80 Belgian Dutch and 80 European Spanish listeners, who were exposed to English speakers with a General British English, Newcastle and French accent. In the first experiment, participants completed (i) a demographic and linguistic background questionnaire, (ii) an orthographic transcription task and (iii) a vocabulary/general proficiency test (LexTALE; cf. Lemhöfer & Broersma, 2012). In the transcription task, participants listened to 120 stimulus sentences and were asked to write down what the speakers said. Crucially, each sentence contained one target word that was either phonetically unreduced or phonetically reduced. How well the different groups of listeners understood the speakers (i.e. Intelligibility), and more importantly the unreduced and reduced words, was measured as the number of correctly transcribed target words and was assessed using a linear mixed-effects regression model. In the second experiment, participants completed (i) a demographic and linguistic background questionnaire, (ii) an auditory lexical decision task and (iii) a vocabulary/general proficiency test (LexTALE; cf. Lemhöfer & Broersma, 2012). In the lexical decision task, participants were asked to decide whether a particular target word was a real word in English or a nonword. Participants' lexical decision responses (word vs. nonword) were analyzed using a mixed-effects logistic regression model, and their response times (i.e. time interval between stimulus offset and keypress) were analysed using a linear mixed-effects regression model. R code for the data analysis is provided.
Article abstract This study examines to what extent phonetic reduction in different accents affects intelligibility for non-native (L2) listeners, and if similar reduction processes in listeners’ first language (L1) facilitate the recognition and processing of reduced word forms in the target language. In two experiments, 80 Dutch-speaking and 80 Spanish-speaking learners of English were presented with unreduced and reduced pronunciation variants in native and non-native English speech. Results showed that unreduced words are recognized more accurately and more quickly than reduced words, regardless of whether these variants occur in non-regionally, regionally or non-native accented speech. No differential effect of phonetic reduction on intelligibility and spoken word recognition was observed between Dutch-speaking and Spanish-speaking participants, despite the absence of strong vowel reduction in Spanish. These findings suggest that similar speech processes in listeners’ L1 and L2 do not invariably lead to an intelligibility benefit or a cross-linguistic facilitation effect in lexical access.